Cory Doctorow recently agreed to talk to me!

Check out Cory's blog at Pluralistic.net. I highly recommend following Pluralistic via RSS.

I've been reading Cory's books and watching video clips of his presentations and interviews and am greatly impressed by his opposition to, and proposed strategies for dealing with, the likes of Facebook Google and Twitter  in terms of their disregard for the rights of their users, prioritising monetization over functionality, evading accountability to laws and regulations, abusing our rights to privacy and data security and generally behaving like cartoon supervillains.

Sex workers, and other disfavoured minority groups, are all too familiar with mistreatment at the hands of big tech. Social media likes to ban or shadowban us with no warning or explanation and the platforms we use to advertise (escort directories) blatantly abuse our rights to privacy, data security, deletion requests and ownership of our intellectual property.

Cory is an absolute wealth of information on how we can fight for our rights online and a goldmine of knowledge that I hope we can apply at the point where his ideas intersect with some of the difficulties sex workers face using both platforms intended for us (eg escort directories), and platforms where we are almost, not quite, kind of, sometimes, barely tolerated eg Twitter, Google, Reddit, the various messenger apps like Whatsapp and pretty much any site or app we use for advertising our services, networking with other providers and seeking support and information.

My thoughts follow after the full interview.

Cory: Hi Oz, how are you?

Oz: Good, thank you Cory. How are you?

Cory: I'm honestly not great, but happy to talk. I've had some recent health complications.

Oz: Sorry to hear that. Thank you so much for taking this time to talk to me. I really appreciate it. I'm a fan of your work and I think what you say about technology and digital rights is really interesting. So, I'd love to hear your thoughts on those topics in the context of sex work.

Cory: Sure. I'm not an expert on sex work. I'm happy to tell you what I know but I'm also humble enough to know when I'm not an expert and not qualified. To the extent that I'm qualified to speak about this from the internet and human rights angle, I'm happy to chat with you.

Oz: Yes please, from that angle it should be very interesting. First of all, my commiserations regarding the election result, I know you're not a fan of the orange terror there.

Cory: No. That's pretty terrible indeed. I'm just trying to post through it and wait for other people to have better ideas than I have right now for what to do next. I figure being stressed out about it doesn't hurt Donald Trump and it does hurt me, so I'm trying not to dwell on it.

Oz: That's a good philosophy, I think. Best not to stress. I think sex workers all over the world are following what's going on there with interest, though, because a lot of the platforms that we use are based in America, operated by Americans. We're worried about things like this Project 2025, and whether that might progress now that the Republicans are in. What do you think about that? Is there much we can do to mitigate the effects of  something like Project 2025 if it happens?

Cory: You know, the characteristic of the first Trump regime was a lack of administrative competence. There are a lot of people who are saying Trump is going to address the main stumbling block to administrative success that he had in the first term by packing his agencies with personal loyalists who are really firmly committed to his cult of personality and not making concessions to the party grandees by putting in older line conservatives that might not jump when he says frog. But I don't know that those people are actually administratively competent, right? They, themselves are also, chiefly weird and not necessarily good at getting stuff done.

Rick Perlstein who is a very, very, very good historian of right-wing movements has written I think the best take on Project 2025 which is that the most interesting thing about it is not how extreme their proposals are but how irreconcilable they are. So, in every key area from migration to abortion to labour rights to trade policy, there are multiple conflicting proposals for how to undertake them.

Oz: A lot of Project 2025's proposals just don't make sense from what I've seen.

Cory: It's not that it doesn't make sense, it's that what you see is that within the coalition that has given us Trump, there are irreconcilable differences and, you know, maybe relevant to what we do about Trump. Every change that we see in society almost without exception is the result of a new coalition.

You know if there's a bunch of people who want some stuff and they try really hard to get it, maybe they just have the wrong tactics and eventually, they'll hit on a better tactic and figure out how to make this stuff happen. But usually what you're seeing if someone's trying to make something happen and failing is that they don't have enough clout to accomplish their goals and so when things change it's because a coalition is formed. You fuse together two or more groups who inevitably don't agree on everything and so the coalition is how things get done.

After the Thatcher years you had new Labour which is a coalition of business interests and trade unions. With the trade unions taking the role of junior partner. That coalition was very powerful. We see lots of years of Blair with a strong parliamentary majority able to enact policies that punish the junior partners, the working people, to the benefit of mostly the finance sector people who joined the Blair coalition, and eventually that crumbles. Eventually, the Labour coalition crumbles and Labour ends up in the dark again for 14 years because that line of power is also a line of weakness or a line of brittleness.

There's a vulnerability as well as the strength. When we look to Project 2025, if we're taking a critical eye to it and saying, ‘What can we do to avert the worst outcomes?, What we can treat Project 2025 as is a roadmap to the fractures within the coalition.’

If these predatory, irreconcilable proposals actually aided in to Project 2025, what we can say about that with some degree of certainty is that the people who disagree about this are each of them sufficiently important and powerful enough in the movement that no one can dominate the other.

Which means that what you have is unstoppable forces and immovable objects in conflict, and that's an area where things could really shatter, right? So if we can figure out how to heighten the contradictions around those areas of fracture that they've so helpfully diagrammed for us, that's a good tactical place to start, to start pulling that coalition apart.

Oz: The part of Project 2025 that I worry about is that they're going to criminalize pornography. That consenting adults selling images and video online could become illegal, but as you say, that could be a fracture line in that people that are profiting from porn are not going to want it to be illegal.

Cory: Oh, not just that, right? Remember that a huge part of this coalition are libertarians of various types. Some of them are libertarians because they want to live in polycules and hire sex workers and consume all the pornography they want, and some of them are libertarians because they don't want to hire black people. Most of them are libertarians because they don't want to pay any taxes.

All of those groups, broadly speaking, are going to be really upset about porn bans, both on ideological and sort of personal grounds.

They represent a really significant bloc, and moreover, they represent a really significant fraction of the financial backing to the movement. And so, that fracture line is going to be a really important one.

Oz: Definitely. Well, a lot of people watch porn for sure, so it's something that affects everyone.

Cory: Yeah, you know, you can see this in the inverse, right? So if you recall, second-wave feminists who were anti-pornography, like Andrea Dworkin, found themselves in coalition with evangelicals like Jerry Falwell, even though they disagreed on other things.

You could imagine a coalition of libertarians who absolutely oppose rights for sex workers of any description, still forming a coalition with sex workers to defend the right to have pornography and do sex work. So that would be a very weird coalition. It's going to be really uncomfortable. You're going to be in the room with people who are marching side by side along with them or signing letters with them, with people who you really dislike and who have no interest in your well-being, but who might be tactically useful.

Deciding whether or not you want to make that compromise or form that coalition is going to be a really hard call. There's no right answer. And as far as I know, there's no heuristic to actually say, ‘Okay, well, this is the compromise that you should make’ and these are the compromises that are beyond the pale.

Oz: Yes, that's very interesting and I guess now we'll see how it plays out. Now when I was researching that blog post that I sent you about the privacy policies of the sex worker directories, I got a lot of mixed messages about how those platforms handle our identities and why. Some of them say it's because of the GDPR or the FTC or the requirements of their payment platform or Visa or MasterCard.  But then they're claiming to be in Cyprus or Malta to avoid these things or they end up charging using Bitcoin anyway. So, it's all a bit of a mess, but I was wondering what do you think about what needs to change before they'll actually show any respect for our privacy and change the way they do things?

Cory: Well, I think that what you're seeing is different kinds of regulatory arbitrage. So, firms that pretend to be Maltese are not pretending to be Maltese to avoid the GDPR or the FTC, they're pretending to be Maltese to avoid tax and also to avoid disclosure of beneficial ownership, right?

When you see these problems within the EU, they're actually, I think downstream of intrinsic contradictions within Federalism. So, if you have a bunch of independent or quasi-independent states and you say, okay, we're all going to form a single bloc, there's always going to be some tension there that's completely legitimate.

You know I'm Canadian and it wasn't until after World War II that Newfoundland, which is population-wise, a very small territory, joined the Canadian Confederation. People from Newfoundland were legitimately concerned that everyone else in the country might gang up on them and say, okay, well, we have these new policies for our eastern coastal waters that are quite broadly beneficial to the whole country, but fuck over everyone in Newfoundland.

So whenever you have Federalism, you have these humanitarian rights for otherwise small things during federations. The problem is that that creates opportunities for small states to sell out the bloc.

So in Europe, you have Ireland, Malta, Cyprus, to a lesser extent, the Netherlands, and Liechtenstein, selling out the EU on tax and to a lesser extent, but still in a related matter, selling out the EU on regulation and enforcement.

Broadly, if you're a tax haven, you are relying on companies that, by definition, can change their flag of convenience, because that's how they got to your country. So the way that they decided to pretend to be Irish is they figured out how to do the paperwork.

If they can do the paperwork to pretend to be Irish this week, they could do the paperwork to pretend to be Luxembourgian next week. So you have to have something besides low taxes to keep them there.

What that ends up being is things like, oh, we just don't enforce the GDPR, which is Irelands big thing, their "data commissioner".

So, in terms of these contradictions you're seeing, you're seeing the intersection of a whole ton of different problems. One is this problem of European Federalism, where you have these different territories with different privacy regimes and different degrees of enforcement, and they're doing this tax haven shit that is luring companies there, even though they're not really there.

So obviously, Luxembourg is where Mindgeek mostly pretends it's based, even though they're a Canadian company and everyone knows it, right? I mean, that's like one source of the problem. And then within European Federalism, you have this other problem of enforcement, where it all starts in Ireland and the Irish Data Commissioner sucks.

Then you have a lack of antitrust enforcement, and that all of our payment processes have these incredible arbitrary and ever-changing lines. And so counsel for these firms, as well as their business strategists, just say, okay, well, we don't want to colour up to the edge of the line, because if the line moves even a bit and we find ourselves on the wrong side of the line, we lose everything.

So, we are going to colour really well inside the line. So, now you're trying to reconcile GDPR stuff with the tax haven stuff, with the monopoly payment processor stuff, and then there's the foundational thing that they just don't give a shit about your privacy, right? They don't give a shit about anyone's privacy broadly, and they really don't give a shit about the privacy of disfavoured minorities like sex workers.

So, in terms of what has to change before any of that can move, well, one way to think about this is that any change that we make to any part of the puzzle will result in some material improvements to the policy that flow out of it.

So the FTC has brought a case against Visa for domination of payment processing and monopolisation of payment processing. If that results in more competition in the payment processing world, broadly those companies will be less beholden to Visa and less conservative about pissing Visa off. So that's one thing that might help.

The EU, with the Digital Market Act, has said, okay, well, we're going to move frontline GDPR enforcement to the federal court and out of the national courts.

And so perhaps sex workers will have the ability to use this multi-use flag of convenience against sex worker platforms and say, you know, the European Court of Justice is going to order you to knock this shit off.

Now, again, this was not going to be an easy win because there are lots of good fundamental justice reasons not to want the federalization of European policy enforcement. But like your federalization of European public policy enforcement is how we got Greek Austerity that collapsed the Greek economy and the rise of fascist groups, right, like national sovereignty isn't always bad you know and so there's going to be a lot of countries that are going to be legitimately pissed off for really good reasons that you and I will probably support about the federalizing of European policy enforcement.

But you know, I don't want to say it swings around abouts because that's cheap but I want to say that like there are just as with coalitions there are tactical levers that we can pull on and none of those tactical levers operate just the one issue that we're trying to move.

They change the orientation of many issues that we want to move on and that impacts our ability to form and maintain coalitions so there'll be coalition partners who will be with you right up to the moment you say ‘and by the way we support European federalism and federal enforcement of European policy’ at which point it will become your bitter enemies and you're going to have to figure out right which side of those fights you're going to be on and which kind of coalition is going to get the most done and there there is a point where if you just prioritize coalition happiness above all other things and you say okay well today I'm going to side with these guys who I hate on 99 things but like on this hundredth thing and you are going to I'm going to be in partnership with these other guys who I hate on almost everything but like on this completely different thing, eventually you kind of look yourself in the mirror you go like it kind of seems like I don't stand for anything but I seem to be like marching alongside Maoists and like neo-Nazis,  depending on whether it's a Tuesday or a Wednesday.

Oz: We have to draw the line somewhere.

So I'll give you an example from my own career.

You know, in most democracies, you have these expert agencies, right?  Like the FTC or, you know, the European Commission or the various ministries within the UK. When they propose a regulation, they have some kind of notice and comment. So they say like, “Hey, we're thinking about banning lead in petrol.

What do you guys think?” Everyone submits comments, and then those comments are published, and then everyone submits reply comments, and then they propose a rule, and everyone submits comments, and everyone submits reply comments, and then the rule is ratified or modified or struck down.

That's broadly speaking how administrative agencies work everywhere.

There was a proposal to revamp the portal by which administrative agencies received comments, right, so all administrative agencies irrespective of what policy they were making.

The proposal was that they would develop a system to identify and discard, quote, substantively duplicative comments.

So comments that seem to be the same, so like spam. The problem with that is that once you say that an agency has leeway to decide whether a comment is duplicative, then what we're saying is that if 10 million people all say, “fuck no, this is a terrible idea”, the agency can say,  “well, you're pretty duplicative, we're just going to count that as one now”

Everyone was likely very worried about this, so we created a sign-on letter for different kinds of things.

Oz: That's kind of the opposite of democratic.

Cory: Indeed. I mean, there is such a thing as spam. But it's badly conceived. So we put together a coalition letter to oppose this, and people poured in There were pro-abortion activists, anti-abortion activists, pro-gun activists, anti-gun activists, you know, everybody on every side just understood that this was the wrong discretion to put in the hands of the administration, that they should have to recognize and attend to every comment, or if they were going to discard comments. It would have to be on the basis of something more than this kind of automated opaque system. We got to this point where the guy I was working on this with called me up and said, ‘We don't want to accept comments like a sign-on from the KKK, right?’, and I was like, ‘No, we really don't’, right?

But this is how it might be. Somewhere along the line, you're going to have to draw that line about who you agree with and who you don't. You know, everyone, I think, around the world who follows American politics has heard of that Koch brothers, which is now just the one Koch brother, because the other one died. And the Koch brothers are terrible monsters. They're also prison abolitionists. They want shorter sentences.

They want more emphasis on rehabilitation. They are a libertarian in the best sense of the word partly because they understand that prisons are very expensive and they don't want that public expense, but also I think, because there is some genuine feeling that imprisoning people is an insult to their liberty.

The question is, ‘How do you feel about joining up with the Koch brothers to demand a better justice system?’ when they're also on the wrong side of every other issue? So, this is going to be like, this is the challenge that sex workers and other people from disfavoured minorities face.

Another way of saying a group that's not big enough to make the change that they want is disfavoured minorities. If you're a disfavoured minority, getting the change that you want is going to require forming coalitions.

Those coalitions, if you're very lucky, will just consist of, you know, lovely chaps who don't see your issue as their issue, but probably you all agree.

So I think of the environmental movement. You care about owls, I care about the ozone layer, foundationally, we don't really care about the same thing, but we're both environmentalists, so we can form a coalition.

But sometimes it's going to be like, you care about owls, and I'm a raving, swivel-eyed eco-fascist who thinks that the climate crisis is going to bring millions of migrants into the country, and I want to keep our borders strong. So we're both environmentalists. And do we end up in coalition together? It's not a question with one answer.

Oz: No, it's really not. I'm getting the impression from your answers that a lot of the troubles that we're facing are due to borders and conflicting interests of different nations. I was thinking of a science fiction scenario, I read a lot of  Ian M Banks, if we were to ever have The Culture where we really were one civilization, one culture, that would kind of eliminate the borders and countries kind of problem in making decisions.

Cory: I don't know that that's true, because then you just have the problem of regions, right? You know, I loved Ian's work, and I knew him slightly, and thought the world of him. But, you know, I think that, like, if you look at the United States, which started off as 13 independent colonies unified and then absorbed several other independent territories over the ensuing century, the elimination of borders within the United States did not create a more robust democracy, it created a series of regionalisms that each of them represents a fracture line that can be exploited by bad actors.

When I lived in London, I lived in Hackney, which was the largest borough in the UK, it's larger than most cities in the UK, and I was having a classic local government problem where there was a legal hotel going into the building next to mine and they were doing all their renovation works, they were legally removing their asbestos without any remediation and they were doing it from midnight till 6 in the morning by jackhammering the wall of my bedroom every night. This is just a classic local government issue, right?

The noise abatement team was useless, they only had two people, they took eight hours to respond to a call and if there was no noise when they arrived, then they didn't do anything. So we never got any action out of them. So I went to see my counsellor, so I attended his surgery multiple times, he never showed up, I sent him emails, I sent him calls, never heard back from him, and eventually I called him out on Twitter.

And I was down at my local coffee shop and someone recognized me and said, ‘Oh I saw your tweet about your counsellor, you need to understand that because this is an absolutely safe Labour stronghold, that whoever wins the selection, the in-party selection, through Labour just has the seat, right?’

The election doesn't matter. Once you're selected you win because Labour always takes the counsel. I was at the selection meeting where your counsellor was selected, there were 12 of us there, he was elected by seven people. So, the reason your counsellor is not answering your phone calls or turning up for your surgery is because he doesn't give a shit and he doesn't have to give a shit.

Having a system where there's no competition, where there's no ability to move from one territory to another and seek a better system, and so on, it doesn't necessarily make for a system of more responsive better governance. It can actually create a system of extremely stagnant one-party rule where you don't see much responsiveness and you know, a lot of the, I think if you look at Liz Truss-Toryism, a lot of that is driven by the fact that the electoral map in the UK has been carved up in a way that makes many of the seats uncontested.

So when a seat is not contested, the actual contestation for the seat is in-party and what you get are the civilized loons, who are the only people who are really into how their party is governed, who turn up at the selection meeting and say, ‘I want the maniac who believes in a greater place’ in theory. Because that in-party selection process is so weakly democratic, it doesn't have the safeguards of a general election. It's like, you can take people out for lunch and offer the money to change.

Like, it's not election fraud to bribe someone on in-party selection stuff. All of the stuff that is illegal in a general election is permissible in an in-party selection. So you have these in-party selections that end up with these very weak candidates.

You know, the US election last night had the lowest turnout ever, right? The lowest vote for federal candidates ever. The federal top of the ticket. People just didn't vote for anyone for president yesterday.

Even the people who voted for president, voted in yesterday's election, in record numbers did not vote for the president because they just didn't like the candidates. The candidates are selected by party grandees who are completely disconnected from the will of the people. So without any kind of credible threat of loss of personal power, right, these party grandees can be insulated from the consequences of making poor decisions in the same way that the councillors or the other officials that they install into power are then subsequently insulated from any consequences for failing to serve their constituencies and you get bad governance downstream of that. 

Oz: It's a pretty strange system where if you're not in a swing state a lot of people feel that their vote's not going to count and they might as well not bother voting so you do get these very low turnouts. 

Cory: But even against that, we still have record low numbers because that's not new. We still have record low numbers of people saying I don't want either of these people for president. 

So even people who turned up and voted, even in the swing state, in record numbers they left the top of the ticket blank. This is the party grandees going like we will feed the public a rasher of shit and they will eat it and the public saying ‘no thank you’. 

Oz: Yes, as they should. What if we abolished the career politicians altogether and instead drafted in random members of the public to serve short-terms of compulsory political service, just reward them if they do a good job, punish them if they don't, and then kick them out at the end of their one year? Perhaps we could get sex work decriminalized that way. 

Cory: So certainly sortition, which is more or less what you're describing there, has been a very effective way at breaking through issues where there's broad public support but the political consequences of siding with one issue over another are so intense that you get political gridlock. 

The most famous example is abortion rights in Ireland, where broadly the Irish public supported the rights of women to have abortions but the political situation in Ireland with such that a party that supported it would get completely pasted in any kind of upcoming election. 

Sortition created that basis for legalization without the political consequences. But sortition is not as punitive as you just described. Sortition does not need to include that we punish them if they make bad decisions. The advantage of sortition is that you've got sort of neutral experts who advise people, and then if they turn out not to be very good, they're balanced out by other people in the sortition jury.  And sortition, I don't think anyone, even the biggest fans of sortition say that sortition should be exclusive of elected politicians as well. 

Sortition is a badly needed tool in the governance toolbox, but it's not the only tool we should have.  There's a place for elected legislatures, there's a place for expert drafting, there's even a place for continuity. So one of the things is that if you don't have continuity within political elected leadership, all your continuity comes from your bureaucracy, from the permanent bureaucracy. I think that civil servants can be very good and career civil servants can have this kind of longitudinal view of how things work. But, civil servants do not have the democratic legitimacy of elected leaders. You need at least some kind of long-term governance among at least some of those leaders to understand how things work, and why things are there. 

There's the Fence Principle, where it's like if you find a fence, you shouldn't remove it until you find out why it's there. Because you remove it and it's like, oh shit, this fence is here because like twice a year the bulls come through here, and the fence stops the bulls from running through the schoolyard. It's not obvious when you see the fence, you think, ‘Oh, this is a stupid fence, I'm tearing it down.’ So, you know, you do want continuity because there are policies that are in place that are facially weird, but actually, have some long-term purpose. 

An example of that would be that after the Great Depression, Western democracies around the world instituted separation between retail banks and investment banks. Your high street bank was not an investment bank, they didn't gamble with depositors’ cash. In the GoGo- Blair- Clinton era, we removed those restrictions, and then we had the great financial crisis. That was directly because you had a retail banks that erased the wall between themselves and the investment banks. 

Well Ruth Bader Ginsburg said this when they struck down the Voting Rights Act, she said, ‘if we observe that we are not getting wet because we go outside with our umbrellas, it doesn't follow that we should discard our umbrellas because we don't have a problem getting wet anymore.’ 

The policies that work are the ones that are going to be the hardest ones to understand the reason for them because the problem has been so far in our rear-view mirror that we don't even know it's a problem anymore. 

Oz: The political side of things is clearly a bit of a tangled web, the online side of things, the “enshittification” as you put it in your book, The Internet Con, which I really liked. I did say in the email I sent you that if I could wave a magic wand, I'd decriminalize sex work and give everyone their own personal website, their own blog page, and a payment portal so that people can just pay us directly. And then clients could use a privacy-oriented search engine like sex worker search or DuckDuckGo so that people can find us that way, pay us directly our deposits and for our content, and stay up to date with our blogs via RSS instead of scrolling social media. Basically, I'd like to cut out the directories and the big social media companies because that's where all the enshittification happens in sex work in my opinion. But how can we get there? 

Cory: I think that there are a couple of different things to note about that lovely dream. The first one is that technically none of it is particularly challenging except maybe the payments piece. I'm sceptical of cryptocurrency for payments and decentralized payments more broadly. But I think that all of that stuff is stuff that exists, some of it like RSS is stuff that has existed since I was a young man and I'm decidedly not a young man anymore. 

There's not a real technical impediment. I think that people who use those technologies in their ascendancy and people who can make them work for themselves today greatly prefer them to the platforms. 

The problem isn't, broadly speaking, that people don't like it, and people just like the wrong things. 

If we can say that these things are technically possible and broadly people like them and would prefer them, then you have to ask why aren't they using them. 

Now, the right-wing economists will tell you that what we're seeing is something that they call a ‘revealed preference’. So in other words, if you sign away your privacy, every time you use a service, you must not value your privacy very much. No matter what you say, your actions speak louder than your words. I think this is nonsense.

That's like saying poor people like living in flats with cockroaches because if they didn't, they wouldn't, you know, like you gotta have a roof over your head, okay? I don't know, you know, people sleeping rough do not have a revealed preference for getting frostbite, right? 

You have to factor in power relationships to understand what's going on. So really what's happening with these big platforms is that on the one hand, they did solve a problem, right? 

It was hard to establish yourself online when Web 2.0 came along. So Web 2.0 solved a bunch of legitimate technical problems that people faced when they were trying to, you know, establish an online presence. They also created barriers to switching that are now what has cemented their dominance.

The normal life cycle of platforms up until the kind of monopolization of the internet was a bit like a leaky bucket. So people came in, but people also left. They churned out. The way that they churned out was that they had the ability to use third-party tools that made it easy for them to migrate accounts from one place to another and the best example of this was that Facebook lured away MySpace users by offering them a bot that you could feed your login and password to. Then would go to MySpace several times a day, grab all your waiting messages and put them in your Facebook inbox, and then you could reply to them and it would post them back out to your MySpace friends. So you didn't have to choose. Between the people you were already connected to on MySpace and the superior service on Facebook as Facebook was, in many ways superior to MySpace, including the fact that they had a really robust privacy policy where they promised not to spy on you, which is a thing I think a lot of us forget about Facebook's origins.

What Facebook did was they took advantage of a policy environment where it was permissible for a new market entrance, a new firm, to create these interoperable layers, what I call adversarial interoperability, right? When you modify a service without the permission of its owners or operators.

They took advantage of that and then they took great measures to end that policy. So you can't do that to Facebook again. So I think that Facebook will tell you that the reason people stay on Facebook, even though they don't like it, is because they have a revealed preference for Facebook.

Oz: No. It’s just difficult to leave.

Cory: Right, and I think that when you look at what Facebook does whenever someone makes it easier to leave, right, the litigation threats, the technical countermeasures, sabre rattling, that what you find is that Facebook has a strongly revealed preference for not making it easy for people to leave.

So Facebook does not act as though people just prefer Facebook. Facebook acts as though people would leave Facebook at the drop of a hat if they could. So I think that we can actually use these revealed preferences here a little. And we can say, actually, when we look at Facebook's actions, these are not the actions of a company that thinks that it has a bunch of secretly satisfied customers. These are the actions of a company that thinks that their customers are champing at the bit to leave.

So one thing that we can do is take Facebook at their word here, at least at their revealed word, and we can make it easier to leave Facebook in the other big platforms. That's something that we see in the Digital Markets Act where there are these interoperability mandates that require the largest gatekeeper platforms to have what are called APIs, which are just like programmable interfaces, where instead of having bots that go and write stuff, you can just say, “hi, I'm Oz's registered agent for this new service. Please give me everything waiting for him on Facebook and put it in his inbox over here. I hear all the things that he's sending back to the Facebook users who haven't left. Please put them in there in boxes, right?” This is something that's in the DMA.

The devil is in the details about how it gets implemented. The digital markets unit in the UK has just received authority to do similar stuff in the UK. And indeed, if a big bloc like the EU does this, it's probably going to come to the rest of the world anyway. So that's pretty exciting. It's a slow-moving process. There are lots of ways that it can go wrong, but it's pretty cool.

The other thing that we can do here is we can re-establish the rights of individuals and the people who serve them to not have to wait for official channels like this and simply reverse engineer, scrape, modify, and do that adversarial interoperability. There's not as much of that coming into law, but it makes for a very good adjunct to these mandates.

One of the problems with a mandate like this, as you say to Facebook, you've got to create an API that allows people to compete with you. Then Facebook says, ‘Okay, we'll comply. Here's our API, and it's just shit, and it won't work.’ So then you have a long argument about whether it works or not. You can be tied up for years.

Facebook can then like, even if you come up with something that does work, you would want Facebook to be able to shut down that gateway if they thought that it had a defect and someone was exploiting it to steal people's private information.

So all of a sudden, the successful competitors start showing up and saying, Facebook is turning off the gateway six times a day, and our users are just going back to Facebook because they're fed up with us. They need a reliable service. And Facebook says, ‘Oh, we're sorry, those were legitimate mistakes, you know, we do not want to expose our users, we have 4 billion users, we don't expose them to risk.’  So now you have these very complicated evidentiary questions that you have to resolve, you know, whenever this happens. It's very easy for Facebook to sabotage a rule like this. 

Oz: It would be very difficult to prove that they're breaking the rules. 

Cory: But what if we have this rule and we complement it with another rule that says, broadly, people are allowed to reverse engineer Facebook and wage guerrilla warfare with it? They're allowed to scrape it, they're allowed to break the DRM on the apps, they're allowed to do all kinds of things.

Now, Facebook can probably, like, tap engineers to, like, fight them and figure out what they're doing and block it, but that's a lot of unquantifiable risk for Facebook. And it can create, like, really big problems for them and make their shareholders really angry. If Facebook shows up at the start of the next quarter and says we did have this big feature we're going to roll out, but instead, we spent the last three months just fighting with people who are scraping us because the law no longer allows us to shut those people down.

All we can do is throw engineering at it. Facebook is going to be in trouble. We then create a kind of carrot and stick for Facebook where either they play nice and offer an API that is fit for purpose, or they task a completely unquantifiable amount of resources to fight reverse engineering.

One of the ways that we can figure out whether the API is good is whether or not people prefer to use the API or that they're just scraping and doing reverse engineering which is always going to be harder than using an API that's fit for purpose.  So it gives regulators a kind of diagnostic tool.

We can do both, and I think we should. There's not much of this kind of adversarial interoperability in law. Where we are seeing it come up a little bit now is in right-to-repair rules where we are seeing prohibitions by state-level governments in the United States on invoking IP law to block legitimate kinds of reverse engineering.

So that's in the Oregon laws and the New York law. It's basically saying you're just like, if someone is reverse engineering for the purpose of fixing the thing, you just can't use IP law against them.

You’re just carving out that kind of litigation threat. So now you've got these companies that either can fight this guerrilla warfare with the independent repair sector or they can play nice and give everyone the diagnostic tools they need so that anyone can fix anything and the kind of the cheapest and most commercially advantageous route for them broadly is to play nice and not cheap.

We're setting up an environment where not cheating at the rational thing to do. If you're irrational and they cheat anyway, we still have an escape valve. We still have things that we can use to go around the firms and their intransigence while we wait for the justice system to make a determination that they are cheating, which might take many years.

So I think that's like, I know it's a very wonky answer, right? But that is the policy stuff that we need to try and make it easier to realize the promise of a world in which people who don't like platforms don't feel that they can't leave them.

Oz: If that kind of policy goes through, that's a big deal for everyone, I think. And for sex workers specifically, platforms like Twitter that make it difficult for us to leave are kind of a big problem. Like recently, Elon cancelled their function to block people so that somebody that you've blocked, can still read your tweets. As a sex worker, if you block somebody, often it means that that person is dangerous, they're stalkers, so that's been a bit of a tipping point. People have actually started to leave Twitter and go to things like Bluesky or Mastodon, things like that, which will be great if that happens. If more people start leaving, then maybe they'll stop treating us the way they do, like a second-class user of their platform.

Cory: Yes, indeed. You know, people who fear your departure, broadly speaking, treat you better.

Oz: That would be really nice to see. Also, regarding intellectual property, I’m all for your proposals about free sharing of digital media and the copyright only existing to stop people from selling somebody else's content that they own, like for your own profit. But from a sex worker perspective, I think a lot of us value the right to have our images removed from the internet, if they're stolen or they're misused or we're retiring or have a stalker. People want to be able to take their pictures down, which I've recently written a guide for people on how to send takedown requests.  What are your thoughts on intellectual property rights specific to sex workers in those kind of scenarios?

Cory: Well, I think that these are totally understandable priorities and they're not unreasonable. I use takedowns when my books are sold on Amazon's Audible platform. People record pirate editions and sell them there, which I get quite affronted by and have them taken down. That's fine. I recognize that the takedown process is somewhat tedious. It can be complicated and daunting. What I would urge sex workers to understand as they navigate that process is that the barriers to removal are themselves of enormous benefit to sex workers.

Anything that we do to make it easier to remove things without adequate proof that the person requesting removal is entitled to do so without some kind of review and so on makes it possible for people to just remove sex workers' voluntary and consensual work from the internet, makes it possible for harassers to remove their stuff as a way of attacking them economically, makes it possible for bad clients to have factual and true information about their abuses of other sex workers removed.

I'm not saying that we should never be able to take an intermediary and require them to honour a takedown request, but I am saying that it's very easy as someone who's only interaction with intermediaries, and by an intermediary, I just think you're not hosting your own server in your own data centre with your own website that you wrote yourself on an ISP that you own. You're relying on an intermediary somewhere to connect you with the rest of the world. Anyone who thinks that the intermediary should be less careful because, quote unquote, obviously this is bad, it was someone who has not thought through how their own enemies would have used that facility. I think that sex workers have a lot more to fear from spurious takedowns than they do from bureaucratic requirements around takedown.

That again is like not to say that all bureaucratic requirements are good, they could be nonsensical and so on, but the idea that we should have precautions, that we should have guardrails around takedown notices is in fact hugely beneficial to sex workers and any other disfavoured group because it's what protects our ability to communicate with each other.

Oz: In building the search engine, I'd like to try and encourage more sex workers to build their own personal websites because I see the benefit in it myself that as my own website has improved in search ranking, I'm relying a lot less on directories and a lot less on social media. It feels like something that I personally own and I'm a lot more motivated to work on it. I think the main stepping stone that discourages people from doing that themselves as they feel that it's too complicated to work on SEO. They think they're going to be permanently on page 100 and nobody will ever see their site.  I know you've had a lot of success with your own blogging with Plausible. I was wondering if you have any hints about how to promote a blog and get better ranking.

Cory: I think this is a huge problem. I think that we have seen a sharp decline in Google search quality and Google having 90% of all search means that we're seeing a huge decline in search more broadly. There have been a lot of people who've been writing about the failures of Google in respect of SEO.

Giselle Navarro runs this website that's really good, that reviews air purifiers, called ‘This House Fresh’ and consistently her extremely careful reviews where they have a lab and they do a lot of you know very serious technical analysis get weighted below like Forbes spam reviews where they just take the top 10 items off Amazon, summarize the consumer reviews and add ad affiliate links and those are the ones that Google sends people to and not to these very careful reviews.

This is happening all over the place there was just a thing this week where a bunch of smaller publishers were invited to Google for kind of workshop and they all came away from it saying you know like this was terrible. Google basically admitted that their only priority now is making you know, large brands happy that our content will never gain priority again, it doesn't matter how good it is. 

I think if this is one of those things where you do not have an individual fix, what we have is the Department of Justice convicting Google of being a monopolist over its search engine and demanding, among other things, that Google be broken up.

I think that's the kind of thing that we need to be engaging with here, that you don't solve SEO by getting better at SEO. You solve SEO by making SEO less important. There is a lot of movement on this, both in the EU and in the US. So I know these are obscure wonky issues, but there are issues that we really need people to engage on.

Oz: Absolutely. I wish it was as simple as just writing quality content that people want to read from start to finish, which is what I advise people to do when they ask what to do with their blog. But as you say, the algorithm is gameable, and there are people out there that are very smart and very good at that, that figure out how to pass off something that they've built with a bot or containing basically spam, which will end up higher up in search results than quality content.

Cory: Yeah. No, I agree. I mean, you know, Google has been saying, oh, just make quality content since the year dot. I've been I've been hearing them say this forever and ever. And, you know, I think it was a cop-out when it started. I think it's a much bigger cop-out now. You know, I think when it started, it was legitimately that there was a small group of technical people who were kind of connected through social bonds to Googlers who wanted to know why their content wasn't rated more highly. It was literally just a way for Google to get out of awkward party conversations where someone said I made the ultimate cat website so why isn't it the top cat website on Google, they could just say make your content better.

These days, it's just a fig leaf right around the fact that they are under-investing in blocking SEO, that they themselves are selling two-thirds of the front page to the highest bidder instead of preferring the best content.

If you go back to the PageRank paper, which was the paper that Larry Page and Sergey Brin wrote in 1998 about the search engine that they just built, there's an appendix where they say advertising-based search engines are serving two masters, quality and sell the results, and the advertising is always going to win at the expense of search quality, and website search engines should not be advertising supported.

They understood it in 1998, more than a quarter of a century since they made this prediction, and it's come true.

Oz: That's when they were saying, do no evil. That seems to have gone by the wayside a bit.

Cory: Well, “don't be evil”, and it's an interesting distinction because the difference between do no evil and don't be evil is the recognition that you might slip up and do something wrong, but you will do it out of good faith.

You know, anyone capable of making a mistake, but everyone should strive to operate in good faith to make a better world, which is where their other motto, ‘which is organize the world's information and make it useful’, comes in.

So maybe, in that process, they'll inadvertently doxx someone or something or, you know, promote some spam or something, but they should always be striving to do it.

If you look at the memos from the DOJ case, the antitrust search case against Google, you see that there's this fight in 2019 where Google's advertising revenue was dropping off, and the reason it was dropping off, their growth was slowing was because they had 90% search market share. You can't grow once you've got 90% search market share, right? You don't get more. It's not like the remaining 10%, those people just haven't heard of Google, and once you reach them, you'll grow to 100%. Like, at 90%, that's as high as you're going to go.

Those people understand what Google has to offer, and they haven't chosen.

So that's it. You reach maximum growth, and so the only way to grow from there is not by growing market share, but by growing revenue per customer in the Google memos in the DOJ case, you see that the head of advertising revenue is butting heads with the head of search, and the head of advertising revenue is saying, if we were to make the search quality lower so that it took more than one search to find what you were looking for, we would generate more ads. Because instead of finding it in one search and then leaving, and we only show you four ads, you would do three searches and we'd show you 12 ads. The head of search is like, no, we can't do that. I've been with the company since it was a search server under a desk at Stanford, I've grown it to here, I refuse, and he gets fired. And the head of revenue becomes the head of search.

If you look back to 2019, that's about when Google search quality started to drop off. This is a big piece of the DOJ case against Google, not just that they were raising prices, but they were low on quality.

I think that this just make good web pages stuff was never great, but it's been significantly less true ever since this regime change, where we saw an emphasis on increasing the number of times you had to search for something rather than increasing the quality of the results that you got from your search.

Oz: I'll keep trying to make quality content anyway, just because it's something that I like to do. And I hope that people are reading it and finding some value in my work. And you never know maybe Google's algorithm will reward me for it.

Cory: Yeah, or maybe we'll just get rid of Google and there'll be more than one way to find information on the internet and other people will have a better theory as to how to do that. I prefer that.

I really like Kagi. I think it's a really good search tool. It's not free. It's $10 a month, but I love it. I've been using it since last spring and I've accidentally switched back to Google once or twice in my search bar on Firefox and I noticed it immediately because the search quality was so poor. Even before I noticed that the logo at the top was different, I was like, oh, the search results suck. And then I look over at the top of the page and I'm like, oh, I'm on Google.

Oz: I'll look them up for sure, Kagi. Nice one.

Thank you very much Cory for your time and sharing loads of really interesting information. All the best too with your new book and with your kids' college applications.

Cory: Well, thank you very much.

Oz: And thanks again for talking to me.

Cory: I appreciate that. Have a great day.

Oz: You too. Have a great day.

Cory: Thank you. Bye.

Oz: Bye.

My Thoughts

It was a real pleasure and privilege to speak with Cory. He's so knowledgeable and eloquent and I'm very pleased that we were able to find so much common ground in terms of the Venn diagram of his expertise as a campaigner for digital rights, privacy, and freedom of expression and my own understanding and interests related to sex workers facing discrimination on mainstream social media platforms, the political landscape as pertaining to policies and regulations likely to impact sex workers ability to do our jobs safely and lawfully, and our access to, and use of, online spaces, banking and our rights to privacy.

Every hyperlink in the text above is a link to more information on the topics we discussed. Many of the links lead back to Pluralistic, Cory's blog, which I highly recommend following via RSS or email newsletter.

Cory's ideas around coalitions have given me a lot to think about.

I really hope he's right about the lack of quality coalitions and conflicts of interest within the Trump regime meaning that Project 2025 is unlikely to ever happen.

If you're reading this and you're a sex worker or a client or a sex worker ally, please vote in elections. Please find out which politicians have policies that are pro sex work and vote for them. Or at least figure out which candidate has the policies that are the worst for sex workers and vote for someone else.

If you ever want to know how an election or referendum is going to turn out, ask me. Whatever I tell you, assume that's wrong and the exact opposite will happen.

Also, don't let me anywhere near your fence (principle). I really would kick down the fence without knowing why it's there. I genuinely wish "democracy is the worst form of Government except for all those other forms" wasn't true. There has to be something better than career politicians making promises they have no intention of keeping, getting into office and achieving nothing because other career politicians block every proposal based not on merit but purely based on perceived threat to their own political aspirations. I still think my sortition idea is worth a shot and I'd tear down every border on earth and put an AI in charge of the entire planet if I thought we'd end up with something more like Ian M Banks, The Culture and less like Donald Trump. But I'm an uninformed weirdo so I'll do my best to read more about how democracy actually works from actual experts like Cory and hopefully, for all our sakes, nobody will listen to my ideas about politics.

Regarding coalitions between sex workers and other disfavoured minorities (I very much dislike this term. Not that it's inaccurate but because it's so unjust that consenting adults trying to do business like any other sole trader should be "disfavoured"),  I think following Cory's advice here could really reap rewards for us in terms of finding a path to decriminalisation of sex work and a future where we are legally protected from financial discrimination, have equal access to online platforms and the ability to insist that escort directories provide proper data security and adhere to privacy policies where our identities are not going to be sold to spammers or handed over to the feds without any kind of subpoena.

But who can we form coalitions with? Which groups face similar problems to sex workers while sharing similar enough values that we  could work together to achieve our goals? Industries me might consider forming coalitions with could include Cannabis and marijuana product suppliers, Online dating and social networking, Online gaming, SEO and online marketing services, Crypto, Gambling and online casinos, Web design companies, E sports and sites and applications using AI/neural networks/large language models/machine learning.

All of the above are considered high risk merchant categories by credit card companies. Mentioning any of the above on social media is likely to lead to a shadowban. Legislation around these products and services is complicated, ever changing and inconsistent. I think we could easily find some common ground with any, or all, of the above and stand united in pursuing some common goals.

Following on from speaking with Cory about flags of convenience, I spoke to Adult Biz Law, regarding how to go about registering Sex Worker Search as an offshore company. I also got them to confirm that the requirements sent to me by a certain payment portal provider seem to be legit and that business is known and trusted in the industry so I seem to now have a path to monetising SWS which I'm very happy about. My main motivation with SWS is to encourage more sex workers to promote via their own personal websites and rely less, or not at all, on escort directories with terrible customer service and dodgy privacy policies or on hypocrite social media that makes billions from our content while treating us like criminals. If I can start charging for premium listings to appear above other search results, that will take SWS to the next level and I hope enable me to use SWS as a force to do a lot of good in the online sex work advertising space.

The DOJ case suing Visa for anti trust is potentially a really big deal for sex workers. If we end up with more competition between payment providers, we could end up being able to easily receive credit and debit card payments directly from clients via our own personal websites. No more handing over 30% of every payment to giant corporate digital pimps like Onlyfans.

Cases like this need our support. If you're in the UK, I recommend joining the Sex Workers Union (SWU) and getting involved in lobbying for issues that affect us eg the recent move by the UK finance regulator to warn banks against discriminating against sex workers wanting to open business accounts was thanks in part to lobbying from SWU. In USA the Free Speech Coalition does a lot of incredible work protecting the rights and freedoms of the adult industry and they could really use your support.

I find the concept of adversarial interoperability absolutely fascinating.

When reddit announced their plans to charge for access to their API, I spoke with the other moderators on /r/sexworkers and /r/sexworkersonly and we made the subreddits private in protest along with over 7000 other subreddits in the hope that our 500,00 users along with millions more users of other subreddits no longer generating any ad revenue might give reddit the hint that we like using third party services that depend on the API and did not want to see these apps driven out of business.

We failed.

But the blackout did give me motive to leave sexworkersonly as private and now only verified sexworkers have access so it has become a valuable resource enabling us to speak about topics like screening and blacklists in a space which non sexworkers including dangerous clients who might use the information there to figure out how to circumvent our security cannot access. 

The blackout plus other sex work related subreddits getting banned leading up to the IPO, also inspired me to create a  backup of /r/sexworkers so that if the entire subreddit ever gets banned, sex workers will still have access to all the posts and comments there. Doing so is technically against the rules on reddit but there's 14 years worth of knowledge on there. Losing it would be like watching the library of Alexandria burn down.

These are examples of adversarial interoperability for sex workers.

I think creating products, services, or systems that are designed to interoperate with an existing platform, system, or technology without the permission or cooperation of the original creator, eg reverse-engineering, creative workarounds, or using open standards to make different technologies compatible, are all worthy pursuits that I would love to see more of when it comes to online platforms used by sex workers.

The mass exodus of sex workers leaving twitter for Bluesky continues. Cory's thoughts on platforms making it as difficult as possible for their users to leave will ring true for all the sex workers leaving twitter. Many of us have put in immense amount of time and effort into building up our twitter accounts only to be rewarded with shadowbans. Having now reached the point where we have almost zero engagement, no new followers apart from bots, no visibility in search or on feeds, twitter has rendered itself completely useless to us. So there does come a time when we have to cut our losses and just leave no matter how hard big tech tries to make the move.

I've emailed Bluesky to ask whether sex workers are welcome on their app, or whether they will start shadowbanning us like Twitter. Here is our conversation. They replied and said adult content creators are welcome. I have emailed back and asked what about in person providers and gave them my best pep talk about why I hope they won't become another twitter. I hope to receive a positive response. Let's see. This conversation was inspired by Cory's ideas about social media and could lead to us having a social media space where we're welcome.

I've been putting a lot of work into SEO lately using AHREFS and Yoast to try to make all my websites as compliant as possible with Google algorithms tastes. It really does not sit well with me that those tastes are largely concerned with training googles bot to respond to people's search queries and discourage them from clicking on links to sites like mine so they'll stay on google and generate more ad revenue at the expense of myself and other sex workers and anyone with a website not getting any visitors to our websites. The algorithm is effectively bullying us into rendering ourselves obsolete. Cory's words on the subject of SEO for google really opened my eyes to how badly I wish not to help google get bigger and richer. The case going on at the moment with DOJ trying to make google sell Chrome and become less of a monopolist supervillain, could be a real gift to sex workers. If other, less anti sex work search engines get bigger pieces of the web search pie, we might get some hard earned rewards for those of us who have built our own personal websites.

I switched from using Google for search, to using Kagi, on Cory's recommendation and the difference is night and day. The top results on google are almost always some kind of spam, scam, fake news, or just disappointing content that's very high on SEO optimisation but very low on actually conveying any useful information.

All the links in the text above were found via Kagi.

Kagi results tend to take you directly to real content, written by real humans who have made an effort to convey actual information intended for other humans to read and understand. Try the free 100 searches and see if you think it's worth $10 per month for unlimited access.

After the interview, I went out and bought a copy of Little Brother. I'm currently in Dubai and it was nice to spend time relaxing by the swimming pool getting some vitamin D and reading about teenage hackers going up against draconian measures taken by the authorities to spy on, and take away the civil liberties of, the general public. It's a brilliant book. Great fun to read and highly recommended. Somewhat disconcertingly, for a book published in 2008, everything described within as a worst case scenarios for how things could go if we don't defend our rights to privacy are all completely normal parts of our day to day lives now in 2024. With the exception of facial recognition which Little Brother said was deemed too invasive so gait recognition was used instead. Now facial recognition anywhere and everywhere is normal too.

If you take anything away from this interview, I hope it's a sense of optimism that if sex workers do work together, form some quality coalitions, vote, support organisations fighting for our rights and make a habit of asking questions and standing up for ourselves when platforms we use online show no respect for our privacy or our rights to safely advertise and effectively conduct our business, and maybe hack a little when needs be, we can win. Even vs the biggest of big tech. We can even win in our pursuit of decriminalisation of sex work everywhere and win the fight for changes to policy and legislation that would grant us the access to payment providers as other businesses and the right to use websites and apps in the same way as any other legal business. These goals are not unreachable and ideas like those proposed here by Cory could really help us to achieve our goals.