It's a worldview with no room in it for political agency and no theory of power:

locusmag.com/feature/cory-doct…

The problem, of course, is that power is real, and it sets the rules of this game. Even if you stipulate that it is management's duty to do whatever they can to make the largest profit for the company's owners, "whatever they can do" isn't a free-floating concept. It is inescapably tethered to the rules of the game set by *politics* (that is, *power*).

3/

Cory Doctorow: Qualia

Last summer, the pandemic was in its first wave and the nation was in chaos. A lack of federal leadership left each state to figure out how to interpret the science, and many states punted public h…

^{Locus Online}

A company cannot charge infinity dollars and pay its workers zero dollars. In the former case, customers might reasonably take their business elsewhere. In the latter case, workers might sell their labor elsewhere.

4/

But if companies can capture their regulators and hijack *power* to change the rules of the game in their favor, they can go a long way to achieving both goals. An airport concessionaire on the sanitary side of the TSA checkpoint can charge $14 for a bottle of filtered tap water because exiting the checkpoint to shop elsewhere is a multi-hour affair and you'll miss your flight.

5/

Now, the government *could* intervene here. The federal, state and local regulators overseeing the airport could require price-parity with the prevailing rate in town for water. They could ban obvious scams like stocking weird-sized water (or water with weird characteristics) at the airport that have no in-town equivalents. They could fill the airport with filtered water refill stations.

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On the other hand, if the merchant can convince the government to collude with it in rigging the game, they can remove *all* the water fountains from the airport, and switch the bathroom taps to a non-potable "environmentally responsible" water source.

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Likewise, an employer that can bind their workers to noncompete "agreements" can make it so difficult to switch jobs that workers accept a lower wage out of fear that their employer will use the power of the state to ruin them if they take a better job elsewhere:

pluralistic.net/2025/09/09/ger…

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Even better, if the employer makes workers sign a "training repayment agreement provision" (TRAP) clause, they can literally ask the government to fine workers thousands of dollars for quitting their jobs:

pluralistic.net/2022/08/04/its…

When a firm rips you off or abuses you and gets away with it, that's not "fulfilling their fiduciary duty," it's *cheating*.

9/

They're either buying off the state that is supposed to protect you, or enlisting it to help them screw you. You don't need to make excuses for these fuckers. You can hate them and complain and warn other people. You can make them pariahs and shout mean things at them if you see them on the street.

10/

Take Snapchat: the company has just done a bait-and-switch on its users, announcing that it will erase their saved photos and videos. Ironically, it calls these "memories," which means that it is threatening to *erase its users' memories*. Users who don't want their memories erased will have to pay *stonking* monthly fees:

bbc.com/news/articles/c4g5ypl6…

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Snapchat users share fury at upcoming fees for Memories storage

Snap said only a small number of users would be affected by the changes, but many online disagree.

^{Liv McMahon (BBC News)}

Now, if Snapchat had an API that let you migrate your photos to a rival platform - or if the law would permit a rival to make a scraper to accomplish this without their help - then the rate that Snapchat chose for its monthly fee would reflect a calculation on these lines, "This is how long it takes to click one link on a rival service and port my account to it, and this is how much I value my time at, so this is how much I will pay to avoid making that one click."

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But because Snapchat decides how you use its service, it can set a much higher price, calculated thus: "Here is how long it would take me to download gigabytes of saved storage, figure out how the filesystem on my device works, verify these files, and upload them to a rival platform, and here's how much I value my time, so this is how much I will pay to avoid this enormous, tedious task."

13/

They get to charge you more because they are fucking you over, and they are fucking you over so they can charge you more.

If you heard about Snapchat's memory tax and thought to yourself, "Oh, those fools who signed up for Snapchat thinking it would be free forever were rooked by the world's most transparent ruse and have no one to blame but themselves!" then *you've* been rooked.

14/

The price that Snapchat arrived at - and Snapchat users' ability to get a better price - are both determined by regulation that tilts in favor of corporations at the public expense. No one came down off a mountain with two stone tablets bearing Snapchat's rate card.

15/

Nor is it your job or mine to figure out how Snapchat can keep its lights on. The question, "Well, how can Snapchat keep providing a free service if it doesn't charge certain users through the nose?" is no more those users' problem than, "How can Snapchat *users* preserve their memories if Snapchat charges them more than they can afford, every month, until they die?" is *Snapchat's* problem.

16

"How can Snapchat stay in business?" sounds like a *Snapchat* problem, not a *you* problem (unless you work there or own its stock). Snapchat isn't a charity. It's a venture-backed, for-profit entity listed on the NYSE and NASDAQ.

17/

In a just world, we'd say that the *public* has the right to advocacy and protection from the state that is accountable to it, and *companies* that make bad decisions about their business models can eat shit and be bought out of bankruptcy by smarter people who don't blow up their own balance sheets.

18/

If you want to live in a better world, then shut up that nagging, neoliberalism-trained reflex that treats corporations as charitable enterprises and "consumers" as the secret legislators of the market and the ultimate authors of all its dysfunctions.

Even for their most ardent defenders, markets are supposed to "process aggregated demand signals" about the willingness of different parties to accept different offers.

19/

But if the only "demand signal" you can offer is a binary "take it or leave it," that's a *very* thin data set (and it gets thinner still when "leave it" requires a time machine so you can go back to before you started and warn yourself that the offer's going to be altered adversely in the future).

20/

There are a range of ways to respond to a worsening offer from a merchant, well beyond "take it or leave it." You can complain. You can sue. You can picket. You can boycott. You can spraypaint "GREEDY PIGS" on the corporate headquarters. This is a rich set of infomrational inputs for the market indeed.

21/

When it comes to digital services, you have even more opportunities to program the great market computer in the sky (all hail the infallible market computer!). For example, if a company makes the ads on its webpage too obnoxious and invasive, you can install an ad-blocker, a thing that 51% of all web users have done, making it the largest consumer boycott in human history:

doc.searls.com/2023/11/11/how-…

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How is the world’s biggest boycott doing?

Eight years ago, I called ad blocking The Biggest Boycott in World History, because hundreds of millions of people were blocking ads online. (The headline came from my wife Joyce.) Then, a few days…

^{Doc Searls Weblog}

An ad-blocker enriches the take-it-or-leave it, thin data-set of internet usage patterns by allowing users to make a *counter-offer*: "How about *nah*?"

eff.org/deeplinks/2019/07/adbl…

Of course, no one has ever installed an ad-blocker for an *app*, because that's a *felony* under Section 1201 of the DMCA. An app is just a web-page skinned in the right kind of IP to make it a crime to protect yourself while you use it.

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Adblocking: How About Nah?

For more than a decade, consumer rights groups (including EFF) worked with technologists and companies to try to standardize Do Not Track, a flag that browsers could send to online companies signaling that their users did not want their browsing acti…

^{Electronic Frontier Foundation}

That's why companies - like Snapchat - are insatiably horny to get you to switch from using websites to using apps.

Ultimately, I just don't think neoliberal economists believe in what they're selling. They don't want a market of "demand-signals" that can be used to guide allocations. They just want to help the greediest, worst people on earth screw you as hard as they can, all day long.

And then blame *you* for it.

24/

I'm on a tour with my new book *Enshittification*!

Catch me next in #Cambridge, MA; Washington, #DC and #Brooklyn!

Full schedule with dates and links at:

pluralistic.net/tour

eof/