The Internet Con

I consider myself pretty well versed in the shortcomings of capitalism, but this book still managed to shock me time and time again with tales of the brazen greed of tech companies over time. It was an easy read, which I appreciated, and I greatly enjoyed the conversational and sometimes colorful tone of writing.

Yet even though the author said multiple times that he would explain how we go about fixing the problems of Big Tech, he never really did. That is, unless I somehow figure out how to suddenly make Congress listen to me instead of a huge corporation, or learn how to reverse-engineer my own social media company. Nevertheless, it’s a great read, and one that more people probably should. 

I guess expecting the Anarchist's Cookbook of Adversarial Interoperability would be a bit much, but I did feel like it was lacking any real practical solutions to Big Tech's rampant monopolization.

While being a very concise walk though of the systemic nature of the problems of big tech, I found the title: "How to seize the means of computation" and the blurb: "A Shovel-Ready Plan to Fight Enshittification" to lead me to expect some activist-first analysis. Instead it's "solutions" are very much recommendation to congress or government level policy-types. There is nothing in it that tells me what to do. I have nothing against this - the title and the blurb is just misleading. The analysis is very good though. So if you don't already know Doctorows analysis, it's great. Just don't expect any shovels to grab.

Cory Doctorows Buch über die zerstörerischen Monopole in der Technologie ist fundamental wichtig, um den aktuellen Zustand des Internets zu verstehen. Auch seine Forderung nach Interoperabilität und der Legalisierung "konpetitiver" Interoperabilität ist richtig und wichtig. Das Buch wirkt aber teilweise lediglich wir ein Anhang zu seinem letzten Buch "Chokepoint Capitalism" und wiederholt dessen Argumente im Kern "nur". Auch finden sich leider - entgegen den Versprechungen - keine wirklich praktischen Tipps, wie Einzelne zumindest etwas dazu beitragen können, das Problem zu lösen. (Ich war da vorab aber ohnehin schon skeptisch bzgl. dieser Versprechungen, weil das Problem eben nicht individuell zu lösen ist.)