6 ms·

Cory Doctorow Explains Why Big Tech Is Making the Internet Terrible

• villgax 3y ago
  I guess pandering to governments worldwide tends to have such effects. Just wish we could crowd fund another country or planet to avoid all this BS....
  • iamdamian 3y ago
    How will starting a new country or colonizing a new planet help us avoid the problems we've already created for ourselves?
    • wincy 3y ago
      Benevolent dictatorship is the only way.
      • wahnfrieden 3y ago
        No gods, no masters.
        • seventytwo 3y ago
          Only slaves? Or…?
          • wahnfrieden 3y ago
            Individuals
        • guerrilla 3y ago
          Indeed, also the title of a great documentary[1] about the history of anarchism around the world. 1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JZ-utvfgK8Q https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JZ-utvfgK8Q
      • goodpoint 3y ago
        Forgot the "/s"?
      • beebeepka 3y ago
        And when the dictator dies, so will the way
      • villgax 3y ago
        You mean arms on Mars or something about the Linux kernel?
    • villgax 3y ago
      My point is to avoid government overreach like how China, Russia, UK & almost India behave with regards to the internet existing & wanting companies to make backdoors within encryption or get booted out of such markets
  • rideontime 3y ago
    I missed the mention of "pandering to governments worldwide" in this article, what are you talking about?
    • villgax 3y ago
      > In the early 2000s, there was all this hype that the next frontier for American tech companies was China. Yahoo went into China and started ratting out its users to the politburo and having them arrested and tortured because that was what it took to stay in China. And Google, the “don’t be evil” company was like, “We’re going to do that, too.” Even then, I think, they were like, “We don’t have any ideas. We can’t do better than Yahoo. We just have to do what Yahoo’s doing better than them. We’re not going to have a better idea than Yahoo has.” So, they went into China. (Project Dragonfly anyone?)
  • hezralig 3y ago
    The article didn't touch on a single thing related to pandering to governments. Could you explain the connection?
    • villgax 3y ago
      > In the early 2000s, there was all this hype that the next frontier for American tech companies was China. Yahoo went into China and started ratting out its users to the politburo and having them arrested and tortured because that was what it took to stay in China. And Google, the “don’t be evil” company was like, “We’re going to do that, too.” Even then, I think, they were like, “We don’t have any ideas. We can’t do better than Yahoo. We just have to do what Yahoo’s doing better than them. We’re not going to have a better idea than Yahoo has.” So, they went into China. (Project Dragonfly anyone?)
• jeffbee 3y ago
  [flagged]
• camdenlock 3y ago
  [flagged]
  • potsandpans 3y ago
    hey, congrats! You succeeded.
  • koboll 3y ago
    Never really understood what draws people to Cory Doctorow. Over-the-top polemics aren't really good for much except making you angrier about something you're already angry about.
    • LegitShady 3y ago
      I mean its posted to jacobin.com -> go look up who the jacobins were and the time of terror and you realize the point of the site is over the top polemics. They named themselves after a group that slaughtered their political enemies. It's basically a more obscure older equivalent of khmer-rouge.com - naming yourself after historical political mass murderers. But Doctorow's fiction is better than his opinion pieces.
      • boomboomsubban 3y ago
        >They named themselves after a group that slaughtered their political enemies. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacobin_(magazine)#Title_and_logo https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacobin_(magazine)#Title_and_l...
        • LegitShady 3y ago
          Oh so he's idolizing the perpetrators of the 1804 massacre of the white population by the haitian revolutionaries on the orders of Jean-Jacques Dessalines, who then enacted racist policies in 1805? You find with these revolutions the massacres of the innocent are easy to find after. The haitians were not somehow more moral and upstanding than the french.
• pookah 3y ago
  [flagged]
  • cma 3y ago
    Weren't Merkle trees popularized by git?
  • goalieca 3y ago
    I’m all against such embellishments but crypto really has little societal benefit and many negatives. The biggest way it’s impacted my life is the rise of ransomware!
  • tetris11 3y ago
    If you see it more from the perspective of what value these markets actually contribute to the world, then he's spot on. I cant count how many times an open source alternative has saved me from the price gouging tactics of some seedy firms that cornered or bought out an entire market. At least socialists believe in and contribute to something higher than themselves for the benefit of all, even if their implementation is sometimes poor.
  • smt88 3y ago
    Wow, so much to unpack here... > Take any controversial situation and sift it down to a simple good\bad binary pitch that props up some weird view point The argument Doctorow makes against Big Tech is not that they're 100% evil, but that they don't (and don't want to) compete. > "monopolistic sociapaths"... Lame. I've benefited GREATLY from some of the open source tools that these big bad tech companies have made freely available. You can benefit from monopolistic sociopaths. You would benefit more from a free (as in competitive) market. > And the non-stop self-masterbratory articles about the evils of "crypto" from these guys is obvious and cheesy (individuals making money = bad). This is not close to an honest reconstruction of his argument. He argues that crypto scams are taking advantage of people's good intentions, which is absolutely true. The vast majority of crypto content is promoting shitcoins and Ponzi schemes, not promoting the freedom of [insert country's citizens] to transact without their government intervening. > Merkle-tree's were popularized by these crypto-bro's... I don't know what "popularizing" Merkle trees means, but you can easily see that there is no relationship between interest in Merkle trees[1] and interest in Bitcoin (which I used as a term because it predated the mainstream discussion of "crypto" or "cryptocurrency" as a general topic). In fact, peak interest in Merkle trees happened well before Bitcoin was invented. > ...and have helped other distributed forms of technology. Crypto has not created or helped any other distributed form of distributed technology except crypto. The closest thing to a distributed technology that has become more popular since 2011 is Mastodon, and that got its surge of attention because of Elon Musk antagonizing Twitter's user base. BFT data stores have been around for a long time, and their usage in industry hasn't increased recently. 1. https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=merkle%20tree&hl=en https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=m... 2. https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=bitcoin&hl=en https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=b...
• vagabund 3y ago
  A lot of talk about agile digital monopolies maneuvering quickly to crowd out competition but little talk about actual consumer harm or extracted rents. Amazon subsidizing one-day shipping or Facebook rapidly building out new features may harm competitors but it makes me better off, at least in a narrow sense. He also makes the argument that the quick-moving digital world allows monopolists to pivot to protect their position in a way erstwhile analog monopolists could not, but neglects mentioning that the same logic also removes significant barriers to entry for competitors: > John D. Rockefeller was doing all this stuff one hundred twenty years ago, but if Rockefeller was like, “I secretly own this train line and I use the fact that it’s the only way to get oil to market to exclude my rivals, and I’m worried that there’s a ferry line coming that will offer an alternate route that will be more efficient,” he can’t just click a mouse and build another train line that offers the service more cheaply until the ferry line goes out of business and then abandon the train line. The non-digital example is capital intensive, and it demands incredibly slow processes. With digital, you can do a thing that I call “twiddling,” which is just changing the business logic really quickly. It's pretty crazy to suggest removing capital-intensive constraints like those of physical infrastructure strengthens monopolistic positions.
  • anbende 3y ago
    Also the implication that the digital equivalent of adding entire new lines (new products, new features, or new backend infrastructure, I guess?) is just a "click of a mouse" glosses over the large amount of work that goes into software and tech development, especially at the largest scales. Yes, it might be faster than building a rail line in the early 1900s, but the "button click" metaphor seems a little silly.
    • pcstl 3y ago
      I feel like this is a general bias of people who look at reality through a Marxist framing - for their theory of reality to make sense, they need to undervalue any kind of work that does not take the form of "producing material objects".
  • smt88 3y ago
• garbagecoder 3y ago
  Mastodon winning would be the most cited exception to worse is better if it happened. It's just too much for normies.
  • andybak 3y ago
    "normies"?
• tempodox 3y ago
  It soothes my nerves to see someone speak the unvarnished truth for a change.
• bertman 3y ago
  Doctorow coined the term "enshitification" for this. Previous discussions: https://hn.algolia.com/?q=enshitification https://hn.algolia.com/?q=enshitification
• pcstl 3y ago
  It makes me worried how people look at this and say it's "the unvarnished truth" because it confirms their biases, even if there is next to no actual evidence that current monopolists are more powerful than historic ones, or that people are actually worse off. It also bothers me how this kind of article seems to always be written by people who have no idea about what is the kind of work and challenges that go into building products that can actually get adopted by people.
• timbit42 3y ago
  "I think that we need to understand that capitalists hate capitalism. They don’t want to be in an environment in which they have to compete." I think he means they hate the free market. Many people think capitalism and the free market depend on each other but free markets existed for a long time before capitalism. It's the free market that forces capitalists to compete.
• mananaysiempre 3y ago
  > Google has never, since the development of its search, innovated This (a direct quote from the interview, not just a subtitle) seems false to me. Unless we tweak the definitions to desirable innovations, or to the leadership and not the employees of Google, this has to be false. At the very least we need to credit them for Gmail, which by showing that a non-terrible app could be done in the browser, lit a fire under web devs’ collective arses that is still going today. (Again, whether this was a good idea is orthogonal—one way or another, it was a contribution to the state of the art even if the browser tech was already there. IIRC it was also born as an employee-driven initiative, but that’s also orthogonal.) We’ve also forgotten what a wonder Maps and Earth were at the time. Perhaps ladling out a gigantic pot of money in exchange for every commercially available bit of satellite imagery in the world isn’t that inventive. And yet—for some reason nobody did it before that in such quantity, and that quantity acquired a quality of its own. Books were castrated by copyright law, but they’re still an impressive achievement. You still encounter those Google-watermarked PDFs on Archive.org (proper, not the Wayback Machine), and if they don’t have the polish of pirate libraries, neither do they make you remember how much OCR sucked in the 2000s. And Search, well, web search is a moving target, and what reads as operational competence at a high level is almost certainly dozens of researchers inventing new things for years. I can’t say it’s been an unequivocal good for the world, but to call it staying still seems an exaggeration. Also, Chrome. It was great at first, the thing that finally made me abadon Opera. And V8 brought to the mainstream the more dynamic bits of the Self research from Sun that wasn’t useful for the JVM. Not only Node—I don’t think we’d have LuaJIT today if not for V8 and the *Monkeys, and the initial V8 work was what breached the ivory tower there. (Does Android count? Undeniably most of what it is now is from after the Google acquisition, but they say it’s an enclave with a separate culture within the company. Dunno.)
  • deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]