Metastasis: the IT of global enshittification
Introduction
This post brings together several strands of thought from myself and a couple of other writers. It repeats some things said on LinkedIn recently and elsewhere. It looks to connect the historical and current behaviours of Big Tech with those of people like Putin and countries like Russia, as well as China to a certain degree.
Lead-in
A comment on LinkedIn I stumbled across today crystallised ideas I’ve been writing about the past week or so increasingly. The comment can be found here:
This is a graph of the deep metastases of dictatorship in a still democratic society 😐
It was in response to the post that follows:
I responded with these paragraphs:
As Oksana Zabolotnaya alludes so accurately in a comment below, metastasis is the strategic, geopolitical tool of choice of #russiasputin and #putinsrussia.
When the highest levels of #uk government — the then-ruling #conservativeparty under #borisjohnson and his acolytes — made #lords of people in #putin's inner circle, enabled their ownership of #british #footballclubs and the opportunities for money-laundering this made both practical and inevitable, facilitated the influencing of #london's main #eveningnewspaper by the direct editorship of those sympathetic to #russia's line, allowed #russian and #chinese hackers to embed themselves deep — and remain still — in #sellafield's most profound #it structures, being the most dangerous nuclear reprocessing plant in the #european sphere ... and then again, essentially saw it in the wider interests of #uk #nationalsecurity that #russian strategies remained firmly, metastatically, infiltrated in the #british establishment — in political and security-focussed ways, in equal measure — and if nothing else as a silly justification for agencies remaining stuck in time so they could run as always (and for sure as a bulwark to #germany and #france and their potential to continue to take the #eu away from long-held #british positions), it's clear that #oxforduniversity's taking of £10 million in donations from #putin's own is small beer indeed.
And these cancers are just the ones I remember as I write these words this minute, in relation to simply my own homeland.
Never mind the rest of #europe or wider afield ... no?
How Putin’s strategies of “metastasis” mirror Big Tech’s strategies of “enshittification”
The reason I find this encapsulation so important is because I have been following the line of Cory Doctorow, who recently described the “enshittification” of everything we use in the context of Silicon Valley’s versions of what online should mean — and, indeed, has become:
Enshittification (alternately, crapification and platform decay) is a pattern in which online products and services decline in quality. Initially, vendors create high-quality offerings to attract users, then they degrade those offerings to better serve business customers, and finally degrade their services to users and business customers to maximize profits for shareholders.
Writer Cory Doctorow coined the neologism "enshittification" in November 2022, though he was not the first to describe and label the concept.[1][2] The American Dialect Society selected it as its 2023 Word of the Year.
Doctorow advocates for two ways to reduce enshittification: upholding the end-to-end principle, which asserts that platforms should transmit data in response to user requests rather than algorithm-driven decisions; and guaranteeing the right of exit—that is, enabling a user to leave a platform without data loss, which requires interoperability. These moves aim to uphold the standards and trustworthiness of online platforms, emphasize user satisfaction, and encourage market competition.
In the case of Silicon Valley, then, we call it enshittification — and all of us see why.
In the case of Putin, we may call it a geopolitical strategy of cultural and business metastasis. And here I am sure only his most fervent advocates would argue otherwise. (Although it’s actually possible that his most fervent advocates would be the first to argue in favour …)
Both these things, apparently unrelated, deserve to be in the same post and narrative. This is how I saw it only this morning, first thing:
We cannot trust corporate structures which employ #soviet-style centralised command & control economic and hierarchical structures to ever wish to honestly vanquish the #kremlin's own equivalents.
Corporations of the #siliconvalley kind, with no allegiances to the local, regional and continental outwith their own, cannot be trusted to fight #putin et al. They can, however, be trusted to stealthily side with #bigmoney when their #bottomlines are at stake. And this will always include #putin and the #chinese, too ...
And so, equally, this is why I also, now, firmly believe that we can only change the world by protecting our world: by creating fortresses around the kind of practice we now know is better, so what we are currently delivered by the Valley and those who coattail on it can no longer enshittify us through strategic, corporate, and geopolitical metastasis, alongside its obviously cancerous outcomes.
Why I say what I say lately. Exactly why I do. Because in digital, not even the Governor of California can be entrusted with the public responsibility of enacting legislation the People’s Will has worked hard on behalf of. Not when Big Tech enshittifies even that politics …
"no big tech ever
nothing which uses big tech ever in our projects
nothing which needs big tech ever
everything from scratch
ip belongs to stockholm, london and dublin
not to any private organisation ever
we fund only from scratch
the quanovo model but with money
not quanovo
their model across the regional ecosystems of sweden, the uk, and ireland only
not the us: especially not the us
not the rest of europe
just sweden and maybe the nordics and baltics
and then the uk and ireland, too
but governments and their agencies: not big tech located in, ever
and europe the rest of: not that either
no big tech ever
none"
Conclusion
My final pull-together is this one: a post I wrote before another I wrote on how Silicon Valley delivers, above all, what we might call “gangster capitalism”.
The earlier post compared Putin and Musk — but in each other’s shoes … and is quoted immediately below.
It's a clear example of #hybridwarfare. It's an example -- the clearest of all -- of how #bigtech finds easy affinities with the #soviets that have never left #russia.
Let's take the structure of #putin's world:
1. A #ceo at the very top of an entirely hierarchical economic structure of command & control, with plausible deniability to the fore always.
2. The use of #marketing strategies of what are essentially truly #propagandist aims, where bad is good and dark is always light. And any criticism which does emerge constitutes an enemy's lies to be brutally called out with a blanket messaging of the most costly and vociferous.
3. A workforce built out of a management by fear at the highest levels, designed to belittle creativity and original thinking completely out of the whole organisation in question.
4. The usage of an extreme #criminality as a way of ensuring competitive advantage.
Let's take the structure of #musk's world:
1. A #tsar in charge of everything that happens, where everything involves an #uncertaintyprinciple to the max.
2. The employment of allegedly #unreliablethinking as a way of dominating all opposition.
3. An absence of #transparency in everything the organisation does, where #victimblaming becomes a tool for demolishing the opposition of this #tsar's choice.
4. The usage of the greyest of areas of #zemiological activity to the max to achieve strategic goals.
If this doesn't explain the affinities existent between people like #putin on the one hand and people like #musk, #bezos, #altman, and #zuckerberg et al on the other, I don't know what does.
A great academic called #colincrouch once explained how even in the absence of a literal conspiracy, in economic matters carried out in the areas of #darkfigure and #neocrime, essentially "birds of a feather flock together". We know what to do when our interests are in play. The wealthy no less.
The wealthy know what #crimes to commit in order to sustain their long-term positions; equally, whom best to rub shoulders with, so the money keeps on flowing.
So in truth, it's #putin who's the #tsar and #musk the #ceo.
But these days, at these levels, really there is zero difference ... now is there?
What we need to really do is decide which side of history we'd prefer to be on. And then join that side in the war that's getting closer.
Know what sides there are and where we see ourselves.
Yeah?
Further reading:
• https://www.theguardian.com/business/2024/sep/23/amazon-tesla-meta-climate-change-democracy | The Guardian reporting the other day on how #amazon, #tesla and #meta amongst others are proactively doing the most to undermine #westerndemocracies and related