Rug Pull Culture 101
If the definition of insanity is to keep repeating the same behaviour with the expectation of different outcomes, we are all insane. And our insanity is about to cost us dear. Literally...
There's a threshold in the normalisation of capitalist inhumanity beyond which public benevolence pitches into a Darwinian extinction spiral. We've reached that line.
Rug pull. The term is commonly associated with crypto hit and run schemes. But that narrow association lets other tech industry players off the hook. The rug pull has become a front-running resort for the tech elite and VC-backed startups alike. And whilst some of the methodology may be rather more elaborate than that which has defined crypto as a scammers' charter, the basic strategy behind the schemes is identical:
Bait the public into investing in something whose only value is the public investment itself, then cash out the value, run, and restart the cycle.
The above template applies just as much to a pseudo-social silo like Twitter as it does to a digital coin scheme. It's all worth zippety-zip if you take away what the public put in. It's just that with a pseudo-social silo the public are primarily investing labour rather than money.
And the result of cashing out that investment is always the same:
Fat wallets for the few; losses for the many.
Whatever remains after the rug pull - if indeed anything remains at all - is left in debt. Which is really a public debt, because it's the public who are expected to service the repayments. If you're still publishing on X, $hundreds of $millions a year of the capital you help generate is completely dead money - purely financing interest payments. It's not even possible for you to get anything in return for that. Platforms in X's post-rug-pull state simply can't be anything other than a terrible deal for the public.
This not an occasional hazard. It's a business model. A business model I call CaaC - Community as a Commodity. And one of the most extraordinary things about CaaC is our lucidity. We obligingly dash into CaaC schemes knowing we're the product; knowing our only real purpose is to be sold. The schemes are not even innovative. It's the same people, most often in the same location, playing the same trick over and over again. And yet we still fling ourselves at their every half-promise, like this time it's somehow gonna be different.
WE REALLY ARE THIS STUPID
How stupid are we, AKA modern consumers? Roughly this stupid...
"I'm happy to pay a premium for a service whose marketing department pretends to share my ethical stance." - modern consumerism
That's right; by pretending they hate exploitation just as much as we the plebs do, elitist, union-crushing, slave-driving, customer-extorting corporations make more money. That's how phenomenally impressionable we are when it comes to the mere words that any marketer can say and not even vaguely mean.
In fact, there is virtually no facet of marketing that still works after 60 seconds' critical analysis. For instance, brands will say things like:
"You deserve this product!"
After zero seconds of critical analysis our response is:
"Yes, I do! I shall buy it at once!"
But after 60 seconds or less, we realise that "deserve" means "are entitled to", which begs the question: then why the blazes are you askin' me to pay for it? When subjected to basic reasoning, the self-contradictory marketing fallback "Buy it because you deserve it" only serves to showcase the brand's disrespect for our intelligence. Which is what most marketing does when we bother to think about it. And yet we still shower these glib statements in monetary applause.
We're even worse when it comes to what I'll place under the umbrella heading of "tech bro patter". All they have to do is pipe their bullshit thru some "paid media growth-hacking channel" (that's a well known "tech blog" in our quaint pleb-speak - that's right, they're not really tech blogs; they're advertorial boards for hire), and we fall for it every time.
BLUESKY LOL
It still, nevertheless, boggles my mind that parasitic, Silicon Valley rug pull cycle carbon-copies like Substack and Medium, run by confirmed "exit strategists", found a general public userbase. And as for Bluesky... OMG, Bluesky! I cannot fathom why a single individual on Earth hath joined Bluesky - let alone millions.
Bluesky - Surveillance Valley startup launched by a proven rug pull artist and scam facilitator who has now simply "left" to spend more time worshipping Elon Musk and Bill Pulte - is of course the venture capitalist's version of Mastodon. That's Mastodon, as in the fake alternative network which has already sold out to Google whilst trying to bullshit users that it's just re-located its nOnPrOfIt HQ from Germany to... Italy? Nope. India? Nope. France? Nope. Australia? Nope. Of all the countries in the world it just happened to be the good ol' US of A. Of course it did.
We know Mastodon lost all semblance of independence after it gained traction in late 2022, and was flooded with Google investment... Oh, sorry, "dOnAtIoNs" is how I think I'm supposed to refer to the money Google pumped into the 'Don through virtually every cash-proxying fence it could think of. The German authorities know it too. Yep, the German Gov were so overwhelmed by the pungent wafts of bullshit that they de-nonprofited Mastodon and, presumably, restored it to its rightful status of Google-subsidiary-posing-as-public-serving-charitay.
We're in a world where even Mastodon - the nEtWoRk ThAt CaN't Be BoUgHt - is now governed by a Google-handpicked board, which includes the usual combo of Surveillance Valley tech-bro, AI industry corporate defence lawyer (good luck keeping your Masto posts out of the LLM pool) and assorted "digital rights" co-opts. So, a quick heads-up for anyone running a public Masto instance without a sub from the Big G: you are now basically paying Google's hosting fees - which has been a dream goal in Mountain View since at least 2010. No, that's fine - no need to thank me. Always happy to participate in the spread of wisdom. Or, er... don't shoot the messenger. Delete as appropriate.
But returning to the plot, why are people now exponentially flooding into Bluesky, which in contrast to Masto has never even looked decentralised, is VC-funded, waves every red flag we've come to expect from a Surveillance Valley startup, and could not be a more obvious rug-pull-waiting-to-happen if it had actually been named Rug Pull Waiting To Happen?
Answer:
When a Silicon Valley startup says: "It's gonna be different this time", willingly blind public optimism always wins the day. People want it to be true, and that desperate desire easily subordinates the decades of statistical evidence that it won't be.
EXIT STRATEGY
The gameplan of calculatedly fattening a goose for slaughter is everywhere we look across the tech landscape and beyond. The industry calls it an "exit strategy". The "exit" being the moment at which a tech bro or tech bro collective converts all perceived value into cash, pockets the cash, does a runner, and starts the cycle again. The asset created by the public may then be:
- Stripped and shut down.
- Sold to a 'scrap merchant'.
- 'Burned as fuel'.
- 'Slaughtered for the supermarket'.
Or any combination thereof.
One of the core components of the rug-pull aftershock is scorched earth. The public are learning to pollute the pool. Unfortunately for us, an oligopoly doesn't need to worry about keeping the pool clean. It has enough power to instead say: "Okay, so how do we force people to stay in a polluted pool?"
The tide of individual "exits" is spread so thickly across tech history that it's evidently not the exception, but the rule. Most "exits" are so unremarkable that the world simply forgot about them. Storify, for instance, elicits a lot of blank looks today, and among those who remember it there's often a vague recollection of it going bust. It didn't. It encountered a routine tech startup fate, first selling out to Livefyre, and then selling out again to Adobe, who stripped it and shut it down.
A lot of startups now run "exit first". That is, the main monetisation plan is an "exit", and the secondary monetisation proposals are only really there to help propel the "exit" once the goose is sufficiently fat. I reckon that Ello - which shut down last year - ran "exit first". When the founders propose a utopia whose only feasible income source is God, the only way they can net ROI is by flogging off the community for a lump sum.
So people-trading is back with a vengeance, as the public are lured into pseudo-social environments by merchants who expressly intend to sell the resultant community as a free labour force and ad-viewing machine.
Monopoly has intensified this dynamic, making it more lucrative to simply sell a productive community to a monopolist whose only "cannot afford" is competition, than to let the community sustain itself.
REPEAT OFFENDERS
Some individual brands have pulled the rug hundreds of times. You may be familiar with the phrase Killed by Google. If not, it refers to a mind-boggling list of approaching three hundred services and products, which Google has officially withdrawn in the past couple of decades. It's often cited as a measure of Google's failure. But it's fairly obvious that a company with a yearly revenue of $hundreds of $billions has not been failing. So what the Killed by Google list really measures is the corporation's rug pull mentality.
In the post-trust society that AI has created, paranoia will be normalised. At some point, robots will begin emailing helpful humans, posing as enthusiasts, asking for help, and then selling the answers. Once that little trick rolls out at scale, the concept of ANY information being given without a consultancy fee will be well and truly dead.
Google's incessant rug pulls are strategic. We see a repetitive rinse and repeat cycle, in which things keep closing and breaking, and the public bear the brunt, but the overall palette of facilities never really changes. It's a reflection, within a single brand, of how the tech industry rug pull strategy works as a whole.
Take, for example, Google Sites, the website building resource. Before "committing" to Sites in the late 2000s, Google had already consigned its own Google Pages website builder to its rapidly-filling dustbin. The replacement for Pages - Google Sites - was an already successful startup project, bought in from a third party and rebranded. So, one shutdown to Google; one "exit" to JotSpot - which was the startup that created Google Sites.
By the latter 2010s, Google was getting eager to scrap its site builder for a second time, but once again, replace it with a new incarnation that would better fulfil the corporate agenda. The replacement for Google Sites - imaginatively termed New Google Sites - would serve as a feeder mechanism for the far more central product Google Drive. Which meant that New Google Sites could not offer its own attachment hosting, as the previous product had done.
However, simply introducing New Google Sites without file hosting was not leverage enough for the Mountain View Monolith to push its users across to the muchly more annoying Drive. So Google also decided to delete the attachments from the previous incarnation of Sites, leaving an inevitable trail of link-rot across the wider web. In the pantheon of rug pulls, this would come under 'burned as fuel'. Google's second website builder was burned as fuel for Google Drive, as a third, crippled version of Sites came in to cover the basic website builder role.
Replacing attributed content with an unattributed, robot-reconstituted, ad-pumped, propaganda-pumped, humourless, joyless, talentless version of the same, makes the creation of "nice things" utterly pointless unless the creator is charging dollar.
Let's just think about this for a moment. Products have been trashed, but Google is still providing the same facilities as before. Google was perfectly happy to host all of the download attachments. It just wanted to host them on Google Drive rather than on Google Sites - because Drive was pre-immiserated, allowing Google to extract greater gains whilst Web users suffered a worse experience. And in order to achieve that, it willingly and deliberately broke the Internet, then expected the creators of all the downloads previously hosted on Sites, to run around clearing up the mess Google purposely made.
I had numerous high-value (as in years of work) but completely free (as in both liberty and beer) downloads hosted on Google Sites. Most of them virtual musical instruments, but there were other creations too.
After some consideration, this time I resolved not to remake the rug when Google pulled it away. And despite placing notices on all relevant pages explaining why the downloads are no longer accessible, I now get emails asking me to send out the files directly. The annoyance of these emails comes to me, let us note. Not to the uncontactable Google, who purposely deleted all the downloads and broke all the links. I don't reply to the emails, and every one I get makes me more determined never to upload any free "nice things" to the Web again.
AI - THE ULTIMATE RUG PULL
Google doesn't just break the Internet for profit. It's also a self-serving propaganda machine. Yes, Google has spent decades pumping out anti-copyright propaganda through a wide raft of paid shills, who normally like to describe themselves as "digital rights activists". And it's these self-styled "activists", lobbying and litigating on behalf of Google, who have persistently assured us that immunising corporations to the law, when they planned to use labour theft as a business model, would lead us to a Promised Land.
If we didn't immunise corporate thieves to the law, we were told, we would end up having to pay for everything that the thieves were stealing and giving to the world for free. But it was okay, because Google could be trusted to preserve the principles of "free knowledge", and we'd all live happily in a utopia of free education and free "nice things".
...Until Google felt like pulling the rug, turning the proposed paradise of "free knowledge" into a shopping centre, scam haven and corporate propaganda mill, and doubling down on its labour-theft-as-a-business-model ethos by replacing attributed content with an unattributed, robot-reconstituted, ad-pumped, propaganda-pumped, humourless, joyless, talentless version of the same. All of which makes the creation of "nice things" utterly pointless unless the creator is charging dollar.
AI is the ultimate rug pull. How it started:
"iMmUnIsE tHiEvEs To ThE lAw AnD eVeRyThInG wIlL bE FrEe fOrEvEr."
How it's going:
"Why is everything except worthless robot spew now paywalled or running as SaaS?"
'Twas always gonna happen, obviously. I mean, when has immunising thieves to the law ever worked in the annals of history? But as usual, we set aside the glaring statistical assurance of disaster in favour of willingly blind optimism.
THE AFTERSHOCK
Our willingness to continue serving tech-demigods regardless of how many times they screw us over, has emboldened them beyond containment. Not only is the rug-pull cycle speeding up - it's also become much harsher, without even a remote pretence that we, the public, are considered to be anything other than dumb slaves.
The law no longer works against tech giants, if it ever did. At the beginning of the year I submitted to the UK data protection regulator an open and shut case involving several clear and extensively evidenced breaches of UK GDPR, by Microsoft. The regulator's response? Microsoft's terms of service subordinate UK GDPR. In other words, Microsoft is allowed to make up its own laws. Of course it is. It has the power to shut down the fucking country. It's legally untouchable, and any wranglings we see going through the courts are purely a theatrical charade to persuade the public that the government still has an actual purpose.
The money these companies are fined - if indeed they ever bother to pay up at all - is less than the amount they make in the course of breaking the law. That's a tax, not a deterrent. There is no intention of changing their behaviour, and it could no longer be done even if there were an intention. Tech giants pay fines selectively, for effect. To make it appear that they're not a global government. And their selective approach to fines, in which they pay up in Europe but not in India, reveals that they're prepared to take elitism to truly fascist levels.
So the only recourse we have left is mass abstinence. Of which we are evidently incapable.
That takes us into a new, uncharted era. A post-trust era in which we're not only unable to trust tech overlords, but unable to trust anyone. Because anyone who contacts us can now be an AI robot, working on behalf of a tech overlord.
In this new age, paranoia will be normalised. At some point, robots will begin emailing helpful humans, posing as enthusiasts, asking for help, and then selling the answers. Once that little trick rolls out at scale, the concept of ANY information being given without a consultancy fee will be well and truly dead.
We've seen with both the recent Reddit and Stack Overflow AI sell-out debacles that once intelligent people realise their knowledge is to be fed into a system that cuts them out of the attribution/reward loop, they significantly rebel. Stack Overflow was substantially defaced, and whilst the platform regime hit back, there's no doubt about the strength of opposition to the idea of a community giving for free, so that some grasping shit can profit to the tune of trillions.
One of the core components of the rug-pull aftershock is scorched earth. The Stack Overflow AI sell-out showed us that the public are learning to pollute the pool. Unfortunately for us, a tech oligopoly doesn't need to worry about keeping the pool clean. It has enough power to instead say: "Okay, so how do we force people to stay in a polluted pool?"
WE COULD STOP THIS, BUT...
There's a threshold in the normalisation of capitalist inhumanity beyond which public benevolence pitches into a Darwinian extinction spiral. We've reached that line. We're now finding out what happens when fascist, psychopathic, perverted-to-the-point-that-they-collect-footage-of-people-in-toilets terrorists, rise above the law, and develop a means to impersonate ordinary members of the public at industrial scale - which, for anyone who hasn't yet noticed, is what's now happened.
Why can't I have consumerism without being treated like a consumer? - modern consumerism
The "digital rights" bullshit machine assured us for decades, on behalf of its Surveillance Valley funders, that we should not subject these corporate predators to meaningful law. And so committed to corporate lawlessness were the Electronic Frontier Foundation, that they set up a system, for the pleasure of Google, to actually DOX copyright owners who exercised their legal right to protect their labour. That's right, to violently DOX the VICTIMS of corporate theft to a gang of baying "digital rights" thugs.
As was known by those of us who opposed the EFF and their surrounding thugbase, the opposite of what the "digital rights" circus told us was true. In failing to subject corporate preds to meaningful law we have created a post-trust world in which, very soon, EVERYONE will think you're a robot trying to feed an LLM, and NO ONE will help you, and unless you stump up a consultancy fee, you ain't gonna find out shit. Welcome to the EFF's "Promised Land", where, in fact, corporate lawlessness has only served to inflate the cost of everything. What a surprise... NOT.
We can sit here blaming fake-ass "activists" like Doctorow and his EFF cronies for the violence they perpetrated against creative labourers for Google bucks, and the inevitable result of their drive to allow infinitely scaleable enterprise to profit from theft as a business model - which is, of course, oligopoly. What the fuck else would the result be? But in the end the real blame rests on our own shoulders. Even at this late stage we still have the power to turn our backs on Community as a Commodity and reject AI.
We can't stop the tech elite from stealing our shit. They're literal burglars, they're in our house, and the cops are behind them, cheering them on. But ultimately, the only market they have for their ill-gotten gains is us. We don't have to be so stupid as to buy back our own labour. And if we're not so stupid as to buy back our own labour, there's no point in anyone stealing it. That ends the theft. Ends Community as a Commodity.
Sadly, however, we are so stupid as to buy back our own labour. We are so stupid as to think we can wade neck deep into consumerism without being treated like consumers. If you wanted a fairytale ending, you came to the wrong place.