internet con

(2023) by cory doctorow – The Internet Con – How to Seize the Means of Computation – [https://www.penguinrandomhouse.ca/books/721311/the-internet-con-by-cory-doctorow/9781804291245]

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 extraction. 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.

yeah.. but we’ve been in hostage (sea world) since forever..

need to try a nother way if we want to be legit free

findings:

1\ undisturbed ecosystem (common\ing) can happen

2\ if we create a way to ground the chaos of 8b legit free people

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.

*makes no diff as long as still all in sea world.. need legit global detox leap.. literacy and numeracy (computation et al) both elements of colonialism/control/enclosure.. we need to calculate differently and stop measuring things

ie: need means (nonjudgmental expo labeling) to undo hierarchical listening as global detox

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.

again.. matters little if we interop but still in sea world.. and (to me) any focus on annihilation is cancerous distraction.. just perpetuates prison ness

let’s try this io dance

imagine if we listened to the itch-in-8b-souls 1st thing everyday & used that data to connect us (tech as it could be.. ai as augmenting interconnectedness as nonjudgmental expo labeling)

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intro’d via bruce k fb share:

Great new book by Cory Doctorow: *The Internet Con: How To Seize The Means Of Computation*

“In the nineteenth century, American robber barons got together and formed trusts: for example, a group of railroad owners could sell their shares to a “railroad trust” and become beneficiaries of the trust. The trustees—the same robber barons, or their representatives—would run the trust, deciding how to operate all these different, nominally competing railroads to maximize the return to the trustees (the railroads’ former owners). A trust was a way of merging all the dominant companies in a single industry (or even multiple related industries, like oil refineries, railroads, pipelines and oil wells) into a single company, while maintaining the fiction that all of these companies were their own businesses. Any company that didn’t sell to the trust was quickly driven to its knees. For example, if you owned a freight company and wouldn’t sell out to the trust, all the railroads you depended on to carry your freight would charge you more than they’d charge your competitors for carrying the same freight—or they’d refuse to carry your freight at all. What’s more, any business that supplied a trust would quickly find itself stripped of its profit margins and either bankrupted and absorbed by the trust, or allowed to eke out bare survival. If you supplied coal to the railroad trust, all the railroads would refuse to buy your coal unless you knocked your prices down until you were making next to nothing—or losing money. Hell, if you got too frisky, they might refuse to carry your coal from the coal mine to the market, and then where’d you be? Enter the trustbusters, led by Senator John Sherman, author of the 1890 Sherman Act, America’s first antitrust law. In arguing for his bill, Sherman said to the Senate: “If we will not endure a King as a political power we should not endure a King over the production, transportation, and sale of the necessaries of life. If we would not submit to an emperor we should not submit to an autocrat of trade with power to prevent competition and to fix the price of any commodity.” In other words, when a company gained too much power, it became the same kind of kingly authority that the colonists overthrew in 1776. Government “by the people, of the people and for the people” was incompatible with concentrated corporate power from companies so large that they were able to determine how people lived their lives, made their incomes and structured their cities and towns. *This theory of antitrust is called the “harmful dominance” theory, and it worked. In the early part of the twentieth century, the largest commercial empires—such as John D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil Company—were shattered by the application of the Sherman Act. As time went by, other antitrust laws like the Clayton Act and the FTC Act reaffirmed the harmful dominance approach to antitrust: the idea that the law should protect the public, workers, customers and business owners from any harms resulting from excessive corporate power. Not everybody liked this approach. Monopoly is a powerful and seductive idea. Starting a business often involves believing that you know something other people don’t, that you can see something others can’t see. Building that business up into a success only bolsters that view, proving that you possess the intellect, creativity and drive to create something others can’t even conceive of. In this light, competition seems wasteful: why must you expend resources fighting off copycats and pretenders when you could be using that same time delighting your customers and enriching your shareholders? As Peter Thiel puts it, “Competition is for losers.” The competition-is-for-losers set never let go of their dream of being autocrats of trade. They dreamt of a world where the invisible hand would tenderly lift them and set them down atop a throne of industry, from which they could **direct the lives of millions of lesser beings who don’t know what they want until a man of vision shows it to them. These autocrats-in-waiting were already wealthy, and they bankrolled fringe kooks who had very different ideas about the correct administration of antitrust.”

*worked for what?

mufleh humanity law: we have seen advances in every aspect of our lives except our humanity– Luma Mufleh

**need a nother way for 8b people to live.. sans any form of people telling other people what to do.. sans any form of m\a\p