10 ms·

To Fight Big Tech, We Must Seize the Means of Computation

118 points by msszczep2 3y ago

simne 3y ago
Must say, thoughts of author resonate in my mind. But for HN too little technical details on how he propose to resolve problems. What I mean, we here speak about math models, we even know about open source models of economy of some countries. I cannot remember here link, but anyone could find scientific articles about analyze of legislation texts, and scitech community even have one win case, when pointed on ambiguity in legislation and one parliament heared them and fixed text. To be more concrete, these works begin in 1990s, now they have official recognition.
proc0 3y ago
Are online user revolutions a thing? I can see this happening if the future continues on a dystopian path. Maybe users would organize and threatened to leave or have a change of power structure. Our online accounts are increasingly becoming our identities to the rest of the world, which consequently gives us agency in it, and social media has evolved to literally own this part of ourselves.
- PeterHolzwarth 3y ago
  A subset of users and mods attempted a bit of a revolution on Reddit recently, you'll recall.
  - karmakurtisaani 3y ago
    I switched from Reddit to Lemmy and haven't been back more than a handful of times (and will never comment again). Turns out only a fraction of users did the same, so not sure it was an efficient protest. I'm happy about the quality of discussion in Lemmy, although it would be nice to have more niche communities. On the other hand, the enshittification of Reddit is for sure not over, so I'm happy to have left that timesink earlier rather than later.
    - ornornor 3y ago
      I’ve also deleted my account and never went back to Reddit. I will never create an account or comment on there again. I don’t even miss it, turns out there are 15–20 years old forums with much higher quality information and participants about any niche subject I was using Reddit for. Thanks for opening my eyes /u/spez I guess :)
    - CalRobert 3y ago
      For what it's worth, Mastodon has been a nice community for me. I haven't really found my place in the lemmyverse. Maybe that's a good thing though.
      - KirillPanov 3y ago
        To use the Mastodon web application, please enable JavaScript. Alternatively, try one of the native apps for Mastodon for your platform.
        krapp 3y ago
        ... yes, and?
        edgyquant 3y ago
        Is this a bot?
    - wolverine876 3y ago
      > Turns out only a fraction of users did the same, so not sure it was an efficient protest. The interesting question is, what makes an efficient protest? What is effective in what situations? How is it organized?
    - colordrops 3y ago
      Lemmy isn't some utopia either. There seem to be users of a particular political bent that if you breath in a way that slightly hints that you might not fully align with them, they follow you around every forum and harass you. I ended up replying to one of harassers in a nasty way, and it earned me a ban on the main instance without warning. I was fine with it though, as I was falling into the same shitty time-wasting use patterns that I found myself engaging in on Reddit and Twitter.
  - gjsman-1000 3y ago
    Yes... and to be honest, it appears to have failed miserably. And that was with Reddit. Try inciting a full scale revolution against Google and Amazon, for what they are right now. It's not happening. I've honestly come to the conclusion that 98%+ of people... don't give a darn about "computational freedom." And, to be honest, why should they? They have so many other demands on their lives than an argument about what software they can run on their phone. As long as it runs what they are used to, they don't care. The market also shows this as well. If "computational freedom" was something that most people actually cared about, Linux would not be sitting with ~2% market share. I also have found that most people like appliances. We argue against appliances - like, why would you want your phone to be a dumb appliance considering everything it could possibly do? I've even seen Right-to-Repair and other people (I believe Cory included) screeching about how Apple has turned smartphones into appliances. For most people though... that's a feature, not a bug. Appliances mostly just work. "Computers" in their mind, don't. They don't want their phone to be like their "computer". In which case, I think Microsoft bears the greater blame for permanently sullying what a "computer" feels like. Edit: And while I keep adding my thoughts, I think it is interesting how the App Store, despite literally restricting what customers can install, actually gives customers a very strong sense of "freedom." How many people install apps on Windows? Almost none - in part, because the openness of the platform made most people terrified to install, or even just download, anything. Customers aren't afraid of installing, or trying, anything from the App Store - so to them, the iPhone probably feels more free than their PC. While I generally support sideloading, I do get the sense that most people will, ironically, feel less free overall once it rolls out.
    - weikju 3y ago
      I appreciate these thoughts being written down and these points definitely need to be addressed. I think one of the big problems is not that phones etc are appliances but that everything company is trying to turn their offerings into an appliance (and alternatives becoming more and more niche), and at the same time alternatives are just not allowed to be on the same footing. In some places you need either an Android (Google Android that is) or an iPhone to partake in some services (commercial or otherwise). Very often it feels penalizing to refuse to use either of those, or you lose out in quality of life or available services as a result. This isn’t good.
  - gdulli 3y ago
    Once a big enough Eternal September hits a platform I don't think that kind of revolution is possible anymore. The tyranny of the docile will ensure that a big enough majority will always stick around regardless of how the platform degrades.
    - renewiltord 3y ago
      Surely that's ideal. Eternal September is not a desirable state and presumably the "docile" are not the desired compatriots. So that means that this is good. One can just go start Sawwit and Reddit will act as the lightning rod for the docile while the John Galts go to Sawwit.
  - commandlinefan 3y ago
    ... and if the users and mods who led the "revolution" had gotten their way, reddit would have become even more reddit than it ever had been. I want a revolution that returns reddit to the way it was ten or so years ago when for the most part you could publish whatever you wanted (or a distributed alternative that was uncensorable), but they want a reddit revolution where nobody could publish _anything_ unless it was groupthink approved.
  - zlg_codes 3y ago
    That stunt was doomed to fail due to inconsistent messaging, goals, and total lack of solidarity. Reddit and its ilk are already dead. Even Lemmy's content starts to repeat itself due to 'cross posts' or other allegedly community building activities. The chief problem of these platforms is their gameability. Numbers create social 'games' and before you know it, nobody gives a shit what you're saying, they just want to say some short quip, make a number go up, and feel superior. It comes back around to the problem of: you can't solve social problems with more technology. Social media has a huge verifiability and trust problem. We need to do away with karma systems, because giving people power to silence each other only leads to abuse. Invitation trees as a social concept keeps people honest, at least if they don't want to piss off others who invited them or were invited by the same person. The group on Reddit really has no backbone. They folded as soon as their Reddit accounts were threatened. Real protest would've been gaming their system with bots (the same way they do!) And manipulating the narrative en masse. Nobody had anywhere to go except the Fediverse, and that has its own collection of issues. Social media is just not compatible with the way people socialize. It's a glamor and attention competition, and the winner gets... likes? But yeah, to call that half-assed protest a revolution is somewhat of an insult to activism.
- wolverine876 3y ago
  > Are online user revolutions a thing? How do you define that? People organizing themselves and changing their situation, successfully, is as old as time. Likely, you live in a country where democracy was forced on the powers-that-be in that way.
  - jruohonen 3y ago
    Well, the WSJ recently reported that Meta is planning to charge money for ad-free versions of their platforms in Europe. So, yes, I am sure the common people will eventually "revolt" with their feet.
_gzov 3y ago
I really recommend Cory's talk at DEF CON and he was a guest on the Srsly Wrong podcast. DEF CON: https://youtu.be/rimtaSgGz_4?si=EBlHqv2tmKICIYhT https://youtu.be/rimtaSgGz_4?si=EBlHqv2tmKICIYhT Srsly Wrong: https://srslywrong.com/podcast/297-platform-decay-and-how-amazon-raises-prices-for-everyone-w-cory-doctorow/ https://srslywrong.com/podcast/297-platform-decay-and-how-am... It's a great podcast. I recommend the episodes on degrowth and half earth socialism in particular.
undersuit 3y ago
I dislike that every single one of our displays utilizes an encrypted connection. And it doesn't protect me, I don't have the keys. And though it is fixed function hardware I've often wondered about the waste we have introduced in this world so I can't copy a Disney video that I might watch hundreds of times.
- huytersd 3y ago
  I don’t understand. If you’re watching it the bits have been decrypted. Can’t you just get them from local memory?
  - choeger 3y ago
    Realistically, no. You don't have access to the device that contains the decrypted content. Of course, you could try to open up or bypass the DRM module (e.g., via the GPU driver during hardware accelerated decoding), but that won't work with a TPM module and signed kernel space. If you look at the security technologies introduced into consumer decides over the last decades, it all serves the dual purpose of securing your hardware from ... you.
    - justinclift 3y ago
      HDMI splitters have been a thing for years. Apparently they present as a compliant HDMI output to the source device, but they don't require HDCP or similar on the output they're passing it on to. From there, you're free to do whatever you want with the output.
      - choeger 3y ago
        At least in theory, HDCP keys can be revoced. Manufacturing non-compliant devices could become extremely risky.
        justinclift 3y ago
        Well, these things have already existed for years...
api 3y ago
We have plenty of computation. A decent laptop today is a supercomputer. Terabytes of storage can be had for under $200. Locked hardware isn’t much of an issue either. Most of that either can be unlocked or there are equivalently powerful unlocked alternatives to be had. What people must seize is the network, and the network effect. Most of today’s tech empires are built on owning the hub around which everyone communicates. The fact that they own a lot of hardware is just about irrelevant to their market power or dominance. The only area where compute power determines relevance at all today is AI base model training and large scale AI deployment and that is likely not going to last that long. In the next few years the market for accelerators for AI is going to heat up a lot and prices will come down. There is no way the nVidia monopoly will last more than another two years tops.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- nologic01 3y ago
  The sad part is that nobody really prevents us from seizing the network. It is intrinsically decentralized by design. It takes hard work to subvert this. Yet we don't do it. A sort of digital rigor mortis has descended upon the land. A comatose capitulation, complete lack of vital signs, let alone the lust for life that characterized the early period of the Web when everything seemed possible. The "network effect" is really a psychological and economic mind game. Once a sufficient number of people were conditioned (tricked by novelty and lack of education and regulation) to consider it a "reality" it became a runaway self-financing monopoly. A collective digital hallucination that is actually against the self-interest of the vast majorities, based on rather dodgy foundations and atypical of how societies are generally organized. It was never a perfect world but it never flirted so closely with a surveillance dystopia. This state of affairs becomes very puzzling when it is now almost a point-and-click exercise to setup the equivalent of the early facebook or twitter or skype etc (#fediverse, #matrix, you name it). Either this is the darkest hour before dawn or it is the darkest hour, period.
  - iteria 3y ago
    We can't do it until literally everyone is willing to maintain multiple platforms. There's always people who don't and you end up on a situation where either that person is Isolated or what usually happens, people bend to them because it's just easier. Facebook won the moment elders got there because grandma uses Facebook and it's just easier to interact with her there instead of trying to convince her to do something different. As long as these kind of anchors exist centralization is basically predestined
newsclues 3y ago
If you want to fight big tech stop feeding it data.
crmd 3y ago
Is this from the Sudoer’s Manifesto?
clnq 3y ago
I am always unconvinced by the argument that one can’t leave social media because their friends are on some site. No one I know does not check their SMS and email, and doesn’t pick up phone calls. I’ve not been on social media for about 5 years now, and I have not fallen out of touch with a single friend because of that. For other reasons like moving away physically or not gaming as much anymore, but not for this. Everyone still picks up my calls and reads my messages.
- hotnfresh 3y ago
  Not being contactable the same place all group stuff is organized or info distributed is either asking others to do work for you (to send you info everyone else got automatically) or means you’re opting to exclude yourself from those activities and discussions. Less relevant if your friend/family circle doesn’t organize group activities or chat as a group often, I guess.
  - iteria 3y ago
    This realistically. This is why I can't leave Facebook. There is no platform that all of my friends have some kind of presence on. Some of us have discord. Some us use whatapp. Some of us use $platform, but Facebook is the only one that all of use have at least a login to. There are like 100 of us. I don't know all of them, but my friends want to invite people I don't know and I invite people they don't know and here we are in our 30s still stuck on this situation for big get togethers. Email and text just doesn't work. I don't have have the emails and honestly I'm not all that interested in my friend's sister in law's contact information. This is how Facebook has chained me to it. The network effect is real when you need to keep 2nd and 3rd degree friends in the loop. I can't leave because of people I don't even know.
  - jijijijiji 3y ago
    I don't think it's less work with the new, Whatsapp-based way of organising group events. It seems to be more stressful and distracting to all involved. Your friends shoud appreciate the lack of an extra set of dings in a group chat, and gladly let you know about upcoming events where your presence is desired.
misterbishop 3y ago
The headline borrows from Marx for radical cred, but all of Doctorow's ideas are from the anarcho-liberal school of permanent impotence. He spends the first 2000 words talking about how industry bribed the government to set unjust, inhumane policies on copyright, reverse-engineering, antitrust. Then in the 2nd half, all his tech proposals have to do with alternative tech solutions: federation, mastodon, driver coop apps, etc. The problem with big tech is just capitalism. You don't fight capitalism with new apps. You fight capitalism with an independent political movement of workers. This movement wouldn't even be a tech-oriented movement because most people rightly don't give a fuck about tech. We have to fight the political power of Musk and Zuckerberg by cutting off their ability to make profit. This happens through organizing in the workplace, and with a WORKERS PARTY opposed to the capitalist duopoly.
- Apocryphon 3y ago
  It's telling that every time an alternative, FOSS, socially-conscious tech product gets popular - CyanogenMod being a big example - they often end up doing unpopular shady things to monetize, and sometimes then fall apart. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27951250 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27951250 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27069913 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27069913
  - yreew 3y ago
    Communism/Soviet in a nutshell.
    - mrbadguy 3y ago
      Could you please elaborate on this? Your reply is witty but it seems to me that those companies only start doing shady things once they become more capitalist (ie try to “monetize”) so I’m curious to hear more.
      - antifa 3y ago
        Nothing to elaborate, a brave HN user just needed to finally take a stance and let everyone on the English speaking internet know they agree with one of the most popular opinions on the English speaking internet.
mark_l_watson 3y ago
I finished reading this book last week. I basically liked it, lot's of background material and then practical suggestions.
thefascistleft 3y ago
[dead]
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
mikewarot 3y ago
I think Cory has done a great job picking apart the problems with governance and incentives, but there is another side to this... the insecurity of general purpose computing. We can't run random code from the internet, because we can't control its side effects when we run it. This leads to avoiding novelty in general. This leads to going only to "safe" sites, and only looking at "safe" types of content, from "safe" channels. It doesn't help that the anti-virus systems we're forced to run (because of our insecure computers) flag any novel executables as "dangerous" merely because their signature hasn't previously been present in a statistically large enough sample of users. As for the "access" part of internet connectivity, which was originally intended to be symmetric, we collectively don't care because there aren't any trustworthy operating systems that can withstand direct connection to the internet without the full time attention of system maintainers. You can't turn a box on with a public IP and expect it to survive a decade without updates. (Unlike the wiring in my house, transformer on the pole, and everything else in the power grid) Once we get Genode, Fuchsia, GNU Hurd, or some other capabilities based OS for our machines, we can reverse at least the "safety" part of the problem.
barrysteve 3y ago
Ugh the snake oil. We cannot sieze the means until you can afford a couple billion for a semi conductor fab and to run it at a loss for a very long time. The cpu instruction sets are becoming black boxes, the programming languages are controlled by committee, the internet is run by certification and big tech companies that will choke you out if they don't like you. The hardware is getting locked down with tpm chips. I could write the next revolutionary piece of software and the pre-existing big tech gatekeepers have power over its profitability and the hardware and OS guys determine if my program can be run at all. So tired of wasting decades on snake oil. Never has freedom been so controlled. The ONLY way to generate an agreement with your own purposes, top to bottom, is to make and sell your own hardware and software, on your own network. The existing platforms are permanently compromised by interest groups.
RiOuseR 3y ago
[dead]

118 points by msszczep2 3y ago

Must say, thoughts of author resonate in my mind. But for HN too little technical details on how he propose to resolve problems. What I mean, we here speak about math models, we even know about open source models of economy of some countries. I cannot remember here link, but anyone could find scientific articles about analyze of legislation texts, and scitech community even have one win case, when pointed on ambiguity in legislation and one parliament heared them and fixed text. To be more concrete, these works begin in 1990s, now they have official recognition.

proc0 3y ago

Are online user revolutions a thing? I can see this happening if the future continues on a dystopian path. Maybe users would organize and threatened to leave or have a change of power structure. Our online accounts are increasingly becoming our identities to the rest of the world, which consequently gives us agency in it, and social media has evolved to literally own this part of ourselves.

PeterHolzwarth 3y ago
A subset of users and mods attempted a bit of a revolution on Reddit recently, you'll recall.
- karmakurtisaani 3y ago
  I switched from Reddit to Lemmy and haven't been back more than a handful of times (and will never comment again). Turns out only a fraction of users did the same, so not sure it was an efficient protest. I'm happy about the quality of discussion in Lemmy, although it would be nice to have more niche communities. On the other hand, the enshittification of Reddit is for sure not over, so I'm happy to have left that timesink earlier rather than later.
  - ornornor 3y ago
    I’ve also deleted my account and never went back to Reddit. I will never create an account or comment on there again. I don’t even miss it, turns out there are 15–20 years old forums with much higher quality information and participants about any niche subject I was using Reddit for. Thanks for opening my eyes /u/spez I guess :)
  - CalRobert 3y ago
    For what it's worth, Mastodon has been a nice community for me. I haven't really found my place in the lemmyverse. Maybe that's a good thing though.
    - KirillPanov 3y ago
      To use the Mastodon web application, please enable JavaScript. Alternatively, try one of the native apps for Mastodon for your platform.
      - krapp 3y ago
        ... yes, and?
      - edgyquant 3y ago
        Is this a bot?
  - wolverine876 3y ago
    > Turns out only a fraction of users did the same, so not sure it was an efficient protest. The interesting question is, what makes an efficient protest? What is effective in what situations? How is it organized?
  - colordrops 3y ago
    Lemmy isn't some utopia either. There seem to be users of a particular political bent that if you breath in a way that slightly hints that you might not fully align with them, they follow you around every forum and harass you. I ended up replying to one of harassers in a nasty way, and it earned me a ban on the main instance without warning. I was fine with it though, as I was falling into the same shitty time-wasting use patterns that I found myself engaging in on Reddit and Twitter.
- gjsman-1000 3y ago
  Yes... and to be honest, it appears to have failed miserably. And that was with Reddit. Try inciting a full scale revolution against Google and Amazon, for what they are right now. It's not happening. I've honestly come to the conclusion that 98%+ of people... don't give a darn about "computational freedom." And, to be honest, why should they? They have so many other demands on their lives than an argument about what software they can run on their phone. As long as it runs what they are used to, they don't care. The market also shows this as well. If "computational freedom" was something that most people actually cared about, Linux would not be sitting with ~2% market share. I also have found that most people like appliances. We argue against appliances - like, why would you want your phone to be a dumb appliance considering everything it could possibly do? I've even seen Right-to-Repair and other people (I believe Cory included) screeching about how Apple has turned smartphones into appliances. For most people though... that's a feature, not a bug. Appliances mostly just work. "Computers" in their mind, don't. They don't want their phone to be like their "computer". In which case, I think Microsoft bears the greater blame for permanently sullying what a "computer" feels like. Edit: And while I keep adding my thoughts, I think it is interesting how the App Store, despite literally restricting what customers can install, actually gives customers a very strong sense of "freedom." How many people install apps on Windows? Almost none - in part, because the openness of the platform made most people terrified to install, or even just download, anything. Customers aren't afraid of installing, or trying, anything from the App Store - so to them, the iPhone probably feels more free than their PC. While I generally support sideloading, I do get the sense that most people will, ironically, feel less free overall once it rolls out.
  - weikju 3y ago
    I appreciate these thoughts being written down and these points definitely need to be addressed. I think one of the big problems is not that phones etc are appliances but that everything company is trying to turn their offerings into an appliance (and alternatives becoming more and more niche), and at the same time alternatives are just not allowed to be on the same footing. In some places you need either an Android (Google Android that is) or an iPhone to partake in some services (commercial or otherwise). Very often it feels penalizing to refuse to use either of those, or you lose out in quality of life or available services as a result. This isn’t good.
- gdulli 3y ago
  Once a big enough Eternal September hits a platform I don't think that kind of revolution is possible anymore. The tyranny of the docile will ensure that a big enough majority will always stick around regardless of how the platform degrades.
  - renewiltord 3y ago
    Surely that's ideal. Eternal September is not a desirable state and presumably the "docile" are not the desired compatriots. So that means that this is good. One can just go start Sawwit and Reddit will act as the lightning rod for the docile while the John Galts go to Sawwit.
- commandlinefan 3y ago
  ... and if the users and mods who led the "revolution" had gotten their way, reddit would have become even more reddit than it ever had been. I want a revolution that returns reddit to the way it was ten or so years ago when for the most part you could publish whatever you wanted (or a distributed alternative that was uncensorable), but they want a reddit revolution where nobody could publish _anything_ unless it was groupthink approved.
- zlg_codes 3y ago
  That stunt was doomed to fail due to inconsistent messaging, goals, and total lack of solidarity. Reddit and its ilk are already dead. Even Lemmy's content starts to repeat itself due to 'cross posts' or other allegedly community building activities. The chief problem of these platforms is their gameability. Numbers create social 'games' and before you know it, nobody gives a shit what you're saying, they just want to say some short quip, make a number go up, and feel superior. It comes back around to the problem of: you can't solve social problems with more technology. Social media has a huge verifiability and trust problem. We need to do away with karma systems, because giving people power to silence each other only leads to abuse. Invitation trees as a social concept keeps people honest, at least if they don't want to piss off others who invited them or were invited by the same person. The group on Reddit really has no backbone. They folded as soon as their Reddit accounts were threatened. Real protest would've been gaming their system with bots (the same way they do!) And manipulating the narrative en masse. Nobody had anywhere to go except the Fediverse, and that has its own collection of issues. Social media is just not compatible with the way people socialize. It's a glamor and attention competition, and the winner gets... likes? But yeah, to call that half-assed protest a revolution is somewhat of an insult to activism.
wolverine876 3y ago
> Are online user revolutions a thing? How do you define that? People organizing themselves and changing their situation, successfully, is as old as time. Likely, you live in a country where democracy was forced on the powers-that-be in that way.
- jruohonen 3y ago
  Well, the WSJ recently reported that Meta is planning to charge money for ad-free versions of their platforms in Europe. So, yes, I am sure the common people will eventually "revolt" with their feet.

_gzov 3y ago

I really recommend Cory's talk at DEF CON and he was a guest on the Srsly Wrong podcast. DEF CON: https://youtu.be/rimtaSgGz_4?si=EBlHqv2tmKICIYhT https://youtu.be/rimtaSgGz_4?si=EBlHqv2tmKICIYhT Srsly Wrong: https://srslywrong.com/podcast/297-platform-decay-and-how-amazon-raises-prices-for-everyone-w-cory-doctorow/ https://srslywrong.com/podcast/297-platform-decay-and-how-am... It's a great podcast. I recommend the episodes on degrowth and half earth socialism in particular.

undersuit 3y ago

I dislike that every single one of our displays utilizes an encrypted connection. And it doesn't protect me, I don't have the keys. And though it is fixed function hardware I've often wondered about the waste we have introduced in this world so I can't copy a Disney video that I might watch hundreds of times.

huytersd 3y ago
I don’t understand. If you’re watching it the bits have been decrypted. Can’t you just get them from local memory?
- choeger 3y ago
  Realistically, no. You don't have access to the device that contains the decrypted content. Of course, you could try to open up or bypass the DRM module (e.g., via the GPU driver during hardware accelerated decoding), but that won't work with a TPM module and signed kernel space. If you look at the security technologies introduced into consumer decides over the last decades, it all serves the dual purpose of securing your hardware from ... you.
  - justinclift 3y ago
    HDMI splitters have been a thing for years. Apparently they present as a compliant HDMI output to the source device, but they don't require HDCP or similar on the output they're passing it on to. From there, you're free to do whatever you want with the output.
    - choeger 3y ago
      At least in theory, HDCP keys can be revoced. Manufacturing non-compliant devices could become extremely risky.
      - justinclift 3y ago
        Well, these things have already existed for years...

api 3y ago

We have plenty of computation. A decent laptop today is a supercomputer. Terabytes of storage can be had for under $200. Locked hardware isn’t much of an issue either. Most of that either can be unlocked or there are equivalently powerful unlocked alternatives to be had. What people must seize is the network, and the network effect. Most of today’s tech empires are built on owning the hub around which everyone communicates. The fact that they own a lot of hardware is just about irrelevant to their market power or dominance. The only area where compute power determines relevance at all today is AI base model training and large scale AI deployment and that is likely not going to last that long. In the next few years the market for accelerators for AI is going to heat up a lot and prices will come down. There is no way the nVidia monopoly will last more than another two years tops.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
nologic01 3y ago
The sad part is that nobody really prevents us from seizing the network. It is intrinsically decentralized by design. It takes hard work to subvert this. Yet we don't do it. A sort of digital rigor mortis has descended upon the land. A comatose capitulation, complete lack of vital signs, let alone the lust for life that characterized the early period of the Web when everything seemed possible. The "network effect" is really a psychological and economic mind game. Once a sufficient number of people were conditioned (tricked by novelty and lack of education and regulation) to consider it a "reality" it became a runaway self-financing monopoly. A collective digital hallucination that is actually against the self-interest of the vast majorities, based on rather dodgy foundations and atypical of how societies are generally organized. It was never a perfect world but it never flirted so closely with a surveillance dystopia. This state of affairs becomes very puzzling when it is now almost a point-and-click exercise to setup the equivalent of the early facebook or twitter or skype etc (#fediverse, #matrix, you name it). Either this is the darkest hour before dawn or it is the darkest hour, period.
- iteria 3y ago
  We can't do it until literally everyone is willing to maintain multiple platforms. There's always people who don't and you end up on a situation where either that person is Isolated or what usually happens, people bend to them because it's just easier. Facebook won the moment elders got there because grandma uses Facebook and it's just easier to interact with her there instead of trying to convince her to do something different. As long as these kind of anchors exist centralization is basically predestined

newsclues 3y ago

If you want to fight big tech stop feeding it data.

crmd 3y ago

Is this from the Sudoer’s Manifesto?

clnq 3y ago

I am always unconvinced by the argument that one can’t leave social media because their friends are on some site. No one I know does not check their SMS and email, and doesn’t pick up phone calls. I’ve not been on social media for about 5 years now, and I have not fallen out of touch with a single friend because of that. For other reasons like moving away physically or not gaming as much anymore, but not for this. Everyone still picks up my calls and reads my messages.

hotnfresh 3y ago
Not being contactable the same place all group stuff is organized or info distributed is either asking others to do work for you (to send you info everyone else got automatically) or means you’re opting to exclude yourself from those activities and discussions. Less relevant if your friend/family circle doesn’t organize group activities or chat as a group often, I guess.
- iteria 3y ago
  This realistically. This is why I can't leave Facebook. There is no platform that all of my friends have some kind of presence on. Some of us have discord. Some us use whatapp. Some of us use $platform, but Facebook is the only one that all of use have at least a login to. There are like 100 of us. I don't know all of them, but my friends want to invite people I don't know and I invite people they don't know and here we are in our 30s still stuck on this situation for big get togethers. Email and text just doesn't work. I don't have have the emails and honestly I'm not all that interested in my friend's sister in law's contact information. This is how Facebook has chained me to it. The network effect is real when you need to keep 2nd and 3rd degree friends in the loop. I can't leave because of people I don't even know.
- jijijijiji 3y ago
  I don't think it's less work with the new, Whatsapp-based way of organising group events. It seems to be more stressful and distracting to all involved. Your friends shoud appreciate the lack of an extra set of dings in a group chat, and gladly let you know about upcoming events where your presence is desired.

misterbishop 3y ago

The headline borrows from Marx for radical cred, but all of Doctorow's ideas are from the anarcho-liberal school of permanent impotence. He spends the first 2000 words talking about how industry bribed the government to set unjust, inhumane policies on copyright, reverse-engineering, antitrust. Then in the 2nd half, all his tech proposals have to do with alternative tech solutions: federation, mastodon, driver coop apps, etc. The problem with big tech is just capitalism. You don't fight capitalism with new apps. You fight capitalism with an independent political movement of workers. This movement wouldn't even be a tech-oriented movement because most people rightly don't give a fuck about tech. We have to fight the political power of Musk and Zuckerberg by cutting off their ability to make profit. This happens through organizing in the workplace, and with a WORKERS PARTY opposed to the capitalist duopoly.

Apocryphon 3y ago
It's telling that every time an alternative, FOSS, socially-conscious tech product gets popular - CyanogenMod being a big example - they often end up doing unpopular shady things to monetize, and sometimes then fall apart. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27951250 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27951250 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27069913 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27069913
- yreew 3y ago
  Communism/Soviet in a nutshell.
  - mrbadguy 3y ago
    Could you please elaborate on this? Your reply is witty but it seems to me that those companies only start doing shady things once they become more capitalist (ie try to “monetize”) so I’m curious to hear more.
    - antifa 3y ago
      Nothing to elaborate, a brave HN user just needed to finally take a stance and let everyone on the English speaking internet know they agree with one of the most popular opinions on the English speaking internet.

mark_l_watson 3y ago

I finished reading this book last week. I basically liked it, lot's of background material and then practical suggestions.

thefascistleft 3y ago

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mikewarot 3y ago

I think Cory has done a great job picking apart the problems with governance and incentives, but there is another side to this... the insecurity of general purpose computing. We can't run random code from the internet, because we can't control its side effects when we run it. This leads to avoiding novelty in general. This leads to going only to "safe" sites, and only looking at "safe" types of content, from "safe" channels. It doesn't help that the anti-virus systems we're forced to run (because of our insecure computers) flag any novel executables as "dangerous" merely because their signature hasn't previously been present in a statistically large enough sample of users. As for the "access" part of internet connectivity, which was originally intended to be symmetric, we collectively don't care because there aren't any trustworthy operating systems that can withstand direct connection to the internet without the full time attention of system maintainers. You can't turn a box on with a public IP and expect it to survive a decade without updates. (Unlike the wiring in my house, transformer on the pole, and everything else in the power grid) Once we get Genode, Fuchsia, GNU Hurd, or some other capabilities based OS for our machines, we can reverse at least the "safety" part of the problem.

barrysteve 3y ago

Ugh the snake oil. We cannot sieze the means until you can afford a couple billion for a semi conductor fab and to run it at a loss for a very long time. The cpu instruction sets are becoming black boxes, the programming languages are controlled by committee, the internet is run by certification and big tech companies that will choke you out if they don't like you. The hardware is getting locked down with tpm chips. I could write the next revolutionary piece of software and the pre-existing big tech gatekeepers have power over its profitability and the hardware and OS guys determine if my program can be run at all. So tired of wasting decades on snake oil. Never has freedom been so controlled. The ONLY way to generate an agreement with your own purposes, top to bottom, is to make and sell your own hardware and software, on your own network. The existing platforms are permanently compromised by interest groups.

RiOuseR 3y ago

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