Cory Doctorow

When the tech platforms promised a future of "connection," they were lying. They said their "walled gardens" would keep us safe, but those were prison walls. The platforms locked us into their systems and made us easy pickings, ripe for extaction. Twitter, Facebook and other Big Tech platforms hard to leave by design. They hold hostage the people we love, the communities that matter to us, the audiences and customers we rely on. The impossibility of staying connected to these people after you delete your account has nothing to do with technological limitations: it's a business strategy in service to commodifying your personal life and relationships. We can - we must - dismantle the tech platforms. In The Internet Con, Cory Doctorow explains how to seize the means of computation, by forcing Silicon Valley to do the thing it fears most: interoperate. Interoperability will tear down the walls between technologies, allowing users leave platforms, remix their media, and reconfigure their devices without corporate permission. Interoperability is the only route to the rapid and enduring annihilation of the platforms. The Internet Con is the disassembly manual we need to take back our internet.

How to Seize the Means of Computation

The Internet Con

Matt Stein

Technology isn’t the problem. Stop thinking about what technology does and start thinking about who technology does it to and who it does it for.

Quoting the news isn’t stealing. But you know what is stealing? Actual stealing.

We don’t need a better Zuck. We need to abolish Zuck.

If Apple—or Google, or Facebook, or Microsoft—decides that it is in its own self-interest to prey on us, or to allow someone else to do so, our defenders become our prison guards, and the fortress becomes a dungeon. Our protectors become our hostage-takers.

Tech monopolies are epiphenomena: they are effects, not causes. They are the effect of an ideology that embraces monopolies and inequality as a natural, even inevitable phenomenon. It’s an ideology that lionizes monopolists as once-in-a-generation geniuses who deserve the power to structure the daily routines and constraints of billions of their fellow humans.

Karolina

Standards are infrastructure. Infrastructure casts a long shadow.

The internet doesnt make more people vulnerable to bad ideas, but it lets ideas of all kinds—bad and good—spread widely.

The Internet Con quotes

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