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I like Doctorow, and these point are valid. I just don’t see the American government doing anything to benefit the people, regardless of left or right orientation. Most Americans want abortion access and reasonable restrictions on gun sales; I can’t imagine any candidates, local or federal doing little more than making empty promises on these subjects. Even Obama care is a hugely compromised husk of reasonable healthcare for all, and you still have republicans clamoring to dismantle it.
I hate to be pessimistic, but I don’t think any American politician would take on this topic.
I don’t think any American politician would take on this topic.
That's the feature
The FTC under Biden has begun to push back against tech monopolies.
The Supreme Court overturning the Chevron doctrine could stop that pretty quick
Don't "both sides" this. It's the kind of thing people use to justify voting third party. Off the top of my head the Biden admin has been working to restore net neutrality and has an antitrust case against Ticketmaster and Live Nation
What you've expressed is not pessimism it's cynicism.
- Lack of competition in the market via mergers and acquisitions
- Companies change things on the back end (“twiddle their knobs”) to improve their fortunes and have a united, consolidated front to prevent any lawmaking that might constrain them
- Companies then embrace tech law to prevent new entrants into the market or consumer rights (see: DMCA, etc.)
This is the criteria he has laid out for the "enshitifacation" of the Internet.
This is funny to me because this is the exact pattern of every industry and service in the United States ever. The Internet isn't special, it's just the latest frontier for capitalism.
The corporations have been doing this with housing. I live in CA and it is awful how many unhoused there are now, and the supreme Court made it illegal!I hope one day this will finally be the last straw for the uprising.
The danger here is that they make "open" standards so horrendously complex and ever evolving that only the billionaire mega corporations can can realistically keep up with them.
See the web where Google now control it completely by having such an enormous amount of code that even Microsoft couldn't be arsed to keep up, or Office Open XML, where 100% compatibility is limited to exactly one product: The one that made it. I just downloaded the documentation for the standard. It is over 5000 fucking pages long. That was part 1 of 4.
And those 5000 pages were probably automatically generated from ... something.
Another example here is the Matrix protocol, specifically designed from the ground up to be open and distributed. In reality, the only option for full-featured stable server software is the one maintained by the project itself, and there aren't a lot of third party clients available.
Openness itself is a good goal, but the complexity itself can pose a barrier openness.
I loved the net when you had to have a clue to be there.
The Eternal September is real
Eternal September
Mine began in truth about eight years before that. BBS and tymnet nodes enabled by shit load of blue and black box phone calls. Just go look at the neat and orderly wiring in a blue box and know that mine was nothing like that. Mine looked like low rent spider web of components stuffed in a cigar box.
Interoperability is how we “seize the means of computation.”
Good luck with that. If the success of the iPhone has taught me anything it is that the average person loves them some incompatible with anything but itself vertical integration.
Through no intervention or design, the market creates perverse incentives that only benefit a few. So the solution is to fiddle with the incentives?
Ya ever notice that "market reform" schemes always seem like negotiations with an angry god? Sometimes I think that ancient civilizations would be much better understood if we stopped referring to the "priest class" and started calling them economists.
My default position remains the same, kill god.
This is nice and all but any solution requires a government captured by capital to work against capital feels as likely to work as thoughts and prayers.
Better than completely allowing capital to do whatever it wants without even attempting to push back.
But what if some change in the right direction doesn't fix everything immediately? Then what?
May as well just not bother.
Yup. All of these "solutions" that sound original are known. The reason we don't apply them isn't because we don't know how to solve these issues, it's because capital has pulled the handbrake. This is the problem we have to solve. All the other problems fall downstream and will magically start getting solved if we can release the handbrake. If we're not talking about how to reduce regulatory capture, we're not taking about real solutions.
I think the best way to make the Internet less sh*tty is to get away from Google search.
I like the SearX search engine. It gives old-school, relevant search results, not google ranked ones.
It's also spread out over many separate instances, so you can pick the one that best suits your search needs:
I like Cory Doctorow.
However, I bought the novel Rabbits solely because Doctorow had a front cover blurb praising the novel.
It was downright a bad novel. Doctorow owes me $16.