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Meatspace twiddling - Cory Doctorow
"Enshittification" isn't just a way of describing the symptoms of platform decay: it's also a theory of the mechanism of decay – the means by which platforms get shittier and shittier until they are a giant pile of shit.
I call that mechanism "twiddling": this is the ability of digital services to alter their business-logic – the prices they charge, the payouts they offer, the particulars of the deal – from instant to instant, for each user, continuously:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/19/twiddler/
Contrary to Big Tech's own boasting about its operations, the tricks that tech firms play to siphon value away from business customers and end-users aren't very sophisticated. They're crude gimmicks, like offering a higher per-hour wage to Uber drivers whom the algorithm judges to be picky about which rides they'll clock in for, and then lowering the wage by small increments as a way of lulling the driver into gradually accepting a permanent lower rate:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/12/algorithmic-wage-discrimination/#fishers-of-men
This is a simple trick. The difference is that tech platforms like Uber can play it over and over, and very quickly. There's plenty of wage-stealing scumbag bosses who'd have loved to have shaved pennies off their workers' paychecks, then added a few cents back in if a worker cried foul, then started shaving the pennies again. The thing that stopped those bosses was the bottleneck of payroll clerks, who couldn't make the changes fast enough.
Uber plays crude tricks – like claiming that a driver isn't an employee because the control is mediated through an app – and then piles more crude tricks on top – this algorithmic wage discrimination gambit.
Have you ever watched a shell-game performed very slowly?
https://www.masterclass.com/articles/how-to-do-penn-tellers-famous-cups-and-balls-trick-in-12-steps
It's a series of very simple gimmicks, performed very quickly and smoothly. Computers are very quick and very smooth. The quickness of the hand deceives the eye: do crude tricks with superhuman speed and they'll seem sophisticated.
I call that mechanism "twiddling": this is the ability of digital services to alter their business-logic – the prices they charge, the payouts they offer, the particulars of the deal – from instant to instant, for each user, continuously:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/19/twiddler/
Contrary to Big Tech's own boasting about its operations, the tricks that tech firms play to siphon value away from business customers and end-users aren't very sophisticated. They're crude gimmicks, like offering a higher per-hour wage to Uber drivers whom the algorithm judges to be picky about which rides they'll clock in for, and then lowering the wage by small increments as a way of lulling the driver into gradually accepting a permanent lower rate:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/12/algorithmic-wage-discrimination/#fishers-of-men
This is a simple trick. The difference is that tech platforms like Uber can play it over and over, and very quickly. There's plenty of wage-stealing scumbag bosses who'd have loved to have shaved pennies off their workers' paychecks, then added a few cents back in if a worker cried foul, then started shaving the pennies again. The thing that stopped those bosses was the bottleneck of payroll clerks, who couldn't make the changes fast enough.
Uber plays crude tricks – like claiming that a driver isn't an employee because the control is mediated through an app – and then piles more crude tricks on top – this algorithmic wage discrimination gambit.
Have you ever watched a shell-game performed very slowly?
https://www.masterclass.com/articles/how-to-do-penn-tellers-famous-cups-and-balls-trick-in-12-steps
It's a series of very simple gimmicks, performed very quickly and smoothly. Computers are very quick and very smooth. The quickness of the hand deceives the eye: do crude tricks with superhuman speed and they'll seem sophisticated.
[link:https://pluralistic.net/2024/03/26/glitchbread/#electronic-shelf-tags|
