Gefängnisse sind teuer, aber in den USA sind so viele Leute eingelocht! Da hat Florida jetzt eine geniale Lösung!

It's called "pay-to-stay", charging inmates for their prison stay, like a hotel they were forced to book. Florida law says that cost, $50 a day, is based on the person's sentence. Even if they are released early, paying for a cell they no longer occupy, and regardless of their ability to pay.

Habt ihr den genialen Teil schon erkannt? Du lochst jemanden für 20 Jahre ein, entlässt ihn nach 5, und der muss dann trotzdem für die restlichen 15 Jahre blechen! Je mehr Leute du früher entlässt, desto Profit!!1!

Not only can the state bill an inmate the $50 a day even after they are released, Florida can also impose a new bill on the next occupant of that bed, potentially allowing the state to double, triple, or quadruple charge for the same bed.

Das ist die Art von Wohlstand, die du kriegst, wenn du die Republikaner wählst. Oder die CDU.

Disruptions-Revolution beim US-Militär. Deren CCA-Projekt ging jetzt an Anduril und General Atomics. Auf der Strecke blieben Boeing, Lockheed Martin und Northrop Grumman, die bisher noch in keinem Projekt nicht repräsentiert waren, und sozusagen der personifizierte Military Industrial Complex sind.

Big Tech hat hier also alle etablierten Player wegdisruptiert.

General Atomics kennt man in Deutschland vor allem aus dem Fallout-Universum, aber die Firma gibt es wirklich und die waren ursprünglich im Atomzeitalter für Kernenergie-Dinge gegründet worden, haben sich dann aber auf Militärscheiß umgestellt. Die sind also auch noch eher ein klassischer Military Industrial Complex-Teilnehmer.

Anduril klingt nach einer Peter-Thiel-Firma, ist aber eine Palmer Luckey-Firma (bekannt als Gründer von Oculus, die mit den VR-Brillen). Die sind bisher vor allem durch tolle gerenderte Werbefilme aufgefallen, die vollständig fiktional sind und geradezu absurde Dinge versprechen. Wikipedia über die, Hier ein repräsentatives (älteres) Werbevideo. Die neueren sind noch virtueller und haben noch mehr "KI" drin.

Auf der einen Seite freut es mich, dass die US Army sich nach wie vor von Blendern und Betrügern verarschen lässt. Auf der anderen Seite war das noch nie anders. Insofern business as usual. Weitergehen. Gibt nichts zu sehen hier.

Nur dass diesmal halt ein Tech Bro mit der Kohle koksen geht, nicht die üblichen Mafiosi.

I haven't spoken to the guy since he was a mere hardscrabble multi-millionaire, but this story 100% tracks.

Rick Perlstein:

My first impression of them came of their response to my small-talk description of my delightful afternoon [walking in San Francisco]. Jaws practically dropped, like I had dared an unaccompanied, unarmed stroll through Baghdad's Sadr City in the spring of 2004. [...]

One participant was a British former journalist become computer tycoon who had been awarded a lordship. He proclaimed that the Chinese middle class doesn't care about democracy or civil liberties. I was treated as a sentimental naïf for questioning his blanket confidence.

Another attendee seemed to see politics as a collection of engineering problems. He kept setting up strange thought experiments, which I did not understand. I recall thinking it was like talking to a creature visiting from another solar system that did not have humans in it. [...]

I knew from the New Yorker that Andreessen had grown up in an impoverished agricultural small town in Wisconsin, and despised it. But I certainly was not prepared for his vituperation on the subject. He made it clear that people who chose not to leave such places deserved whatever impoverishment, cultural and political neglect, and alienation they suffered. [...]

And that's when the man in the castle with the seven fireplaces said it.

"I'm glad there's OxyContin and video games to keep those people quiet."

I'm taking the liberty of putting it in quotation marks, though I can't be sure those were his exact words. Marc, if you're reading, feel free to get in touch and refresh my memory. Maybe he said "quiescent," or "docile," or maybe "powerless." Something, certainly, along those lines.

He was joking, sort of; but he was serious -- definitely. "Kidding on the square," jokes like those are called. All that talk about human potential and morality, and this man afire to reorder life as we know it jokingly welcomes chemical enslavement of those he grew up with, for the sin of not being as clever and ambitious as he.

There is something very, very wrong with us, that our society affords so much power to people like this.

Previously, previously, previously, previously.

Click here to go see the bonus panel!

Hovertext:
You won't experience the ice cream in the powerful, meaningful way that I would, but you'll have a great big smile and it'll be so dear.

Today's News:

On February 2, 2024, the first day Apple Vision Pro shipped, we released OmniPlan 4.7.2 native on Apple Vision Pro. Today, we’re releasing the first feature update since that special update, universal across four (4) Apple platforms. That’s right: OmniPlan 4.8 for Mac, iPad, iPhone, and Apple Vison Pro is now available!

OmniPlan 4.8 introduces a beautiful new app icon on the Mac, iPad, and iPhone, bringing visual consistency across all supported platforms.

For anyone running the Pro edition of OmniPlan, this release also introduces support for Omni Automation “Install Links” for simplified Omni Automation plug-in installation. Introduced with OmniFocus 4.1 on Apple Vision Pro, Install Links brings OmniPlan 4.8 across all platforms a simple “Look, Tap, and Approve!” mechanism for installing plug-ins. It’s a prime example of how the innovation and development efforts for the Apple Vision Pro extend to benefit the other platforms as well. We’re updating our plug-in collections to take advantage of this new feature.

But wait, there’s more! OmniPlan 4.8 also introduces support for custom data on iPad, iPhone, and Apple Vision Pro for the first time. Previously only available in OmniPlan for Mac, custom data support lets you display custom data in the project outline and track tasks accordingly. For example, if there’s a particular bit of data, say a part number or item key, that you’ve configured in OmniPlan for Mac, it can now be viewed and edited in OmniPlan across all synced devices. Naturally, OmniPlan 4.8 also includes fixes to variety of bugs. See the full Mac, iPad and iPhone and Apple Vision Pro release notes for the full run down of the changes in OmniPlan 4.8.

If OmniPlan 4 has also empowered you, leaving an App Store review is a great way to help others discover OmniPlan in the App Store! We always like to hear from you directly, too. So, if you’d like to provide feedback about OmniPlan 4, we would love to hear from you!

Today's links

• The specific process by which Google enshittified its search: Ed Zitron has Prabhakar Raghavan bang to rights.
• Hey look at this: Delights to delectate.
• This day in history: 2009, 2014, 2019, 2024
• Upcoming appearances: Where to find me.
• Recent appearances: Where I've been.
• Latest books: You keep readin' em, I'll keep writin' 'em.
• Upcoming books: Like I said, I'll keep writin' 'em.
• Colophon: All the rest.

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The specific process by which Google enshittified its search (permalink)

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.

---

Hey look at this (permalink)

• It’s the End of the Web as We Know It https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2024/04/generative-ai-search-llmo/678154/

• SSL.com is evil and deceptive: Don’t do business with SSL.com https://blog.metabrainz.org/2024/04/23/ssl-com-is-evil-and-deceptive-dont-do-business-with-ssl-com/

• 101 Additional Advices https://kk.org/thetechnium/101-additional-advices/

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This day in history (permalink)

#15yrsago London cop’s Facebook: “Can’t wait to bash” G20 protestors http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/england/london/8016620.stm

#15yrsago Dangerous terrorists arrested in the UK weren’t http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/8011955.stm

#10yrsago Muslims sue FBI: kept on no-fly list because they wouldn’t turn informant https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2014/04/suit-claims-muslims-put-on-no-fly-list-for-refusing-to-become-informants/

#10yrsago Lost Warhol originals extracted from decaying Amiga floppies https://web.archive.org/web/20140424093724/https://studioforcreativeinquiry.org/events/warhol-discovery

#10yrsago Making a planetary-scale sandwich https://www.reddit.com/r/pics/comments/23symq/me_located_in_iceland_and_my_friend_located_in/

#10yrsago Drunk 18 year old girl rushed to hospital from Canadian PM Stephen Harper’s residence https://nationalpost.com/news/canada/intoxicated-18-year-old-girl-reportedly-rushed-to-hospital-from-prime-minister-harpers-residence

#5yrsago Nest’s “ease of use” imperative plus poor integration with Google security has turned it into a hacker’s playground https://memex.craphound.com/2019/04/24/nests-ease-of-use-imperative-plus-poor-integration-with-google-security-has-turned-it-into-a-hackers-playground/

#1yrago How Goldman Sachs's "tax-loss harvesting" lets the ultra-rich rake in billions tax-free https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/24/tax-loss-harvesting/#mego

---

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

• The Bezzle at Book Passage Corte Madera (Marin County), April 27
  https://www.bookpassage.com/event/cory-doctorow-bezzle-martin-hench-novel-corte-madera-store

• Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives (Winnipeg), May 2
  https://www.eventbrite.ca/e/cory-doctorow-tickets-798820071337

• Wordfest (Calgary), May 3
  https://wordfest.com/2024/event/wordfest-presents-cory-doctorow-2/

• Massy Arts (Vancouver), May 4
  https://www.eventbrite.ca/e/solo-reading-cory-doctorow-the-bezzle-tickets-876989167207

• Tartu Prima Vista Literary Festival, May 5-11
  https://tartu2024.ee/en/kirjandusfestival/

• Tim O’Reilly and Cory Doctorow on “Enshittification” and the Future of AI, May 14
  https://www.oreilly.com/live-events/tim-oreilly-and-cory-doctorow-on-enshittification-and-the-future-of-ai/0642572001651/

• "Finding the Money" screening (LA), May 15
  https://www.laemmle.com/film/finding-money?date=2024-05-15

• Media Ecology Association keynote (Amherst, NY), Jun 6-9
  https://media-ecology.org/convention

• American Association of Law Libraries keynote (Chicago), Jul 21
  https://www.aallnet.org/conference/agenda/keynote-speaker/

---

Recent appearances (permalink)

• Come sfuggire al “Merdocene” e costruire un Internet migliore (Torino Biennale Tecnologia)
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z5NC2EZCYBg

• Show Me The Money Club (The Rideshare Guy)
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZCETi3XqSds

• NUOVO BARETTO UTOPIA
  https://videoteca.kenobit.it/w/azRmQBCenVwjSRz9WCp8JS

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Latest books (permalink)

• The Bezzle: a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about prison-tech and other grifts, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2024 (the-bezzle.org). Signed, personalized copies at Dark Delicacies (https://www.darkdel.com/store/p3062/Available_Feb_20th%3A_The_Bezzle_HB.html#/).

• "The Lost Cause:" a solarpunk novel of hope in the climate emergency, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), November 2023 (http://lost-cause.org). Signed, personalized copies at Dark Delicacies (https://www.darkdel.com/store/p3007/Pre-Order_Signed_Copies%3A_The_Lost_Cause_HB.html#/)

• "The Internet Con": A nonfiction book about interoperability and Big Tech (Verso) September 2023 (http://seizethemeansofcomputation.org). Signed copies at Book Soup (https://www.booksoup.com/book/9781804291245).

• "Red Team Blues": "A grabby, compulsive thriller that will leave you knowing more about how the world works than you did before." Tor Books http://redteamblues.com. Signed copies at Dark Delicacies (US): and Forbidden Planet (UK): https://forbiddenplanet.com/385004-red-team-blues-signed-edition-hardcover/.

• "Chokepoint Capitalism: How to Beat Big Tech, Tame Big Content, and Get Artists Paid, with Rebecca Giblin", on how to unrig the markets for creative labor, Beacon Press/Scribe 2022 https://chokepointcapitalism.com

• "Attack Surface": The third Little Brother novel, a standalone technothriller for adults. The Washington Post called it "a political cyberthriller, vigorous, bold and savvy about the limits of revolution and resistance." Order signed, personalized copies from Dark Delicacies https://www.darkdel.com/store/p1840/Available_Now%3A_Attack_Surface.html

• "How to Destroy Surveillance Capitalism": an anti-monopoly pamphlet analyzing the true harms of surveillance capitalism and proposing a solution. https://onezero.medium.com/how-to-destroy-surveillance-capitalism-8135e6744d59?sk=f6cd10e54e20a07d4c6d0f3ac011af6b) (signed copies: https://www.darkdel.com/store/p2024/Available_Now%3A__How_to_Destroy_Surveillance_Capitalism.html)

• "Little Brother/Homeland": A reissue omnibus edition with a new introduction by Edward Snowden: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250774583; personalized/signed copies here: https://www.darkdel.com/store/p1750/July%3A__Little_Brother_%26_Homeland.html

• "Poesy the Monster Slayer" a picture book about monsters, bedtime, gender, and kicking ass. Order here: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781626723627. Get a personalized, signed copy here: https://www.darkdel.com/store/p2682/Corey_Doctorow%3A_Poesy_the_Monster_Slayer_HB.html#/.

---

Upcoming books (permalink)

• Picks and Shovels: a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about the heroic era of the PC, Tor Books, February 2025

• Unauthorized Bread: a graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, 2025

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Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing:

• A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

• Picks and Shovels, a Martin Hench noir thriller about the heroic era of the PC. FORTHCOMING TOR BOOKS JAN 2025

• Vigilant, Little Brother short story about remote invigilation. FORTHCOMING ON TOR.COM

• Spill, a Little Brother short story about pipeline protests. FORTHCOMING ON TOR.COM

Latest podcast: Capitalists Hate Capitalism https://craphound.com/news/2024/04/14/capitalists-hate-capitalism/

---

This work – excluding any serialized fiction – is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. That means you can use it any way you like, including commercially, provided that you attribute it to me, Cory Doctorow, and include a link to pluralistic.net.

https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Quotations and images are not included in this license; they are included either under a limitation or exception to copyright, or on the basis of a separate license. Please exercise caution.

---

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