Can things ever get better?

Does it ever seem to you like things are getting slowly worse all the time? It can't be just me. And last week I finally saw a video that explains why.

It's a joke, of course. The video purports to show us "A Day in the Life of an Ensh*ttificator," someone whose job it is to make every product and service a little bit worse. The main character addresses the audience directly, explaining that he inherited his calling from his father before him. And at first he starts off small: cutting holes in the toes of socks, and sawing half an inch off one table leg so that the table rocks. But the Internet allows him to expand his operations. Soon he offers online services for free—just long enough to get users hooked on them—and then incrementally degrades the services to encourage customers to pay for "Premium" status (viz., the same level of service that was free last year). I won't give away the punchline, but the ending is perfectly in line with the dark humor that pervades the rest of the video. It's well worth the four minutes.

Wow, that sounds cynical! Who made it? Some disgruntled undergraduate? 

The "Breaking Free" report

Actually, no. The video was produced by NewsLab, a Norwegian communications agency; but it was commissioned and publicized by Forbrukerrådet, the Norwegian Consumer Council. Their point is to advertise a new report which highlights that this drift towards "enshittification" is a conscious, deliberate policy of the major firms in Big Tech. The report, entitled "BREAKING FREE: Pathways to a fair technological future," spells out the exact steps by which major tech firms hook customers with free or discounted services, and then squeeze them for payment once the cost of leaving the service is too great. Nor do they stop there. Forbrukerrådet winds up the report by identifying a slate of legislative measures to protect consumers from this predatory behavior. And in a logical next step, they and other allied consumer organizations have already sent letters to legislators in Norway, in the European Union, and in the United States urging adoption of these measures.

In case it's not clear in what follows, I wish them well. I agree that life is worse when online services are designed so that you can't easily switch between providers. And it could be interesting to study the slate of concrete measures proposed in the report, to understand how likely they are to achieve their stated goal. If you want me to drill into the details in a future post, please tell me in the comments. What is certain is that even with the best measures, bringing the corporations to heel won't be easy. (Consider the "Alternative to fines" discussion in this post from two years ago.) But what I want to ask right now is a far more basic question. Once the legislators get these letters and read them, what motivation do they have to act on the proposals? What's in it for them?

Finn Lützow-Holm Myrstad,
Director of Digital Policy,
Norwegian Consumer Council

I don't know how politics works in Norway, nor at the pan-European levels of the EU. But in the United States, legislators are generally motivated by re-election. They support measures that will get them re-elected, and they oppose measures that would prevent their re-election. The Big Tech firms contribute generously to the campaign funds of legislators who are disposed to help them. Who contributes to their opponents? Who is out there in the public square, capitalizing on the attention earned by this funny video, mobilizing voters to throw out the rascals who protect Big Tech and to replace them with insurgents defending the Common Man? Can you think of a name? Anyone?       

Because without such mobilization, I think the measures are going nowhere. If legislators are motivated by re-election, then the surest way to make progress on this topic is to convince those legislators that supporting consumers against the depradations of Big Tech is essential to getting re-elected. It might be possible to make such an argument some day, with enough organization. But up till now I have not heard it made.

Maybe it sounds like I'm ranting, or preaching cheap gloom-and-doom. But I'm not. There's an important Quality lesson here, one that applies to every improvement project you undertake—in the office, on the shop floor, or anywhere. The point is this: 

• Every improvement project requires someone in authority to say, "Do it."
• Therefore, every improvement has to look good to the person who authorizes it.
• This means that no matter how much benefit the improvement might bring, it won't happen unless you can persuade the person in authority that he or she is better off approving the project than rejecting it. At some level, there has got to be something in it for him or her.   

Often that "something" is just that your improvement will make things run smoother in the office or on the shop floor, and naturally the boss wants things to run smoother. That might be enough. In other cases, you might have to be a little more persuasive. But the point is that there has to be something. And my biggest concern about the package of reforms that the Forbrukerrådet has proposed to protect common consumers against Big Tech is that these measures benefit everyone except the tech executives themselves and the legislators who have to pass the laws. 

      

Egg cartons

Last week I talked about preventive actions in general, and remarked that you have to make sure you are solving the right problem. But of course there are other requirements too, in order for a preventive action to be really effective. It should be (for example) simple, inexpensive, and easy to replicate at scale. So I thought it would be fun to take a minute to look at one of the most successful preventive actions of our time, an invention so ubiquitous that it can be hard to remember the problem it was designed to solve.

Consider the egg carton.

The modern egg carton was invented in 1911 by Joseph Coyle, a newspaperman in British Columbia, after overhearing an argument between a hotel owner and a deliveryman over an order of eggs that had arrived broken.

"[Coyle] said there's got to be a better way. And … well, the rest is history," Fergus Tomlin, director of the Bulkley Valley Museum, said in an interview.

The modern egg carton is an ingenious device—so ingenious that it becomes easy to think of it as an obvious tool or a fact of nature, rather than a preventive measure created by human intelligence to solve a problem. But a moment's reflection reveals some interesting questions. Among these:

Eggs have been fragile as long as people have been eating them; so why did it take until 1911 for someone to invent a protective container to carry them in?

What was it about Coyle's design that made it universally adopted?

For the first question, I think there are two answers. Over the long term, it is only comparatively recently that we have developed economic markets large enough that the fragility of eggs carried to market could be treated as one large problem rather than as hundreds of small, individual problems. And if anyone did happen to develop an egg carton back in the Middle Ages, he never wrote it down in any document that has survived—so the idea died with him. By the dawn of the twentieth century, by contrast, we had national markets and a patent system to spread innovations.

The second answer is that other people before Coyle did come up with solutions to the problem, but their solutions simply weren't as good! There were wooden crates designed to carry eggs in quantity, but they were large and bulky. At best, they were suited to large commercial transactions, but they were too cumbersome for anyone who wanted to by a simple dozen.

This brings us the the second question: What was it about Coyle's design that made it universally adopted? And I think I anticipated the answers in my introduction above.

Coyle's design was simple: The whole carton is one part. There are no interior slats to insert and align, in order to keep the eggs in place.

Coyle's design was inexpensive: His egg cartons were made of cardboard or paper pulp, not wood.

Coyle's design was easy to replicate at scale: Ironically, this is why Coyle never became a millionaire. Other people took his simple design, made this or that minor improvement, and then patented the result. In a brief Google search I found four different US patents for variant egg cartons; it would not surprise me if there are more.

US patent 1269394, to Joseph Coyle        

US patent 1543443 to Morris Koppelman

US patent 1975129 to Francis H. Sherman

US patent 3458108 to Walter H Howarth, Gerald A Snow, and Harold A Doughty

At a personal level, this outcome may be disappointing. Years later, in an interview, Coyle's daughter said, "As is so often the case with inventors, he was no match for the sharp practices of big business and their sharper lawyers. The Coyle carton made several millionaires but dad was not one of them. We lived comfortably, but not affluently."

But from a Quality perspective, in a sense this is the best possible outcome. Innovations should be spread, picked up, adapted, improved-upon, and then those improvements should be passed along in their turn. We learn from others, and then others in their turn learn from us. The Quality goal is to solve problems as well as possible. And the problem of carrying eggs without breaking them was solved—almost (if not quite) as well as possible—by Joseph Coyle in 1911. 

           

Gatekeeping

Last week I wrote a post for this blog, and—as usual—tried to publicize it in LinkedIn. But I mostly failed. My very first post about the article (in my own timeline) went through well enough; but when I tried to cross post in special-interest groups, I invariably got the message, "Oops - we were unable to complete your request. Please try again later." And "trying again later" produced the same result. It was odd.

LinkedIn Customer Support has hitherto offered a number of theories for what happened, none of which match the facts of the case. (Perhaps I explained the problem in a confusing way at first; but as we have emailed back and forth, I have tried to make the picture clearer.) But I have been able to post other notifications since then. So it is clear to me that my account has not been blocked, and I have not violated some overall limit on the number of posts. As far as I can tell, the only plausible explanation left is that my post triggered a content filter. The filter must have determined my post to be spam, not because there were too many copies of it (There weren't.) but somehow because of what I said. In other words, I must have run afoul of some gatekeeping protocol.     

Gatekeeping isn't necessarily a bad thing, though in this case it proved inconvenient for me. In essence, gatekeeping is a form of preventive action. For example, many large companies have policies that require all their suppliers to be certified to ISO 9001. This is a gatekeeping requirement, and it is intended to weed out certain problems before they start. We have discussed at length that certification to ISO 9001 doesn't necessarily mean a company does good work. But it does mean that they have a way to handle complaints, and it does mean that they will work next week more or less the same way they worked this week. Those two reassurances—just by themselves—are huge. 

By the same token, if you determine that a certain sort of message interferes with the purposes of your online community, it's only natural to take action in advance to prevent that kind of message from ever being posted. I assume that the LinkedIn filters probably thought my post was some kind of advertisement—maybe even an advertisement for some kind of artificial intelligence tool. While advertising is allowed on LinkedIn, it has to go through a certain procedure before it is posted. It would not surprise me to learn that LinkedIn has tools—maybe even AI tools, ironically—that screen individual posts to look for advertisements that have been disguised as personal notifications. It wouldn't even surprise me if someone showed me a list of the features that this tool looks for, the features that identify a probable advertisement-in-hiding, and it turned out that by a simple accident I had written some of those features into my post—so that the gatekeeping tool rejected it.

It wouldn't surprise me. But at this point that's pure speculation. I have seen no such list yet, and LinkedIn Customer Service has not confirmed that this is the problem. I am just guessing.

But let's take this line of thought one step farther. We all know that if you are going to derive preventive actions or lessons learned from a problem investigation, the actions or the lessons have to be based in some kind of causal way on the things you learned during the investigation. In the same way, if you decide to gatekeep your social media community to keep out AI-based advertising (or whatever it turns out to be), you should make sure that this is what you are really doing in practice. Look at your algorithm closely, and review it from time to time. Also, if someone's posts get caught by the algorithm and he complains, that might mean he's a human being (rather than an AI) so you might be able to use that information to refine your algorithm even more. 

Meanwhile I'll try to write notifications that don't sound like ad copy. That's a preventive action on my part, to avoid this circumstance arising again.