"Corporate crime" is an oxymoron in America. While it's true that the most consequential and profligate theft in America is #WageTheft, its mechanisms are so obscure and, well, dull that it's easy to sell us on the false impression that the real problem is shoplifting:
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While this veil has parted somewhat, it is still intact enough to allow the company to work the refs and kill disfavorable reporting from the trial. Last week, #MeganGrey - ex-FTC, ex-#DuckDuckGo - published an editorial in #Wired reporting on her impression of an explosive moment in the Google trial:
"they're not talking about shared risk here – no one at Unity is saying, "If you try to make a game with our tools and you lose a million bucks, we're on the hook for ten percent of your losses." This isn't partnership, it's extortion."
"As we learned from the documentary The Incredibles, supervillains can't stop themselves from monologuing, and in big, sprawling monopolists, these monologues have to transmitted electronically – and often indelibly – to far-flung co-cabalists."
"When I think about this enshittification curve, I often think of Google, a company that had its users' backs for years, which created a genuinely innovative search engine that worked so well it seemed like *magic, a company whose employees often had their pick of jobs, but chose the "don't be evil" gig because that mattered to them."
I'm surprised the details made it into the public. The article also mentions how techbros tend to label their clandestine conversations as "I'm doing a crime here" as well. It very much makes me think of Trump and how he wants people to know he is doing a crime but does not want to suffer any negative consequences.
The latest @pluralistic is full of so many fantastic points. I've forwarded this a half dozen ways with seperate pull quotes for each friend
"For a lot of people, the analysis stops here. "If you're not paying for the product, you're the product." Google locks in users and sells them to advertisers, who are their co-conspirators in a scheme to screw the rest of us.
But that's not right. For one thing, paying for a product doesn't mean you won't be the product. Apple charges a thousand bucks for an iPhone and then nonconsensually spies on every iOS user in order to target ads to them (and lies about it):
John Deere charges six figures for its tractors, then runs a grift that blocks farmers from fixing their own machines, and then uses their control over repair to silence farmers who complain about it:
When I think about how the old, good internet turned into the #enshitternet, I imagine a series of small compromises, each seemingly reasonable at the time, each contributing to a cultural norm of making good things worse, and worse, and worse.
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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: