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/362/ Life Doesn't Have to Zuck ft. Cory Doctorow (Patreon)

Published:
2023-09-05 10:52:42
Imported:
2024-07
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On the internet being sh*t.

Tech critic, author and blogger Cory Doctorow joins us to talk about his new book, The Internet Con. He tells us his ONE SIMPLE TRICK to fix the internet: interoperability. Breaking down the tech giants' walled gardens is the first step to dethroning them. 

How does Big Tech depend on intellectual property to cement their monopolies? How can their grip be loosened? How do we make tech work for us?

In the After Party, the boys debate Doctorow's anti-monopolist arguments, and look at the wider ways tech is affecting everything from agriculture to services. We conclude by asking what the best way to guarantee freedom of expression is. 

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Blake

Amazed at how eloquent Doctorow is here, I read some of his written works and he always seemed slightly smarmy but listening to this I was instantly convinced by anything he said.

Cody

I've encountered Doctorow's idea of the "felony contempt of business model" before in his book with Rebecca Giblin and it struck me that this is what IP and copyright law in particular always was doing. In a pre-digital world, sans copyright the book publishing industry, to take an example, wouldn't be able to prevent competitors' selling unauthorized reproductions of their books at a lower price. Copyright law was originally introduced in the 18th C. to replace a system of government-granted printing privileges and make feasible a business model of selling copies of works at a significant premium to their material costs of production. Copyright's now just supporting different business models, largely based around advertising and subscriptions. That's not to defend copyright--rather I think it means we need to be more critical of how it and other IP rights commodify labour and other inputs rather than the specific legal form of intellectual property rights. Similarly I'm skeptical of the "rentier" label for big tech firms because it doesn't capture how user attention and experience is commodified. The pressures to turn user eyeballs into profits wouldn't go away if big tech firms were split up, so the question becomes: what are the business models going to be? Are the new, interoperable mini-Facebooks and mini-Googles going to charge users directly, or compete on how much value they can extract from user attention through advertising? If the former, you're limiting access based on who can pay; if the latter, then you just have a more dispersed (and possibly harder to regulate) version of the predation from platforms we have today. Hoping for "hobbyist" platforms a la Mastodon as a wholesome solution to this dilemma I think underestimates the labour and resources that go into maintaining these platforms. (A big reason why Mastodon sucks and has failed to gain traction is its infrastructure just isn't as good as the big tech firms'.) Anyway, enjoyed the conversation and I'm glad these topics are getting discussed. Would love to hear something on the culture industries around streaming and the Hollywood strikes.