The Internet Con: How To Seize the Means of Computation

by Cory Doctorow

But then phonograms came along, and these jumped-up recipe-followers started to record themselves performing the music, and to sell those recordings. As far as the composers and the sheet music industry were concerned, this was an act of sheer piracy, profiting off the labor of a composer without their permission.

The USA established its version of these protections in 1998, with the passage of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). Section 1201 of the DMCA makes it a felony, punishable by a five-year prison sentence and a $500,000 fine, to “traffick” in a tool that can bypass “an effective means of access control.” The law is so broadly written that merely publishing information that could help someone beat an “access control” is a crime. Now,

Rather, the point of adding a lock to a product is to gain the right to invoke Section 1201 of the DMCA.

A note on terminology here: “adversarial interoperability” is a phrase that only a wonk could love. It’s hard to say, hard to spell, and its acronym (AI) is already taken.

This is a “radicalization” funnel. I started off not knowing much about a subject—not even what it was called! From there, I learned a few search terms, which got me channeled into a specific area (just as searches for “flat Earth evidence” and “flat Earth conspiracy” steer you into different online communities). The engagement-maximizing algorithm has learned from those who came before me that many people can be lured into longer online sessions if they are presented with a list of specific subtopics branching off the general topic they’ve landed on.

The internet helps us find subjects we didn’t know we were interested in; it lets us find people who are interested in those subjects. But the internet does one more thing: it lets us coordinate with those people to do stuff.

But here’s what I do know: “radicalization” is the end of a pipeline, and it is preceded not just by finding people who offer seductive and misleading solutions to real problems—it is preceded by the problems themselves. 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.