The Internet Con
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. 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.
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- Fantastic talk and a terrific write-up. Whether or not you agree with Doctorow's proposed solutions, I think his analysis of the problem and how we got here is pretty compelling.
If you want to watch the talk (linked to from TFA): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ydVmzg_SJLw
I you want to go even deeper, I also highly recommend his book, "The Internet Con: How to Seize the Means of Computation"
- Cory Doctorow's books "Chokepoint Capitalism" and "The Internet Con" discuss a good number of possible reforms, if anyone is interested
- Agree with all of your RSS points. AT Proto are data rails, but they are more fancy and open rails; they are a superior primitive imho while also inherently preventing ecosystem closure that has happened with every social network previously. Consumption and discovery can be solved for, and I argue, generative AI has a role to play here. u/echelon and u/wild_egg have comments that touch on this in another thread:
> I expect for this kind of tech to have really novel use cases. For it to sit between me and the internet and remove the ads, nuke time wasting clickbait, and obliterate low-information irrelevant noise. For it to be my personal bodyguard that protects me from any and all forms of attention stealer. ... I want this to be tech to give birth to an anti-Google, anti-social media algo, anti-advertiser terminator from the future. Something that torpedoes the previous paradigm and that does it so quickly that the old purveyors can't adjust in time. [1]
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> It's now my daily driver for web access. It monitors for content I'm interested in (that's how I found your comment), handles all my searches and feeds, can dynamically adapt its interface, and is working on integrations to submit content for me so that I don't have to leave that interface to write these replies. [2]
We can build and tailor the interface for both discovery and consumption of the data transiting the AT Proto rails. This could be a client on your device (what Apple Intelligence should be, exposing an API to other apps to perform this compute), this could be an agent that runs on your own PDS [3] and then provides a distilled feed for you based on what it learns about you through signal from your client that is not shared, and you would be able to share your customized discovery feed with others. Plug DeepSeek in for now (while keeping an eye towards drivers so you can plug any other LLM in and you're off the the races and the state of the art advances). In the book "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. AT Proto and Gen AI allows, to an extent, to sidestep the adversarial interoperability needed to diminish Big Tech control of the digital social fabric. We are currently on a path towards seizing the means of computation and users controlling their experience and consumption. To me, this is the most exciting part of the work ahead.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42836289
- I urge you to read "Technofeudalism" by Yanis Varoufakis or "The Internet Con" by Cory Doctorow to appreciate why this is extremely difficult for consumers and entrepreneurs, and not just an inconvenience.
- This essentially advocates for the same thing defined in Cory Doctorow's The Internet Con: How to Seize the Means of Computation. That point being, requiring open protocols from big tech will enable competition and innovation. This will return the creative inspiration to the technologists. I completely agree with it, and I hope we are reaching an inflection point where walled data gardens are cracked open.
- If you haven't read it, I highly recommend Cory Doctorow's book "The Internet Con: How to Seize the Means of Computation." I originally had low expectations that anybody would have a reasonable answer, and mainly purchased it to support the author making it available DRM free, but have been very impressed with the analysis.
Relevant to this issue, Cory discusses how this (ab)use of copyright is what enables gigantic tech companies and walled gardens, because competing with them is not a technical problem, but rather a legal problem. He's right! (At least for now until the wet dreams of the DRM people are realized and there's hardware DRM baked into everything). If people could without fear of lawyers build stuff, big tech would have to compete on merits and user experience rather than wielding armies of IP lawyers and legal threats.
