The Internet Con: How To Seize the Means of Computation

by Cory Doctorow

effects are merely how Big Tech gets big. Switching costs are how Big Tech stays big.

If we someday triumph over labor exploitation, gender discrimination and violence, colonialism and racism, and snatch a habitable planet from the jaws of extractive capitalism, it will be thanks to technologically enabled organizing.

In other words, a legal victory is far more devastating than a mere technical one. A firm that sues a rival into oblivion for aiding its customers in grabbing a better experience for themselves (better prices, more privacy or just a user interface that’s better adapted to their capabilities and disabilities) wins a powerful prize. That firm can use the law to reach beyond its four walls, into the minds of potential future competitors and their investors, and permanently terrorize them out of even the merest thought of a challenge to the company’s dominance. That firm can reach into the hearts of its own customers and convince them that any attempt to disloyally reconfigure their experience of the firm’s products will be a futile waste of hope. Venture capitalists call the products and services adjacent to the Big Tech firms’ core technology “the kill zone” and will not invest in any company that proposes to pitch its tent in that dead place. Abandon all hope, ye who enter here.

the kill zone indeed

At the time of this writing, Facebook is being sued by a group of sex workers who allege that Facebook’s top executives took bribes from OnlyFans to add these sex workers to the terrorist watchlist. The performers had quit OnlyFans and struck out for platforms that treated them better and paid them more, and OnlyFans, the suit alleges, wanted to make sure they failed on these new platforms, lest their success tempt other performers to quit the service.

It’s an established fact that 99.83 percent of all conversations about blockchain are nonconsensual.