Doctorow describes 'shitty technology adoption curve': harmful technologies start with people without social power (prisoners, asylum inmates, refugees) then work up to children, high school kids, blue-collar workers, pink-collar workers, and finally white-collar workers and middle-class people.

Cory Doctorow recommends Sarah Weinman Williams' Careless People as an example of the Streisand effect: when a company suppresses something, it brings interest. Williams was a NZ diplomat who pushed for government job with Facebook and got it, but the job became a nightmare.

Both Doctorow and Wu learned to program on Apple IIs in their early education and were excited about early computing, viewing it as the origin of their later advocacy against tech monopolies.

Veena Dubal coined the term 'algorithmic wage discrimination,' describing how hospitals use apps to hire nurses as contractors, and the apps buy nurses' credit history from data brokers, then use their debt level to charge a 'desperation premium'—offering lower wages to more desperate nurses.

Just because platform harms haven't hit a particular person yet doesn't mean they should not be worried about future harms, and accepting surveillance or manipulation on platforms should not be framed as inevitable or like asking for water that isn't wet; different design is possible.

Cory Doctorow and Tim Wu went to elementary school together in suburban Toronto at a school with 80 kids in one classroom where older kids taught younger kids and they were left to pursue self-directed learning.

Google has suffered from curse of bigness: almost all successful consumer-facing products failed or were shut down. Almost all their successes (video, ads, documents, maps, etc.) were acquired from others and operationalized rather than invented internally.

The healthcare system should care that nurses are underpaid through algorithmic discrimination because underpaid, exhausted, and skipping meals to make rent means nurses are inserting catheters while already at the physical/mental breaking point, making everyone worse off.

Doctorow disputes pure nostalgia, arguing instead that the question is whether technological systems that gave users control necessarily had to evolve into systems where computers have control over users, or whether there were alternative paths that were foreclosed.

Cory Doctorow argues that even if people enjoy aspects of platforms like Facebook, they should not accept the premise that there is no alternative to having Mark Zuckerberg listen in on conversations; instead, the goal is to preserve good experiences while eliminating the surveillance.

Enshittification is a label for both an observation about a characteristic pattern of how platforms degrade and why platforms degrade now, because something has changed—not that greed was newly invented in the middle of the last decade.

When Apple gave Facebook users the power to opt out of spying via a checkbox, 96% of Apple users ticked the box, demonstrating that revealed preference for spying is overridden when users have actual choice and countervailing power.

In 2022, two teenagers reverse-engineered Instagram and created OG app, which logged in as users, grabbed their Instagram feed, discarded ads and suggestions, and showed only chronological feed of followed users. Meta sent cease letters to Apple and Google, who removed the app due to DMCA prohibition on reverse engineering.

Algorithmic wage discrimination through credit history surveillance is the result of specific policy choices taken in living memory by named individuals who were warned at the time that this would be the likely outcome and did it anyway.

Cory Doctorow argues that competition is only valuable if it breaks monopoly cartels into rabbles, not competition to become 'the world's most efficient human rights violator.' The concern is not whether platforms compete but whether the competition is toward harmful or beneficial business models.

Within large companies, divisions can still 'bid against each other' but this is not a meaningful substitute for external competition. Stephen King's analogy: 'me and my wife promising to both bid against each other on the next house we move into' satirizes the claim that internal competition replaces external competition.

Cory's three policy solutions are: (1) repeal section 1201 of DMCA to legalize modifying owned devices; (2) create muscular federal privacy law with private right of action; (3) interoperability mandate for social media allowing users to leave and continue receiving messages.

Cory recommends Bridget Read's Little Bosses Everywhere: history of American pyramid schemes as central to current rot. MAGA movement members are often people predated on by scams and adopting toxic positivity from that experience.

Interoperability would allow users to leave a social media platform and continue receiving messages from people they follow on the new platform, similar to switching phone carriers, with technical details solvable and tradeoffs worth it.

Tech has an exceptional property: any program adverse to user interests can be neutralized with a program beneficial to user interests, allowing new market entrants to exploit deliberately bad programs. However, IP law has made reverse engineering and modification illegal, eliminating this competitive check.