As a leading blogger in the pre-Substack era, novelist and public-interest technologist Cory Doctorow often warned that Big Tech was rendering of cyberspace a polluted, dystopian, crassly commercial and often hostile world of limited options.
Now it's happened. Facebook, Instagram and other walled fiefdoms of surveillance capitalism distract discourse with scrolls of targeted ads and trending video reels. More genteel competitors were long ago muscled out.
Hateful trolls, violent speech and addictive algorithms thrive. And when a user account is mistakenly or unjustly shuttered, platform automation means the aggrieved will encounter callous indifference. It鈥檚 gotten to where anti-Big Tech initiatives enjoy bipartisan backing in an otherwise teetering U.S. democracy.
鈥淭here is no fixing Big Tech,鈥� Doctorow, who blogged for years on the website 鈥淏oing Boing,鈥� writes in his new book 鈥淭he Internet Con: How To Seize The Means of Computation.鈥� The breezily written 173-page manifesto is for people who want to destroy it.
Doctorow is adamant that no one be allowed to wield as much power as Mark Zuckerberg, who he deems a 鈥渇eudal warlord鈥� of middling intellect. 鈥淲e don鈥檛 need a better Zuck. We need to abolish Zuck.鈥�
He singles out Google, Facebook (鈥渨hich bizarrely insists that it is called 鈥楳eta鈥欌��) and Apple in particular for robbing us of choice 鈥� of the ability to pick up and relocate from the online spaces where we commune with friends, relatives and colleagues.
How did these megacorporations do it? With behavior that would have been deemed illegal in other times, and with lawyers and lobbyists who got them laws like the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act. It effectively criminalizes the invention of competing products.
Doctorow shows how such laws have let HP and Epson make us purchase overpriced printer ink. They鈥檙e what let auto dealerships and John Deere elbow independent mechanics out of the car and tractor repair business.
And they鈥檙e what discourage the kind of reverse-engineering that allows competitors to create products that can seamlessly converse with, say, Facebook Messenger or Apple鈥檚 iMessage.
Imagine if you could chat online with all your friends, nevermind which messenger service, operating system or device they use. Such a world actually existed 鈥� this grizzled tech journalist can attest 鈥� before Generation Z landed in maternity wards.
A few apps such as Pidgin still cling to that model of open-platform engineering. It鈥檚 enabled by what鈥檚 called 鈥渋nteroperability,鈥� something the Big Tech revert to next year under its Digital Markets Act.
Back in the day 鈥渋f you had an account on Yahoo Messenger, AIM and Skype, Pidgin could let you manage them all from one app.鈥� And it had its own super-secure encryption to protect your digital interactions from prying eyes.
A simple, well-crafted vision of a more civil, civic-minded online life 鈥� peppered with selected sad tales of the human cost of Big Tech greed 鈥� make for an illuminating read. Not least because Doctorow, an accomplished novelist and longtime former activist with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, lays out a plan of action.
Vanquishing Big Tech and restoring 鈥渁dversarial interoperability鈥� 鈥� what the EFF calls 鈥渃ompetitive compatibility鈥� 鈥� will take political will and, above all, technical competence.
There鈥檚 no taking back the internet without the kind of knowledge Doctorow imparts.
Frank Bajak, The Associated Press
