The Opposite of Good Fires is Wildfires
“And it’s important to note that the reason those firms (Google, Amazon, Facebook, Apple, Microsoft) were allowed to grow as large as they have, the reason that state regulators turned such a blind eye, is because states view those firms as potential deputies for their own exercises of power.”
They certainly work like deputies whenever an authoritarian pops up.
No need to use an archive link for Doctorow’s site. It’s not paywalled and he deserves the clicks. Here it is for anyone who wants to give him some clicks.
It needs an account to be fully readable
If you like his writing go to his website http://craphound.com and read some of his books. He has some good stuff - been following him for years.
It’s a member-only story on Medium, and some of us have used all our member-only stories. Like me.
I am not a member and I have never ever had problems accessing Doctorow’s site?
E2A; Firefox kills all my cookies so it might just be that they don’t know how many free reads I’ve had?
Ooo. Maybe that’s it. I’m on LibreWolf, though. It’s killing cookies too.
“We must abolish Mark Zuckerberg”
YES. And Musk. And spez. And all of these techtyrants.
Tyranny and the means to do it should be stopped. As long as it is allowed & enabled, it will take place.
Abolish billionaires
The long near 0 interest rate made lending money so cheap. Once it started to rise it’s easy to see how the tech sector has been overvalued. I think most people “knew” this but couldn’t articulate it since the value of social networks was so high. I am hopeful we can see some of the businesses split up or burned.
Hopefully this will reduce the obsession with business and we can focus on helping people but I doubt it
It just changes what businesses are going to be invested. Basically, you need a pretty good business plan now to get investment instead of the previous plan to steal underpants.
That is good. Business are meant to fail at some point. We need some cleaning up
Great article. It doesn’t just have one salient point, it has a bunch of related points that reinforce the big one, and a ton of zinger quotes everywhere to make it memorable. My favorite is this:
Rather than devoting all our energy to keep Meta’s empire of oily rags from burning, we could devote ourselves to evacuating the burn zone.
It’s honestly amazing that perhaps the aspect of technology that has most profoundly shaped peoples lives during the 2010s has turned out to be almost completely financially unsustainable
To me that implies that social media is a service or a utility, not a product. Maybe it’s something that should be publicly funded like roads and the mail.
