The Internet Con Quotes

“To make tech better, we have to make it smaller—small enough that the bad ideas, carelessness and blind spots of individual tech leaders are their problems, not everyone else’s.”
― Cory Doctorow, The Internet Con: How to Seize the Means of Computation

“The hard problems of reforming social media are the laws that block interoperability and the management of tech giants’ unwillingness to provide interoperability in the absence of these laws. Because Big Tech can lock people into its silos, it can impose high switching costs on users who have the temerity to leave those silos: they can make you surrender your apps, or your data, or your relationships, or your media, or your customer list.”
― Cory Doctorow, The Internet Con: How to Seize the Means of Computation

“In my discussions with blockchain people, I’ve encountered a persistent pattern: first, they assume that if you disagree with them, it must be because you don’t understand them. If you manage to convince a blockchainist that you do understand them and that you still disagree with them, they assume you’re being paid to disagree with them.”
― Cory Doctorow, The Internet Con: How to Seize the Means of Computation

“I could write an entire (tedious) book about why I think blockchain-based technologies are foolish at best and scams at worst, but it wouldn’t convince anyone in blockchainland of anything.”
― Cory Doctorow, The Internet Con: How to Seize the Means of Computation

“Any company more powerful than the government is a company the government won’t be able to hold to account—that’s the very definition of too big to jail.”
― Cory Doctorow, The Internet Con: How to Seize the Means of Computation

“We need lots of tech, run by lots of different kinds of people and organizations, and we need to make it as close to costless as possible to switch from one to the other.”
― Cory Doctorow, The Internet Con: How to Seize the Means of Computation

“Today’s tech giants have not invented an interop-proof computer. They’ve invented laws that make interoperability illegal unless they give permission for it. A new, complex thicket of copyright, patent, trade secret, noncompete and other IP rights has conjured up a new offense we can think of as “felony contempt of business model”—the right of large firms to dictate how their customers, competitors and even their critics must use their products.”
― Cory Doctorow, The Internet Con: How to Seize the Means of Computation

“The lower the switching costs are, the better a company has to treat you if they want to keep your business.”
― Cory Doctorow, The Internet Con: How to Seize the Means of Computation

“Tech is the terrain on which our future fights will be fought. If we can’t seize the means of computation, we will lose the fight before it is even joined.”
― Cory Doctorow, The Internet Con: How To Seize the Means of Computation

“we can attack network effects by reducing switching costs.”
― Cory Doctorow, The Internet Con: How To Seize the Means of Computation

“It’s an established fact that 99.83 percent of all conversations about blockchain are nonconsensual.”
― Cory Doctorow, The Internet Con: How To Seize the Means of Computation

“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.”
― Cory Doctorow, The Internet Con: How To Seize the Means of Computation

“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.”
― Cory Doctorow, The Internet Con: How To Seize the Means of Computation

“The design for the Space Shuttle called for the creation of reusable solid rocket boosters, massive cone-tipped cylinders that would lift the Shuttle to 150,000 feet before falling away and floating to the ground on parachutes for recovery and reuse. This worked surprisingly well. The boosters were built in Brigham County, Utah, and shipped to Florida for takeoff. After each use, they’d be recovered from the open ocean, freighted to port, refurbished and, once again, shipped to Florida. The boosters were about 150 feet long, but they were precisely 12.17 feet in diameter—because they had to fit on a special railway flatcar for those overland shipments. The aerospace engineers who sat down to design those solid rocket boosters had a lot of parameters to juggle—the pull of gravity, the efficiency of rocket fuel, the weight of the payload. But mixed in with those parameters, immutable and inarguable was the width of a railcar, which was foreordained by the width of the Roman chariot wheelbase, which was, in turn, determined by the metalbeating know-how of Roman blacksmiths. Infrastructure casts a long shadow.”
― Cory Doctorow, The Internet Con: How To Seize the Means of Computation

“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.”
― Cory Doctorow, The Internet Con: How To Seize the Means of Computation