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I have been aging the Rib Shaped, Barbecue Flavor Pork Patty from Menu 16 on the shelf behind my desk since February 2012, when I was given it during a tour of the US Army Natick Soldier Research, Engineering and Development Center. By law, combat rations are designed to last for three years at 80 degrees Fahrenheit, so I'm not overly worried about food poisoning. Still, it's definitely long past its expiration date. But the perfect occasion to taste my now-vintage Meal, Ready to Eat (a.k.a. MRE) never came along. Until now: the MUNCHIES theme week on fast food.
I scissor across the end of the pouch and tumble the rectangular "rib" onto a plate. The pebbly textured meat is caramel brown and crossed by four raised "bones." Not unappealing, except if you peek in the package. The meat juice is a bizarrely bright yellowish-orange; I quickly tilt the pouch up to keep it from splashing out. Following the civilized example set by our Tweeter-in-Chief, I slice off an end with a knife and fork. It's porky and slightly smoky, although there's a tinny aftertaste, probably from some of the preservatives used to keep it fresh so long. Using a couple of "wheat snack breads" and the packet of dark, oily "BBQ" sauce that came with it, I assemble a sandwich and take a bite. Not bad! Scatter a couple onion slices and pickles on top, and the whole thing would be pretty damn close to a McRib.
Which makes perfect sense. Seeing how consumers go loco for the ersatz baby backs when they appear at McD's, why wouldn't the US military want to provide a similar treat for the hardworking men and women on the battlefield in Iraq, Afghanistan, and—perhaps coming soon to a theater near you—North Korea? It's hard not to imagine the Natick Center food technologists, who spend all their time creating and perfecting rations, being inspired on a run to their local drive-though, and the McDonald's corporation, patriotic American business that it is, giving the project a big thumbs up.
The McRib was born of fear. In the mid-1970s, McDonald's, while still on its global domination trajectory, was feeling pressure from competitors "Have It Your Way" Burger King and aggressive upstart Wendy's. It was also reeling from a 1977 federal government recommendation that people "decrease consumption of meat and increase consumption of poultry and fish" to avoid heart disease. The upshot: erosion of their core business, the burger. It was time to expand their offerings. But the fried chicken market was already cornered by KFC and newcomer Popeye's, which sold crispy drumsticks and breasts by the bucketful. Their Filet-O-Fish, introduced countrywide in 1965, was never going to be a bestseller because, well, fish. And the tastiest pork preparation was barbecue, whose long cooking over low heat is the epitome of slow food—and whose bones 'n' sauce presentation was antithetical to the tidy tidbit ethos of the quick-service restaurant.
Was there a way to harness the bland appeal of the deep-fried bird and the succulence of the pit-cooked pig without making a big-*** mess?
There was. And that know-how came from another mega organization that unceasingly seeks to create food that's inexpensive, portable, and universally appealing.
The McRib is actually restructured meat, a food processing technique created by the US Army in the 1960s to dramatically lower its food bill. Until then, most beef, lamb, and pork had been sold in carcasses, which were broken down by butchers in specialty shops or, increasingly, supermarkets. But the system was inefficient. Dead animals are oddly shaped, and take up a lot of room. They include bones and gristle, which end up being tossed. And they are shockingly inelastic when all your customers want T-bones for Father's Day, of which there are only 12 pounds on a 1,200-pound steer. Enter boxed meats, itself a military innovation from World Wars I and II. By the mid 1960s, the Army could order exactly the cuts it wanted. And what they wanted was the cheapest stuff available—the trimmings.
Food technologists at the Natick Center were asked to develop "fabricated meat" by figuring out a way to turn this waste product into something edible. It took them the better part of a decade, but here's what they came up with:
1. Scrape flesh off bone, remove sinews, and grind into flakes. These turned out to be the perfect sized particle to simulate a whole-muscle cut.
2. Add salt and tumble. This causes—official meat science term here—"exudate" to ooze from the flakes. This was the original "meat glue" (later versions isolated a single protein), and was patented in 1958 by the military's longtime collaborator, Oscar Mayer.
3. Add fat back in for richness, sodium phosphate for juiciness.
4. Form into patties, nuggets, cutlets, or fake rack of ribs.
5. Cook in airtight package (for MREs, add some preservatives to help keep fresh during prolonged storage at room temperature), or freeze (for the fast food industry).
By 1976, soldiers in the field were testing fabricated beefsteaks, lamb chops, veal steaks, and pork chops, and in 1981, the heat-and-serve entrees, now renamed "restructured meat," became a staple in the new MRE ration. "For the military, it was a very important application. It allowed them to use all the meat from a particular animal and provide essential nutrition in portion-controlled, easy-to-prepare serving," Dr. Roger Mandigo, a Natick Center contractor and meat scientist, told me.
Mission accomplished—for the Army. But it was just the beginning for the fast food industry. Several of the Natick Center's collaborators began knocking on doors—from Denny's to Burger King to McDonald's, peddling the new processing technique as a way to produce something tasty for almost nothing. Says Mandigo, who is often erroneously credited with the invention of restructured meat—and, by extension, the McRib—"Government doesn't patent their intellectual property, so anyone can use it. They [the Natick Center] presented material at technical meetings… The military allowed us to use the processes they'd developed."
Although restructured meat represented a radical departure from the plain ground beef of its signature product, McDonald's was one of the first quick-service chains to bite. "McDonald's McRib is as close to our product as you can get," John Secrist, a food technologist at the Natick Center, told me. In an attempt to give pork "the same stature as beef in the institutional market," the National Pork Producers Council funded Mandigo to show how to apply the new technique. Using his roadmap, McDonald's then developed "a patty of pork made from small flakes of meat taken from the shoulders of a pig," according to the professor in a 1982 United Press International. Upholding the McRib scarcity theory, Mandigo observed that merely testing the item in one-third of the country's almost 6,000 Micky D's required 40 to 60 percent of the total amount of pork shoulder available weekly.
The McNugget is also a restructured meat product, with the addition of modified cornstarch for thickening. But in this case, credit for the technical details is claimed by Keystone Foods, McDonald's meat supplier (the 12th largest meat company in the US, according to National Provisioner). "In 1981, the McDonald's President said he needed chicken on his menu and wanted something that customers could hold in their hands, with no bones and cut into pieces," explained the company's founder Herbert Lotman to National Provisioner. "We tried several attempts to fit his requirements… It took us about six months to create what looks like the nuggets we have today." Fish stick maker Gorton's is said to have contributed the tempura batter, according to the book Tastes Like Chicken: A History of America's Favorite Bird.
A burger is pretty simple food. The main ingredient, beef, is ground, perhaps with some salt and pepper added, and then gently shaped into a patty so as not to disturb the muscle proteins and toughen the meat. From there on, it's just a question of cooking technique: grill, broil, or pan fry? While McD's had built an empire on cookie-cutter hamburger production, the steps involved were still basically the same as for the home cook. The most controversial update had been an early 1970s move to frozen instead of fresh patties. So when that changed with a vengeance with the introduction of the McRib and the McNugget, McDonald's knew the manmade animal proteins would be much more acceptable to the public if they'd been invented by a personable and photogenic executive chef.
They found him at the Chicago Whitehall Hotel's members-only club, which is exactly the kind of place you'd expect Ray Kroc, the founder of McDonald's, and Fred Turner, its CEO, to hang out during the late 1960s, drinking martinis, smoking Montecruz cigars, and scarfing steak Diane and creamed spinach. There, according to company legend, they met, befriended, and, for ten years, wooed a young Belgian-born chef, Rene Arend (1928-2016), to be McDonald's product development chef. "I told him I am not a hamburger man. I am a chef. We are completely different," said Arend in a Weekly World News interview. But the fact that they were hiring an unknown local cook with zero training in food science to lead a multinational powerhouse that had recently sold its 20 billionth burger didn't seem to matter much to Kroc and Turner.
Arend began work at the food lab in McDonald's Oak Brook, Illinois headquarters in 1976. His assignment: chicken. His first few projects, a deep-fried pot pie and the McChicken sandwich, flopped. But—origin story alert—on a suggestion from Turner that he experiment with bite-sized pieces, in 1979 he turned his attention to the McNugget. There was a catch, however. The need for such a large quantity of boneless birds—at that time, fast food places sold only bone-in fried chicken—overwhelmed poultry processors. They couldn't keep up. To fill the gap, Arend, allegedly inspired by a trip to Charleston, South Carolina, created a boneless barbecue sandwich, the McRib. Both items were added to the Golden Arches menu in the early 1980s. (The McRib, too, initially failed, and was retired in 1985, to be reintroduced in 1989, again in 1990, again in 1991, again in 1992, again in 1993, and… you get the picture.) While we now know the real story behind the "meat," Rene Arend did add the finishing touches to both items: the McRib's washboard shape, sauce, and condiments and the three special dipping sauces—barbeque, sweet-sour, and hot mustard—for the McNugget.*
Cue the press tour. As McDonald's rolled out its new entrees, Arend led the charm charge, distracting attention from what was below the batter . Tall, slim, and impeccably dressed in a spotless white uniform and towering toque, he was always smiling. Articles usually began with a reference to his European culinary training and the fact that he had once cooked dinner for the Queen of England, then quickly segued to his "inventions." "His latest triumph is Chicken McNuggets, bite-size pieces of boneless breast and thigh meat with a tempura coating," wrote the food editor of the Minnesota Star Tribune in 1984. She admiringly noted that Arend came up with the idea in one day, "But the company, which was then feeding 17 million customers a day, required two years to smooth out the wrinkles of the manufacturing process." The finishing touch is some quips from the executive chef himself, such as this to the New York Times: "I wanted to do for the people out there in the street what I did for those who were rich." And decades later to Maxim: "The McNuggets were so well received that every franchise wanted them." (Crunchy, poultry pops succeeded beyond anyone's wildest dream; chicken titans KFC and Popeye's ultimately had to retool and offer boneless, batter-coated bits to remain competitive.)
America's 21st-century war on processed food was also parried by clever marketing. In 2005, McDonald's launched a McRib farewell tour, complete with cheesy rock anthem radio ads, to permanently phase out the mini-slab. In response, the "Boneless Pig Farmers Association of America" rallied people to a "Save the McRib" campaign, gathering 100,000 signatures in an online petition. Both efforts, of course, were created by a McDonald's ad agency. Good fun, right? Maybe. By the early 21st century, fast food was under fire. In a 1994 press conference on the White House lawn, former Surgeon General C. Everett Koop had identified a new public health menace, "[a]n epidemic of disease and disability and death all traced to the plain fact that too many Americans are too big." The exposé Fast Food Nation was published in 2001, and the documentary Super Size Me, in which filmmaker Morgan Spurlock subsisted on McDonald's for a month, came out in 2004. People started counting the number of ingredients in their favorite on-the-go meals and panicking when the total reached 40, 50, 60. By gently mocking its bizarre, skeleton-free patty, McD's normalized it—and deflected further scrutiny of its origins.
I don't finish my Rib Shaped, Barbecue Flavor Pork Patty. And while it's obviously not a piece of real meat, it chews nicely and even has some specks of gristle and fat. I appreciate all the ingenuity that has gone into making these matted-together flakes of pork protein safe, nourishing, and relatively palatable. In dire circumstances, I would chow it down with gratitude. But would I pay $3.79 to eat it by choice? An engineered meat whose freakishness has been soft-pedaled by winky-face marketing and a jolly dude in a chef's hat? Seriously Probably not.
As Jonathan Gold, restaurant critic for the Los Angeles Times, puts it: "A McRib sandwich may not be the foulest thing I've ever put in my mouth, but it is certainly among the most dishonest."
Towards the End of World War II, two Soviet mechanics sought to use automatic submachine guns to increase the capabilities of Soviet aircraft. The design, coined the “Fire Hedgehog”, was innovative, but ultimately proved to be flawed.
The Fire Hedgehog incorporated the Pistolet Pulemjot Schpagina model of 1941, commonly known as the PPSh-41. Georgii S. Shapagin, a Soviet weapons designer, created the 33-inch long, 12-pound automatic machine gun. This weapon featured a ten-inch, chrome-lined barrel fed by either a 71-round drum magazine or a 35-round box magazine housed in a wooden stock.
Soviet production of the PPSh-41 exceeded 6 million units, many of which are still in use in various theaters throughout the world. While it utilized the same round as the Soviet Torkarev pistol, a 7.62x25mm cartridge similar to the western .38 super round, the PPSh-41 had a 900-round per minute cyclic firing rate, nearly twice as rapid as its counterparts in the WWII era.
Modern commercial rounds seldom exceed 570 ft/lbs of force when fired out of a handgun, but witness more force when fired from a PPSh-41 due to the increase in barrel length. Likely, the most destructive round fired from the PPSh-41 was the P-41 shell. This loading is a steel-cored, 74-grain, incendiary round, meaning it has the proper velocity to penetrate mid-grade armor and the incendiary component necessary to ignite the contents of whatever the round is fired into.
Many PPSh-41s were fitted to the Soviet Tupolev Tu-2 aircraft. Originally designed by Andrei Tupolev when in a Russian Gulag or prison camp, the Tu-2 was both a light bomber and high altitude fighter. From 1941 to 1948 only 2,200 of these aircraft were constructed, compared to 5,800 of its American counterpart, the B-26 Marauder. With a 61-foot wingspan, the Tu-2 was durable, reliable, and maneuverable, so much so that it remained in use until 1982 in several third world countries.
Despite its use as a bomber and fighter, it was often used to provide close air support to friendly troops, by strafing enemy ground troops. In this capacity, many Tu-2s were modified with additional armor on the underside and around the four crew members’ seats. Interestingly, many of these aircraft were piloted by members of the nine Soviet female combat squadrons in WWII.
The Tu-2 was already a proven combat entity in a ground-attack role with its two forward 20mm machine guns, three rear 7.62x54mm machine guns, bomb carrying capacity, and high survival rate; the addition of PPSh-41 submachine guns to the belly of the aircraft further increased its potential for inflicting damage and casualties on enemy forces. In 1944, A.V. Nadashkevich and S. Saveliev pioneered a new design – a removable battery of originally 48, then 88, PPSh-41 submachine guns to the underside of the Tu-2.
This battery, oriented to fire down, was comprised of 11 rows of 8 PPSh-41s and occupied the space previously utilized to hold up to 3,300 lbs. of bombs. While it increased the Tu-2’s abilities in theory, only one plane, designated the Tu-2Sh, was ever fitted with the battery that could be fully equipped in a workshop, hoisted onto the plane by ropes, aimed through a specially designed sight, and fired by a solenoid which activated all 88 guns at one time.
With a 900 round per minute firing rate, round per gun capacity, and 88 PPSh-41s, the Tu-2Sh could expend 6,248 steel-cored incendiary rounds over a 1,800 long and 4-foot wide area in 4 seconds, with all weapons working perfectly. While devastating, the battery was never employed in combat due to several limiting factors.
Specifically, the battery required 100 man-hours to be fully loaded, there was a high chance of weapon malfunction, and the effective range of the PPSh-41 required Soviet pilots to fly under 800 feet, well within the range of most German anti-aircraft weaponry. They were then very vulnerable to being shot down.
In the end, the PPSh battery was an interesting experiment, but was ultimately a failure.
A study of 26 years' worth of wolf behavioral data, and an analysis of the blood of 229 wolves, has shown that infection with the parasite Toxoplasma gondii makes wolves 46 times more likely to become a pack leader.
The research shows that the effects of this parasite in the wild have been horrendously understudied - and its role in ecosystems and animal behavior underestimated.
If you have a cat, you've probably heard of this parasite before. The microscopic organism can only sexually reproduce in the bodies of felines, but it can infect and thrive in pretty much all warm-blooded animals.
This includes humans, where it can cause a typically symptomless (but still potentially fatal) parasitic disease called toxoplasmosis.
Once it's in another host, individual T. gondii parasites needs to find a way to get their offspring back inside a cat if it doesn't want to become an evolutionary dead-end. And it has a kind of creepy way of maximizing its chances.
Animals such as rats infected with the parasite start taking more risks, and in some cases actually become fatally attracted to the scent of feline urine, and thus more likely to be killed by them.
For larger animals, such as chimpanzees, it means an increased risk of a run-in with a larger cat, such as a leopard. Hyenas infected with T. gondii also are more likely to be killed by lions.
Gray wolves (Canis lupus) in the Yellowstone National Park aren't exactly cat prey. But sometimes their territory overlaps with that of cougars (Puma concolor), known carriers of T. gondii, and the two species both prey on the elk (Cervus canadensis), bison (Bison bison), and mule deer (Odocoileus hemionus) that also can be found there.
It's possible that wolves also become infected, perhaps from occasionally eating dead cougars, or ingesting cougar poo.
Diagram showing the hypothesized wolf-cougar-T. gondii feedback loop. (Meyer, Cassidy et al., Communications Biology, 2022)
Data collected on the wolves and their behavior for nearly 27 years offered a rare opportunity to study the effects of the parasite on a wild, intermediate host.
The researchers, led by biologists Connor Meyer and Kira Cassidy of the Yellowstone Wolf Project, also took a look at blood samples from wolves and cougars to gauge the rate of T. gondii infection.
They found that wolves with a lot of territory overlap with cougars were more likely to be infected with T. gondii.
But there was a behavioral consequence, too, with significantly increased risk-taking.
Infected wolves were 11 times more likely to disperse from their pack, into new territory. Infected males had a 50 percent probability of leaving their pack within six months, compared with a more typical 21 months for the uninfected.
Similarly, infected females had 25 percent chance of leaving their pack within 30 months, compared with 48 months for those who weren't infected.
Infected wolves were also way more likely to become pack leaders. T. gondii may increase testosterone levels, which could in turn lead to heightened aggression and dominance, which are traits that would help a wolf assert itself as a pack leader.
This has a couple of important consequences. Pack leaders are the ones who reproduce, and T. gondii transmission can be congenital, passed from mother to offspring. But it can also affect the dynamics of the entire pack.
"Due to the group-living structure of the gray wolf pack, the pack leaders have a disproportionate influence on their pack mates and on group decisions," the researchers write in their paper.
"If the lead wolves are infected with T. gondii and show behavioral changes ... this may create a dynamic whereby behavior, triggered by the parasite in one wolf, influences the rest of the wolves in the pack."
If, for example, the pack leader seeks out the scent of cougar pee as they boldly push into new territory, they could face greater exposure to the parasite, thus a greater rate of T. gondii infection throughout the wolf population. This generates a sort of feedback loop of increased overlap and infection.
It's compelling evidence that tiny, understudied agents can have a huge influence on ecosystem dynamics.
"This study demonstrates how community-level interactions can affect individual behavior and could potentially scale up to group-level decision-making, population biology, and community ecology," the researchers write.
"Incorporating the implications of parasite infections into future wildlife research is vital to understanding the impacts of parasites on individuals, groups, populations, and ecosystem processes."
The research has been published in Communications Biology.
An earlier version of this article was published in November 2022.
Several facilities in the U.S. and abroad maintain morbid warehouse morgues full of frozen human heads and bodies, waiting for the future. They are part of a story that is ghoulish, darkly humorous, and yet endearingly sincere. For a small group of fervent futurists, it is their lottery ticket to immortality. What are the chances that these bodies will be reanimated?
A primer on cryonics
Cryonics — attempting to cryopreserve the human body — is widelyconsidered a pseudoscience. Cryopreservation is a legitimate scientific endeavor in which cells, organs, or in rare cases entire organisms may be cooled to extremely low temperatures and revived somewhat intact. It occurs in nature, but only in limited cases.
TOP STORIESHumans are particularly difficult to preserve because of the delicate structure in (most of) our heads. Deprived of oxygen at room temperature, the brain dies within minutes. While the body may be reanimated, the person who “lives” is often in a permanent vegetative state. Cooling the body may give the brain a bit more time. During brain or heart surgery, circulation may be stopped for up to an hour with the body cooled to 20° C (68° F). A procedure to cool the body to 10° C (50 F°) without oxygen for additional hours is still at the experimental research stage.
After a while, he let the bodies thaw out inside the capsule and left the whole thing festering in his vault.
When a cryonic patient dies, a race begins to prepare and cool the body before it decays and then to place it inside a Dewar: a thermos bottle full of liquid nitrogen (LN). The inner vessel of the Dewar contains a body, or bodies, wrapped in several layers of insulating material, attached to a stretcher, and suspended in LN. The head is oriented downward to keep the brain the coldest and most stable.
This vessel lies within a second outer vessel, separated by a vacuum to avoid heat transfer from the outer room-temperature vessel wall to the cold inner vessel wall. Heat gradually transfers across anyway and boils away the LN, which must be periodically refilled. Bodies were originally, and may still be in some cases, cooled and frozen in whatever condition they were in at death, with better or worse preservation, as we shall see.
The grisly fates of the first cryonauts
The early years of cryonics were grisly. All but one of the first frozen futurists failed in their quest for immortality.
FEATURED VIDEOSSmall freezing operations began in the late 1960s. While the practice of storing bodies has become more sophisticated over the past 50 years, in the early days, technicians cooled and prepared corpses with haste on dry ice before eventually cramming them into Dewar capsules. By and large, these “preservations” did not achieve preservation. They were nightmarish, gruesome failures. Their stories were researched and documented by people within the field, who published thorough and frank records.
The largest operation was run out of a cemetery in Chatsworth, California by a man named Robert Nelson. Four of his first clients were not initially frozen in LN but placed on a bed of dry ice in a mortuary. One of these bodies was a woman whose son decided to take her body back. He “hauled (his dead mother) around in a truck” on dry ice for some time before burying her.
The bodies in the container partially thawed, moved, and then froze again — stuck to the capsule like a child’s tongue to a cold lamp post.
Eventually, the mortician was not pleased with the other bodies sitting around on beds of ice, so a LN Dewar capsule was secured for the remaining three. Another man was already frozen and sealed inside the capsule, so it was opened, and he was removed. Nelson and the mortician then spent the entire night figuring out how to jam four people — who may or may not have suffered thaw damage — into the capsule. The arrangement of bodies in different orientations was described as a “puzzle.” After finding an arrangement that worked, the resealed capsule was lowered into an underground vault at the cemetery. Nelson claimed to have refilled it sporadically for about a year before he stopped receiving money from the relatives. After a while, he let the bodies thaw out inside the capsule and left the whole thing festering in his vault.
Another group of three, including an eight-year-old girl, was packed into a second capsule in the Chatsworth vault. The LN system of this capsule subsequently failed without Nelson noticing. Upon checking one day, he saw that everyone inside had long thawed out. The fate of these ruined bodies is unclear, but they might have been refrozen for several more years.
Nelson froze a six-year-old boy in 1974. The capsule itself was well maintained by the boy’s father, but when it was opened, the boy’s body was found to be cracked. The cracking could have occurred if the body was frozen too quickly by the LN. The boy was then thawed, embalmed, and buried. Now that there was a vacancy, a different man was placed into the leftover capsule, but ten months had elapsed between his death and freezing, so his body was in rotten shape — no pun intended — from the get-go and was eventually thawed.
Every cryonic client put into the vault at Chatsworth and looked after by Nelson eventually failed. The bodies inside the Dewar capsules were simply left to rot. Reporters visited the crypt where these failed operations had taken place and reported a horrifying stench. The proprietor admitted to failure, bad decisions, and going broke. He further pointed out, “Who can guarantee that you’re going to be suspended for 10 or 15 years?”
The worst fates of all occurred at a similar underground vault that stored bodies at a cemetery in Butler, New Jersey. The storage Dewar was poorly designed, with uninsulated pipes. This led to a series of incidents, at least one of which was failure of the vacuum jacket insulating the inside. The bodies in the container partially thawed, moved, and then froze again — stuck to the capsule like a child’s tongue to a cold lamp post. Eventually the bodies had to be entirely thawed to unstick, then re-frozen and put back in. A year later, the Dewar failed again, and the bodies decomposed into “a plug of fluids” in the bottom of the capsule. The decision was finally made to thaw the entire contraption, scrape out the remains, and bury them. The men who performed this unfortunate task had to wear a breathing apparatus.
The state of cryonics today
Out of all those frozen prior to 1973, one body remains preserved. Robert Bedford was sealed into a Dewar in 1967. Instead of leaving the body to meet a horrific fate under Nelson’s care, Bedford’s family took custody of the capsule, meticulously caring for it at their own expense. The body was handed off between professional cryonics operations, occupying multiple frozen tanks and facilities for 15 years or so. Eventually it ended up in the hands of the founders of Alcor — a modern cryonics outfit — one of whom wrote a heartfelt, slightly creepy piece about the body.
Alcor is the leading example of the current state of cryonics. While the ugly events above suggest that your remains might well end up as tissue sludge scraped out of a can, the professionalism of companies like Alcor may offer an increased chance for long-term preservation. This 501(c)(3) organization hosts researchers who work on methods to improve the freezing process, possibly increasing whatever slight odds exist that human popsicles will ever be brought back to life. At a more fundamental level, it appears to be stable and to have deep pockets, so there is a better chance that your corpse will be around long enough for some distant future doctor to recoil in horror at it.
The U.S. industry has consolidated around two main organizations. If not Alcor, your other choice is the Cryonics Institute, which has more than 200 bodies stored in giant tanks and accepts dozens more each year. Apparently, ten years ago, head storage alone at Alcor cost $80,000, while full body storage at the Cryonics Institute was only $30,000. There are international options as well. A Russian cryogenics company stores not only people but pets, including one entry under rodents, a deceased chinchilla named Button.
Modern cryonic preparations at Alcor employ a multistep process to prepare the body for storage. First, they begin to cool the body while anti-clotting agents and organ preservation solutions are injected into the bloodstream and circulated under CPR. The body is then transported to the company’s main facility, where the original fluid is replaced with chemicals that vitrify — turn to glass — the body’s organs. This offers some hope for cutting down on structural damage during the subsequent cooling and storage. Then the body is entombed in its Dewar capsule.
Is cryonics science — or making human popsicles?
That all sounds scientific and careful. But is it really science or just applying scientific tools to a fantasy proposition? Is it possible to freeze the human body and revive it decades later? Currently, it’s not remotely plausible. Will it ever be? That’s probably an open question. As it stands now, cryonics is a bizarre intersection of scientific thinking and wishful thinking.
While cryonic preparation is now more advanced, the laws of physics demand that the structure of the body will break down — rapidly after death, catastrophically upon freezing, and gradually over time, even while frozen. Think of how badly frozen food ages in your freezer. If the medical technology of the future becomes advanced enough, perhaps these corpses can be revived. But that’s a big “if.” Let’s say your body remains frozen until the 25th century. Then, let’s say that future doctors are interested in reviving you. How much work will they have to do to fix you once you’re thawed? The answer lies in the condition of the bodies once they’re thawed. Strangely enough, we know something about this.
In 1983, Alcor needed to lighten three cryonauts, reducing them from bodies to simply heads. (In one transhumanist conception of the future, medical science will be able to revive the brain and then simply make a new body or robot to which to attach it. Neuropreservation is cheaper and easier too.) The three corpses were removed from their Dewar capsules so that the heads could be cut off — still frozen, so requiring a chainsaw — and stored separately. Once the heads were sawed off and put away, Alcor employees got to work medically examining the state of the bodies. They wrote up their findings in great detail.
At first, things looked reasonably good. While the bodies were still frozen, their skin was only moderately cracked in a few places. But once the bodies thawed, things started to go downhill.
The organs were badly cracked or severed. The spinal cord was snapped into three pieces and the heart was fractured.
Cracks appeared in the warming bodies, cutting through the skin and subcutaneous fat, all the way down to the body wall or muscle surface beneath. One patient displayed red traces across the skin following the paths of blood vessels that ruptured. Two of the patients had “massive cutaneous ruptures over the pubis.” The soft skin in these areas was apparently quite susceptible to cracking.
While the external damage was extensive, the internal damage was worse. Nearly every organ system inside the bodies was fractured. In one patient, every major blood vessel had broken near the heart, the lungs and spleen were almost bisected, and the intestines fractured extensively. Only the liver and kidneys weren’t completely destroyed.
The third body, which had been thawed very slowly, was in better condition externally, with only a few skin fractures and no obvious exploded blood vessels. However, the inside was even more annihilated than the others. The organs were badly cracked or severed. The spinal cord was snapped into three pieces and the heart was fractured. The examiners injected dye into an artery in the arm. Rather than flow through blood vessels and into muscles, most of it pooled under the surface in pockets and leaked out of skin fractures.
The medical examiners extensively detailed the content of the blood, the texture of the muscles, and the extent of the damage. They included pictures. And they earnestly stated their conclusion up front: The tremendous tissue deterioration will require incredibly advanced medical technology to fix. Worse, the probable destruction at the cellular level may require rebuilding the body at the molecular level. Perhaps future medicine might be able to inject swarms of nanobots into your body to repair every bit of tissue, but don’t bet on it happening any time soon.
Will the wonders of the internet never cease? When I was a kid in London in the early ’00s, I was lucky enough to experience great cinema from around the world. I had a particular fondness for some of the incredible Ghanaian and Nigerian bootleg movies that we used to purchase from the local entrepreneurs that thrived in Hackney at the time. Through these early experiences of Nollywood and the cinema of Ghana, I came to discover the incredible hand-painted posters of the Ghanian Mobile Cinema, but never in my life did I dream I might be able to own one. Until I discovered Deadly Prey Gallery.
Deadly Prey Gallery, art by Leonardo
The Chicago-based gallery’s Instagram account is filled with outrageous masterpieces featuring everything from Batman ’89 to Alien and The Thing to Curb Your Enthusiasm, and plenty of your other favorites. The most famous painting is undoubtedly the incredible Mrs. Doubtfire poster by Leonardo, which has gone viral more than once. I reached out to the gallery’s creator Brian Chankin who gave our readers a little more insight into Deadly Prey Gallery, the artists behind the awesome posters, and the history of the Ghanaian Mobile Cinema.
Deadly Prey Gallery, art by Heavy J
The primary aim of the gallery is to support artists and archive these unique pieces of art. Per the organization’s website, “Deadly Prey Gallery was created by Brian Chankin, in partnership with Robert Kofi in Accra, Ghana. Our goal is to archive, educate, exhibit, and promote the art of hand-painted movie posters from Ghana.” The best thing is that the team supports current artists in Ghana still working in the genre today by selling their paintings and offering commission opportunities to their customers.
Heavy J in his studio, Deadly Prey Gallery
So what is Ghanaian Mobile Cinema? “This business started in the late 1980s when artistic, industrious groups of people formed video clubs,” Chankin explained. “With a television, VCR, VHS tapes, and a portable generator, they’d travel throughout Ghana setting up makeshift screening areas in villages void of electricity. An interesting selection of movies became popular mainly due to availability. These genres include Hollywood action and horror, low-budget American schlock, Bollywood films, Hong Kong martial arts movies, and Ghanaian and Nigerian features.”
Deadly Prey Gallery, art by Mr. Nana Agyq
He also shared how the success of the mobile cinema culture led to the creation of the handcrafted posters that the internet is falling in love with. “As more people gained interest in this rising business, competition arose,” Chankin said. “Mobile cinema operators found a need to set their products apart, so an advertising motif came into play. With no affordable access to printing, the hand-painted movie poster was the most logical advertising vehicle. Skilled local artists were now part of this growing entertainment industry in Ghana, and they surely brought their own distinct touch to each film they were called upon to promote.”
Farkira with his painting for Tales From the Crypt
Rugged and beautiful, these pieces benefit their unique look in part from the use of wildly imaginative canvases. “By sewing together used flour sacks, a perfect-sized canvas for an oversized movie poster was created,” Chankin said. “The ruggedness of these posters is immediately noticed. Though a specific poster might only be 10 to 20 years old, its appearance will far surpass its actual age due to the elemental toll one takes from constant transit, being rolled, folded, left in the sun, rain, etc.”
Deadly Prey Gallery, art by Magasco
Despite the fact that the mobile cinema may be a thing of the past, the gallery aims to keep the culture of hand-painted posters alive. “The mobile cinema has all but passed away, but these hand-painted movie posters remain a wonderful, tangible product of the time,” Chankin said. “Many of the same artists from Ghana’s former mobile cinema continue to paint movie posters as art with Deadly Prey Gallery on a commission basis to a growing worldwide audience. Today the gallery works with talented artists from Ghana’s former mobile cinema. The impressive roster features Heavy J, Salvation, Stoger, Leonardo, Farkira, Mr. Nana Agyq, Mark Anthony, C.A. Wisely, Magasco, and Nii Bi Ashitey.”
The artists from left to right: Salvation, Heavy J, Mr Nana Agyq, Farkira, and Stoger
Last year, I coined the term “enshittification” to describe the way that platforms decay. That obscene little word did big numbers; it really hit the zeitgeist.
The American Dialect Society made it its Word of the Year for 2023 (which, I suppose, means that now I’m definitely getting a poop emoji on my tombstone).
So what’s enshittification and why did it catch fire? It’s my theory explaining how the internet was colonised by platforms, why all those platforms are degrading so quickly and thoroughly, why it matters and what we can do about it. We’re all living through a great enshittening, in which the services that matter to us, that we rely on, are turning into giant piles of ****. It’s frustrating. It’s demoralising. It’s even terrifying.
I think that the enshittification framework goes a long way to explaining it, moving us out of the mysterious realm of the “great forces of history”, and into the material world of specific decisions made by real people; decisions we can reverse and people whose names and pitchfork sizes we can learn.
Enshittification names the problem and proposes a solution. It’s not just a way to say “things are getting worse”, though, of course, it’s fine with me if you want to use it that way. (It’s an English word. We don’t have ein Rat für englische Rechtschreibung. English is a free-for-all. Go nuts, meine Kerle.) But in case you want to be more precise, let’s examine how enshittification works. It’s a three-stage process: first, platforms are good to their users. Then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers. Finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, there is a fourth stage: they die.
Let’s do a case study. What could be better than Facebook?
Facebook arose from a website developed to rate the fuckability of Harvard undergrads, and it only got worse after that. When Facebook started off, it was only open to US college and high-school kids with .edu and K-12.us addresses. But in 2006, it opened up to the general public. It effectively told them: Yes, I know you’re all using MySpace. But MySpace is owned by a billionaire who spies on you with every hour that God sends. Sign up with Facebook and we will never spy on you. Come and tell us who matters to you in this world.
That was stage one. Facebook had a surplus — its investors’ cash — and it allocated that surplus to its end users. Those end users proceeded to lock themselves into Facebook. Facebook, like most tech businesses, had network effects on its side. A product or service enjoys network effects when it improves as more people sign up to use it. You joined Facebook because your friends were there, and then others signed up because you were there.
But Facebook didn’t just have high network effects, it had high switching costs. Switching costs are everything you have to give up when you leave a product or service. In Facebook’s case, it was all the friends there that you followed and who followed you. In theory, you could have all just left for somewhere else; in practice, you were hamstrung by the collective action problem.
It’s hard to get lots of people to do the same thing at the same time. So Facebook’s end users engaged in a mutual hostage-taking that kept them glued to the platform. Then Facebook exploited that hostage situation, withdrawing the surplus from end users and allocating it to two groups of business customers: advertisers and publishers.
To the advertisers, Facebook said: Remember when we told those rubes we wouldn’t spy on them? Well, we do. And we will sell you access to that data in the form of fine-grained ad-targeting. Your ads are dirt cheap to serve, and we’ll spare no expense to make sure that when you pay for an ad, a real human sees it.
To the publishers, Facebook said: Remember when we told those rubes we would only show them the things they asked to see? Ha! Upload short excerpts from your website, append a link and we will cram it into the eyeballs of users who never asked to see it. We are offering you a free traffic funnel that will drive millions of users to your website to monetise as you please. And so advertisers and publishers became stuck to the platform, too.
Users, advertisers, publishers — everyone was locked in. Which meant it was time for the third stage of enshittification: withdrawing surplus from everyone and handing it to Facebook’s shareholders.
For the users, that meant dialling down the share of content from accounts you followed to a homeopathic dose, and filling the resulting void with ads and pay-to-boost content from publishers. For advertisers, that meant jacking up prices and drawing down anti-fraud enforcement, so advertisers paid much more for ads that were far less likely to be seen. For publishers, this meant algorithmically suppressing the reach of their posts unless they included an ever-larger share of their articles in the excerpt. And then Facebook started to punish publishers for including a link back to their own sites, so they were corralled into posting full text feeds with no links, meaning they became commodity suppliers to Facebook, entirely dependent on the company both for reach and for monetisation.
When any of these groups squawked, Facebook just repeated the lesson that every tech executive learnt in the Darth Vader MBA:
“I have altered the deal. Pray I don’t alter it any further.”
Facebook now enters the most dangerous phase of enshittification. It wants to withdraw all available surplus and leave just enough residual value in the service to keep end users stuck to each other, and business customers stuck to end users, without leaving anything extra on the table, so that every extractable penny is drawn out and returned to its shareholders. (This continued last week, when the company announced a quarterly dividend of 50 cents per share and that it would increase share buybacks by $50bn. The stock jumped.)
But that’s a very brittle equilibrium, because the difference between “I hate this service, but I can’t bring myself to quit,” and “Jesus Christ, why did I wait so long to quit?” is razor-thin.
All it takes is one Cambridge Analytica scandal, one whistleblower, one livestreamed mass-shooting, and users bolt for the exits, and then Facebook discovers that network effects are a double-edged sword. If users can’t leave because everyone else is staying, when everyone starts to leave, there’s no reason not to go. That’s terminal enshittification.
This phase is usually accompanied by panic, which tech euphemistically calls “pivoting”. Which is how we get pivots such as: In the future, all internet users will be transformed into legless, sexless, low-polygon, heavily surveilled cartoon characters in a virtual world called the “metaverse”.
That’s the procession of enshittification. But that doesn’t tell you why everything is enshittifying right now and, without those details, we can’t know what to do about it. What is it about this moment that led to the Great Enshittening? Was it the end of the zero-interest rate policy (ZIRP)? Was it a change in leadership at the tech giants?
The period of free Fed money certainly led to tech companies having a lot of surplus to toss around. But Facebook started enshittifying long before ZIRP ended, so did Amazon, Microsoft and Google. Some of the tech giants got new leaders. But Google’s enshittification got worse when the founders came back to oversee the company’s AI panic — excuse me, AI pivot. And it can’t be Mercury in retrograde, because I’m a Cancer, and as everyone knows, Cancers don’t believe in astrology.
When a whole bunch of independent entities all change in the same way at once, that’s a sign that the environment has changed, and that’s what happened to tech. Tech companies, like all companies, have conflicting imperatives. On the one hand, they want to make money. On the other hand, making money involves hiring and motivating competent staff, and making products that customers want to buy. The more value a company permits its employees and customers to carve off, the less value it can give to its shareholders.
The equilibrium in which companies produce things we like in honourable ways at a fair price is one in which charging more, worsening quality and harming workers costs more than the company would make by playing dirty.
There are four forces that discipline companies, serving as constraints on their enshittificatory impulses:
Competition. Companies that fear you will take your business elsewhere are cautious about worsening quality or raising prices.
Regulation. Companies that fear a regulator will fine them more than they expect to make from cheating, will cheat less.
These two forces affect all industries, but the next two are far more tech-specific.
Self-help. Computers are extremely flexible and so are the digital products and services we make from them. The only computer we know how to make is the Turing-Complete Von Neumann Machine, a computer that can run every valid program.
That means that users can always avail themselves of programs that undo the anti-features that shift value from them to a company’s shareholders. Think of a boardroom table where someone says, “I’ve calculated that making our ads 20 per cent more invasive will net us 2 per cent more revenue per user.”
In a digital world, someone else might well say, “Yes, but if we do that, 20 per cent of our users will install ad blockers, and our revenue from those users will drop to zero, for ever.” This means that digital companies are constrained by the fear that some enshittificatory manoeuvre will prompt their users to google, “How do I disenshittify this?”
And, finally, workers. Tech workers have very low union density, but that doesn’t mean that tech workers don’t have labour power. The historical “talent shortage” of the tech sector meant that workers enjoyed a lot of leverage. Workers who disagreed with their bosses could quit and walk across the street and get another, better job.
They knew it and their bosses knew it. Ironically, this made tech workers highly exploitable. Tech workers overwhelmingly saw themselves as founders in waiting, entrepreneurs who were temporarily drawing a salary, heroic figures to be.
That’s why mottoes such as Google’s “Don’t be evil” and Facebook’s “Make the world more open and connected” mattered; they instilled a sense of mission in workers. It’s what the American academic Fobazi Ettarh calls “vocational awe” or Elon Musk calls being “extremely hardcore”.
Tech workers had lots of bargaining power, but they didn’t flex it when their bosses demanded that they sacrifice their health, their families, their sleep to meet arbitrary deadlines. So long as their bosses transformed their workplaces into whimsical “campuses”, with gyms, gourmet cafeterias, laundry service, massages and egg-freezing, workers could tell themselves that they were being pampered, rather than being made to work like government mules.
For bosses, there’s a downside to motivating your workers with appeals to a sense of mission. Namely, your workers will feel a sense of mission. So when you ask them to enshittify the products they ruined their health to ship, workers will experience a sense of profound moral injury, respond with outrage and threaten to quit. Thus tech workers themselves were the final bulwark against enshittification.
The pre-enshittification era wasn’t a time of better leadership. The executives weren’t better. They were constrained. Their worst impulses were checked by competition, regulation, self-help and worker power. So what happened?
One by one, each of these constraints was eroded, leaving the enshittificatory impulse unchecked, ushering in the enshittoscene.
It started with competition. From the Gilded Age until the Reagan years, the purpose of competition law was to promote competition between companies. US antitrust law treated corporate power as dangerous and sought to blunt it. European antitrust laws were modelled on US ones, imported by the architects of the Marshall Plan. But starting in the 1980s, with the rise of neoliberalism, competition authorities all over the world adopted a doctrine called “consumer welfare”, which essentially held that monopolies were evidence of quality. If everyone was shopping at the same store and buying the same product, that meant that was the best store, selling the best product — not that anyone was cheating.
And so, all over the world, governments stopped enforcing their competition laws. They just ignored them as companies flouted them. Those companies merged with their major competitors, absorbed smaller companies before they could grow to be big threats. They held an orgy of consolidation that produced the most inbred industries imaginable, whole sectors grown so incestuous they developed Habsburg jaws, from eyeglasses to sea freight, glass bottles to payment processing, vitamin C to beer.
Most of our global economy is dominated by five or fewer global companies. If smaller companies refuse to sell themselves to these cartels, the giants have free rein to flout competition law further, with “predatory pricing” that keeps an independent rival from gaining a foothold. When Diapers.com refused Amazon’s acquisition offer, Amazon lit $100mn on fire, selling diapers way below cost for months, until Diapers.com went bust, and Amazon bought them for pennies on the dollar.
Lily Tomlin used to do a character on the TV show Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In, an AT&T telephone operator who’d do commercials for the Bell system. Each one would end with her saying: “We don’t care. We don’t have to. We’re the phone company.”
Today’s giants are not constrained by competition. They don’t care. They don’t have to. They’re Google.
That’s the first constraint gone, and as it slipped away, the second constraint — regulation — was also doomed.
When an industry consists of hundreds of small- and medium-sized enterprises, it is a mob, a rabble. Hundreds of companies can’t agree on what to tell Parliament or Congress or the Commission. They can’t even agree on how to cater a meeting where they’d discuss the matter.
But when a sector dwindles to a bare handful of dominant firms, it ceases to be a rabble and it becomes a cartel. Five companies, or four, or three, or two or just one company can easily converge on a single message for their regulators, and without “wasteful competition” eroding their profits, they have plenty of cash to spread around.
This is why competition matters: it’s not just because competition makes companies work harder and share value with customers and workers; it’s because competition keeps companies from becoming too big to fail, and too big to jail.
Now, there are plenty of things we don’t want improved through competition, like privacy invasions. After the EU passed its landmark privacy law, the GDPR, there was a mass-extinction event for small EU ad-tech companies. These companies disappeared en masse and that’s a good thing. They were even more invasive and reckless than US-based Big Tech companies. We don’t want to produce increasing efficiency in violating our human rights.
But: Google and Facebook have been unscathed by European privacy law. That’s not because they don’t violate the GDPR. It’s because they pretend they are headquartered in Ireland, one of the EU’s most notorious corporate crime havens. And Ireland competes with the EU’s other crime havens — Malta, Luxembourg, Cyprus and, sometimes, the Netherlands — to see which country can offer the most hospitable environment.
The Irish Data Protection Commission rules on very few cases, and more than two-thirds of its rulings are overturned by the EU courts, even though Ireland is the nominal home to the most privacy-invasive companies on the continent. So Google and Facebook get to act as though they are immune to privacy law, because they violate the law with an app.
This is where that third constraint, self-help, would surely come in handy. If you don’t want your privacy violated, you don’t need to wait for the Irish privacy regulator to act, you can just install an ad blocker.
More than half of all web users are blocking ads. But the web is an open platform, developed in the age when tech was hundreds of companies at each other’s throats, unable to capture their regulators. Today, the web is being devoured by apps, and apps are ripe for enshittification. Regulatory capture isn’t just the ability to flout regulation, it’s also the ability to co-opt regulation, to wield regulation against your adversaries.
Today’s tech giants got big by exploiting self-help measures. When Facebook was telling MySpace users they needed to escape Murdoch’s crapulent Australian social media panopticon, it didn’t just say to those Myspacers, “Screw your friends, come to Facebook and just hang out looking at the cool privacy policy until they get here.” It gave them a bot. You fed the bot your MySpace username and password, and it would login to MySpace and pretend to be you, scraping everything waiting in your inbox and copying it to your Facebook inbox.
When Microsoft was choking off Apple’s market oxygen by refusing to ship a functional version of Microsoft Office for the Mac in the 1990s — so that offices were throwing away their designers’ Macs and giving them PCs with upgraded graphics cards and Windows versions of Photoshop and Illustrator — Steve Jobs didn’t beg Bill Gates to update Mac Office. He got his technologists to reverse-engineer Microsoft Office and make a compatible suite, the iWork Suite, whose apps, Pages, Numbers and Keynote could read and write Microsoft’s Word, Excel and PowerPoint files.
When Google entered the market, it sent its crawler to every web server on earth, where it presented itself as a web-user: “Hi! Hello! Do you have any web pages? Thanks! How about some more? How about more?”
But every pirate wants to be an admiral. When Facebook, Apple and Google were doing this adversarial interoperability, that was progress. If you try to do it to them, that’s piracy.
Try to make an alternative client for Facebook and they’ll say you violated US laws such as the Digital Millennium Copyright Act and EU laws like Article 6 of the EU Copyright Directive. Try to make an Android program that can run iPhone apps and play back the data from Apple’s media stores and they’d bomb you until the rubble bounced. Try to scrape all of Google and they’ll nuke you until you glow.
Tech’s regulatory capture is mind-boggling. Take that law I mentioned earlier, Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act or DMCA. Bill Clinton signed it in 1998, and the EU imported it as Article 6 of the EUCD in 2001. It is a blanket prohibition on removing any kind of encryption that restricts access to a copyrighted work — things such as ripping DVDs or jailbreaking a phone — with penalties of a five-year prison sentence and a $500,000 fine for a first offence. This law has been so broadened that it can be used to imprison creators for granting access to their own creations. Here’s how that works: In 2008, Amazon bought Audible, an audiobook platform. Today, Audible is a monopolist with more than 90 per cent of the audiobook market. Audible requires that all creators on its platform sell with Amazon’s “digital rights management”, which locks it to Amazon’s apps.
So say I write a book, then I read it into a mic, then I pay a director and an engineer thousands of dollars to turn that into an audiobook, and sell it to you on the monopoly platform, Audible, that controls more than 90 per cent of the market. If I later decide to leave Amazon and want to let you come with me to a rival platform, I am out of luck. If I supply you with a tool to remove Amazon’s encryption from my audiobook, so you can play it in another app, I commit a felony, punishable by a five-year sentence and a half-million-dollar fine, for a first offence.
That’s a stiffer penalty than you would face if you simply pirated the audiobook from a torrent site. But it’s also harsher than the punishment you’d get for shoplifting the audiobook on CD from a truck stop. It’s harsher than the sentence you’d get for hijacking the truck that delivered the CD.
Think of our ad blockers again. Fifty per cent of web users are running ad blockers. Zero per cent of app users are running ad blockers, because adding a blocker to an app requires that you first remove its encryption, and that’s a felony. (Jay Freeman, the American businessman and engineer, calls this “felony contempt of business-model”.)
So when someone in a boardroom says, “Let’s make our ads 20 per cent more obnoxious and get a 2 per cent revenue increase,” no one objects that this might prompt users to google, “How do I block ads?” After all, the answer is, you can’t. Indeed, it’s more likely that someone in that boardroom will say, “Let’s make our ads 100 per cent more obnoxious and get a 10 per cent revenue increase.” (This is why every company wants you to install an app instead of using its website.)
There’s no reason that gig workers who are facing algorithmic wage discrimination couldn’t install a counter-app that co-ordinated among all the Uber drivers to reject all jobs unless they reach a certain pay threshold. No reason except felony contempt of business model, the threat that the toolsmiths who built that counter-app would go broke or land in prison, for violating DMCA 1201, the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, trademark, copyright, patent, contract, trade secrecy, nondisclosure and noncompete or, in other words, “IP law”.
IP isn’t just short for intellectual property. It’s a euphemism for “a law that lets me reach beyond the walls of my company and control the conduct of my critics, competitors and customers”. And “app” is just a euphemism for “a web page wrapped in enough IP to make it a felony to mod it, to protect the labour, consumer and privacy rights of its user”.
We don’t care. We don’t have to. We’re the phone company.
What about that fourth constraint: workers? For decades, tech workers’ bargaining power and vocational awe put a ceiling on enshittification. Even after the tech sector shrank to a handful of giants. Even after they captured their regulators. Even after “felony contempt of business model” and extinguished self-help for tech users. Tech was still constrained by their workers’ sense of moral injury in the face of the imperative to enshittify.
Remember when tech workers dreamt of working for a big company for a few years, before striking out on their own to start their own company that would knock that tech giant over? That dream shrank to: work for a giant for a few years, quit, do a fake start-up, get “acqui-hired” by your old employer, as a complicated way of getting a bonus and a promotion. Then the dream shrank further: work for a tech giant for your whole life, get free kombucha and massages on Wednesdays.
And now, the dream is over. All that’s left is: work for a tech giant until they fire you, like those 12,000 Googlers who got fired last year, eight months after a stock buyback that would have paid their salaries for the next 27 years.
Workers are no longer a check on their bosses’ worst impulses. Today, the response to “I refuse to make this product worse” is “turn in your badge and don’t let the door hit you in the *** on the way out”.
I get that this is all a little depressing. OK, really depressing. But hear me out! We’ve identified the disease. We’ve identified its underlying mechanism. Now we can get to work on a cure.
There are four constraints that prevent enshittification: competition, regulation, self-help and labour. To reverse enshittification and guard against its re-emergence, we must restore and strengthen each of these.
On competition, it’s actually looking pretty good. The EU, the UK, the US, Canada, Australia, Japan and China are all doing more on competition than they have in two generations. They’re blocking mergers, unwinding existing ones, taking action on predatory pricing and other sleazy tactics. Remember, in the US and Europe, we already have the laws to do this; we just stopped enforcing them.
I’ve been fighting these fights with the Electronic Frontier Foundation for 22 years now, and I’ve never seen a more hopeful moment for sound, informed tech policy.
Now, the enshittifiers aren’t taking this lying down. Take Lina Khan, the brilliant head of the US Federal Trade Commission, who has done more in three years on antitrust than the combined efforts of all her predecessors over the past 40 years. The Wall Street Journal’s editorial page has run more than 80 pieces trashing Khan, insisting that she’s an ineffectual ideologue who can’t get anything done. Sure, that’s why you ran 80 editorials about her. Because she can’t get anything done.
Reagan and Thatcher put antitrust law in a coma in the 1980s. But it’s awake, it’s back and it’s pissed off.
What about regulation? How will we get tech companies to stop doing that one weird trick of adding “with an app” to escape enforcement?
Well, here in the EU, they’re starting to figure it out. Recently, the main body of the Digital Markets Act and the Digital Services Act went into effect, and they let people who get screwed by tech companies go straight to the European courts, bypassing the toothless watchdogs in places like Ireland.
In the US, they might finally get a digital privacy law. You probably have no idea how backwards US privacy law is. The last time the US Congress enacted a broadly applicable privacy law was in 1988. The Video Privacy Protection Act makes it a crime for video-store clerks to leak your video-rental history. It was passed after a rightwing judge who was up for the Supreme Court had his rentals published in a DC newspaper. The rentals weren’t even all that embarrassing.
Sure, that judge, Robert Bork, wasn’t confirmed for the Supreme Court, but that was because he was a virulent loudmouth who served as Nixon’s solicitor-general. Still, Congress got the idea that their own video records might be next, freaked out and passed the VPPA. That was the last time Americans got a big, national privacy law. And the thing is, there are a lot of people who are angry about it. Worried that Facebook turned Grampy into a QAnon? That Insta made your teen anorexic? That TikTok is brainwashing Gen Z into quoting Osama bin Laden?
Or that cops are rolling up the identities of everyone at a Black Lives Matter protest or the Jan 6 riots by getting location data from Google?
Or that red state attorneys-general are tracking teen girls to out-of-state abortion clinics?
Or that Black people are being discriminated against by online lending or hiring platforms?
Or that someone is making AI deepfake **** of you?
Having a federal privacy law with a private right of action — which means that individuals can sue companies that violate their privacy — would go a long way to rectifying all of these problems. There’s a big coalition for that kind of privacy law.
What about self-help? That’s a lot farther away, alas. The EU’s DMA will force tech companies to open up their walled gardens for interoperation. You’ll be able to use WhatsApp to message people on iMessage, or quit Facebook and move to Mastodon, but still send messages to the people left behind. But if you want to reverse-engineer one of those Big Tech products and mod it to work for you, not them, the EU’s got nothing for you. This is an area ripe for improvement. My big hope here is that Stein’s Law will take hold: anything that can’t go on forever will eventually stop.
Finally, there’s labour. Here in Europe, there’s much higher union density than in the US, which American tech barons are learning the hard way. There is nothing more satisfying in the daily news than the recent salvo by Nordic unions against that Tesla guy. But even in the US, there’s a massive surge in tech unions. Tech workers have realised they’re not founders-in-waiting. In Seattle, Amazon’s tech workers walked out in sympathy with Amazon’s warehouse workers, because they’re all workers.
We’re seeing bold, muscular, global action on competition, regulation and labour, with self-help bringing up the rear. It’s not a moment too soon, because the bad news is enshittification is coming to every industry. If it’s got a networked computer in it, the people who made it can run the Darth Vader MBA playbook on it, changing the rules from moment to moment, violating your rights and then saying: “It’s OK, we did it with an app.”
From Mercedes effectively renting you your accelerator pedal by the month to Internet of Things dishwashers that lock you into proprietary dish soap, enshittification is metastasising into every corner of our lives. Software doesn’t eat the world, it just enshittifies it.
There’s a bright side to all this: if everyone is threatened by enshittification, then everyone has a stake in disenshittification. Just as with privacy law in the US, the potential anti-enshittification coalition is massive. It’s unstoppable.
Last edited by DeerHunter; 02-14-2024 at 10:17 PM.
The cynics among you might be sceptical that this will make a difference. After all, isn’t “enshittification” the same as “capitalism”? Well, no.
I’m not going to cape for capitalism. I’m hardly a true believer in markets as the most efficient allocators of resources and arbiters of policy. But the capitalism of 20 years ago made space for a wild and woolly internet, a space where people with disfavoured views could find each other, offer mutual aid and organise. The capitalism of today has produced a global, digital ghost mall, filled with botshit, crap gadgets from companies with consonant-heavy brand names and cryptocurrency scams.
The internet isn’t more important than the climate emergency, gender justice, racial justice, genocide or inequality. But the internet is the terrain we’ll fight those fights on. Without a free, fair and open internet, the fight is lost before it’s joined.
We can reverse the enshittification of the internet. We can halt the creeping enshittification of every digital device. We can build a better, enshittification-resistant digital nervous system, one that is fit to co-ordinate the mass movements we will need to fight fascism, end genocide, save our planet and our species.
Martin Luther King said: “It may be true that the law cannot make a man love me, but it can stop him from lynching me, and I think that’s pretty important.” And it may be true that the law can’t force corporations to conceive of you as a human being entitled to dignity and fair treatment, and not just an ambulatory wallet, a supply of gut bacteria for the immortal colony organism that is a limited liability corporation. But it can make them fear you enough to treat you fairly and afford you dignity — even if they don’t think you deserve it.
Law does not keep a man from killing another man. Fear of the punishment keeps a man from killing another man. When the desire to kill outweighs the fear of the punishment you end up with a problem.
01-13-2024, 08:37 PM
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