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[Cory Doctorow] With An Audacious Plan To Halt The Internet’s Enshittification And Throw It Into Reverse

hackaday.com Supercon 2023: [Cory Doctorow] With An Audacious Plan To Halt The Internet’s Enshittification And Throw It Into Reverse

Those of us old enough to remember BBS servers or even rainbow banners often go down the nostalgia hole about how the internet was better “back in the day” than it is now as a handful o…

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Cory Doctorow

Supercon 2023: with an Audacious Plan to Halt the Internet’s Enshittification and Throw It Into Reverse

hackaday.com /2024/10/03/supercon-2023-cory-doctorow-with-an-audacious-plan-to-halt-the-internets-enshittification-and-throw-it-into-reverse/

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I like Doctorow, and these point are valid. I just don’t see the American government doing anything to benefit the people, regardless of left or right orientation. Most Americans want abortion access and reasonable restrictions on gun sales; I can’t imagine any candidates, local or federal doing little more than making empty promises on these subjects. Even Obama care is a hugely compromised husk of reasonable healthcare for all, and you still have republicans clamoring to dismantle it.
I hate to be pessimistic, but I don’t think any American politician would take on this topic.
- I don’t think any American politician would take on this topic.
  That's the feature
- The FTC under Biden has begun to push back against tech monopolies.
  
  The Supreme Court overturning the Chevron doctrine could stop that pretty quick
  
  And Harris will probably replace the ftc head actually trying to enforce anti trust because of lobbying.
  Fucking citizens united
- Don't "both sides" this. It's the kind of thing people use to justify voting third party. Off the top of my head the Biden admin has been working to restore net neutrality and has an antitrust case against Ticketmaster and Live Nation
  
  I didn’t both sides this. To clarify; I meant that if republicans brought forth policies to preserve personal privacy, or the democrats decide to bust up monopolistic companies- doesn’t matter which side tried to bring up any of these ideas; they would be so neutered by the time the ink dried the impact would be negligible.
  I can see how you could take my comment as both sides-ing it. I haven’t seen either party do anything that impacts the quality of daily life (in a positive way) for myself, friends or family. The examples of abortion and gun control are just examples where the overwhelming majority of citizens want one thing, in very clear terms, and the government does absolutely nothing about it despite the wishes of the people.
  I’m also clearly not advocating for any third party. If you take the very common knowledge that the government no longer works for the people and twist that into throwing away your vote on Kennedy or Nader your problems are larger than limited browser selection.
  And how’s that antitrust case going? Where are we on net neutrality? Student loan forgiveness for like 10% of borrowers? Expanding Medicare? I only criticize democrats because that’s the party that’s supposed to do things for us. The American republicans are Christo- fascists who’ve long abandoned any pretense of constitutional law or responsibility for their country. Either way- we have crumbling infrastructure, hungry children, women dying because religious abortion restrictions, and lead pipes. And these shit bags can just send another $25 billion to kill more brown people in the Middle East.
  So forgive me if I doubt they’ll take the time to learn what http means or even consider something that doesn’t have a wealthy donor behind it.
- What you've expressed is not pessimism it's cynicism.
- I don’t think any American politician would take on this topic.
  And if they did it would be clear they didn't have a clue what they were talking about.
- I hate to be pessimistic, but I don’t think any American politician would take on this topic.
  it's only pessimism if it's not true and there are plenty of demonstrably true public examples to guarantee that this isn't pessimism; it's reality that sounds like pessimism.

Lack of competition in the market via mergers and acquisitions
Companies change things on the back end (“twiddle their knobs”) to improve their fortunes and have a united, consolidated front to prevent any lawmaking that might constrain them
Companies then embrace tech law to prevent new entrants into the market or consumer rights (see: DMCA, etc.)
This is the criteria he has laid out for the "enshitifacation" of the Internet.
This is funny to me because this is the exact pattern of every industry and service in the United States ever. The Internet isn't special, it's just the latest frontier for capitalism.
- The corporations have been doing this with housing. I live in CA and it is awful how many unhoused there are now, and the supreme Court made it illegal!I hope one day this will finally be the last straw for the uprising.

The danger here is that they make "open" standards so horrendously complex and ever evolving that only the billionaire mega corporations can can realistically keep up with them.
See the web where Google now control it completely by having such an enormous amount of code that even Microsoft couldn't be arsed to keep up, or Office Open XML, where 100% compatibility is limited to exactly one product: The one that made it. I just downloaded the documentation for the standard. It is over 5000 fucking pages long. That was part 1 of 4.
- And those 5000 pages were probably automatically generated from ... something.
- Another example here is the Matrix protocol, specifically designed from the ground up to be open and distributed. In reality, the only option for full-featured stable server software is the one maintained by the project itself, and there aren't a lot of third party clients available.
  Openness itself is a good goal, but the complexity itself can pose a barrier openness.
  
  true, but at least they have been working on modularizing it for a few years, and making it so that even unsupported message types can be displayed to some level
- I think that this is the reason that the rust programming language exists: to make learning the skill too hard for a regular person.
  
  My favorate quote about the language is, "it feels like rust was made by people who hate uncertan behavor." Languages with manual memory management are harder. On top of that, Rust demands you prove your memory management is 'correct'.
  
  Programming is already too hard for a regular person
  
  much easier than C/C++. no more random bugs that make no sense and basically untraceable segfault crashes

I loved the net when you had to have a clue to be there.
- The Eternal September is real
  
  Eternal September
  Mine began in truth about eight years before that. BBS and tymnet nodes enabled by shit load of blue and black box phone calls. Just go look at the neat and orderly wiring in a blue box and know that mine was nothing like that. Mine looked like low rent spider web of components stuffed in a cigar box.

Interoperability is how we “seize the means of computation.”
Good luck with that. If the success of the iPhone has taught me anything it is that the average person loves them some incompatible with anything but itself vertical integration.

Through no intervention or design, the market creates perverse incentives that only benefit a few. So the solution is to fiddle with the incentives?
Ya ever notice that "market reform" schemes always seem like negotiations with an angry god? Sometimes I think that ancient civilizations would be much better understood if we stopped referring to the "priest class" and started calling them economists.
- My default position remains the same, kill god.

This is nice and all but any solution requires a government captured by capital to work against capital feels as likely to work as thoughts and prayers.
- Yup. All of these "solutions" that sound original are known. The reason we don't apply them isn't because we don't know how to solve these issues, it's because capital has pulled the handbrake. This is the problem we have to solve. All the other problems fall downstream and will magically start getting solved if we can release the handbrake. If we're not talking about how to reduce regulatory capture, we're not taking about real solutions.
- I'm inclined to agree. I think the best path through would be to focus on laws that benefit multiple minor players that have a seat at the table.
  Antitrust laws in general are a good example. These function at the direct expense of big monopolies, but are exactly what companies need if they want in on what was monopolized. And in the case of breaking a monopoly down, the resulting "baby" companies given more power, growth opportunity, hiring opportunities (job growth) and money making potential than the parent. This can also spur economic growth for all the fat cats out there by creating many new investment and hiring potentials. Overall, if you can get past the monopoly itself (read: take the ball away from your billionaire of choice), everyone else involved stands to benefit.
  There may be other strategies, but I can't think of any right now. I think the key is to tip the scale in favor of more favorable outcomes, then repeat that a few more times, achieving incremental progress along the way. Doctorow outlines the ideal end state for all this, but it's up to everyone else to figure out how to get there.
  While I don't like the idea of embracing capital to improve things, the whole system is currently run this way. Standing with other monied interests that are aligned with the same goal might be the only way to go.
- It's not that we had enough power to guarantee we would make an impact. It's that we had enough power that we should have tried.

I think the best way to make the Internet less sh*tty is to get away from Google search.
I like the SearX search engine. It gives old-school, relevant search results, not google ranked ones.
https://search.inetol.net/
It's also spread out over many separate instances, so you can pick the one that best suits your search needs:
https://searx.space/
- I like Kagi a lot. It has a Small Web feature that is results from smaller sites like the good old days. Also has a Fediverse filter.
  
  Kagi, though, is also a private company and that means it's just a wait for the enshitification to start

I like Cory Doctorow.
However, I bought the novel Rabbits solely because Doctorow had a front cover blurb praising the novel.
It was downright a bad novel. Doctorow owes me $16.

Friendly reminder: Dotorow's wife is a director of a Disney subsidiary highly likely to be involved with DRM.
Ms Taylor is now the Director, StudioLab at The Walt Disney Studios. In that role she is responsible for ensuring that Disney continues to invest in the intersection between online tech and content distribution.
EDIT: You all are reading way too far into me bringing this up. Didn't say this to invalidate his point, mostly wanted to highlight something that I find most people don't know about him. It's something I think is important considering how much he styles himself as an idealogue/icon for technological freedom. He still makes good points, but the position he's doing it from should be known is all.
- Does that invalidate his point regarding enshittification?
  I think it might matter if Cory came out and said, I am starting an org with the resources to fix it. But I don’t see how this tidbit is relevant for a guy who coined the term about what’s happening here and has been beating the drum about the problem.
  
  Yeah this feels like a “no true Scot” fallacy to me, where anything he says should be invalid because of his wife’s position, which is false
  
  Cory has self styled and been treated as a free software icon for well over a decade. The whole enshittification thing is just the latest thing to bring him back into the public eye.
  It doesn't invalidate his point whatsoever, but it's important to know that what pays his bills is all.
- Is he, or has he ever been, a communist or associated with communists! We demand an answer!
  
  Lol, no. Also, big diff between associating with and being actively married to.
  Anyway I've edited my comment and I'll repeat tye edit here: You all are reading way too far into me bringing this up. Didn't say this to invalidate his point, mostly wanted to highlight something that I find most people don't know about him. It's something I think is important considering how much he styles himself as an idealogue/icon for technological freedom. He still makes good points, but the position he's doing it from should be known is all.
- Her running MakieLab (which might indeed utilise DRM, idk) doesn't invalidate her husband's point.
  
  It's no longer Makielab, as it was acquied by Disney. What they actually do now ias a subsidiary is unclear beyond the quote from her Wikipedia page, especially as her personal site linked to by Wikipedia is down.
  I spent a good chunk of my teen years on 4chan, I'm normally the one pushing the idea that a good point is valid regardless of the source.
  Anyway, I edited my comment and I'll copy that here: Didn't say this to invalidate his point, mostly wanted to highlight something that I find most people don't know about him. It's something I think is important considering how much he styles himself as an idealogue/icon for technological freedom. He still makes good points, but the position he's doing it from should be known is all.
- I don't have a stake in this argument, as this is my first time learning about Doctorow. I just want to add that a good phrase to express the situation you described is "potential conflict of interest."
- He still makes good points, but the position he’s doing it from should be known is all.
  I'll remember that whenever George Conway or his wife talk about politics: apparently their diametrically-opposed views are somehow intertwined.
- See Kelly Ann Conway and George Conway.
- I met Cory at a book signing and told him how much I loved Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom and he told me his wife works at Disney straight up.
  He's an honest dude who has done more for how we think of the internet (and how it could be) than the majority of humans on this planet.

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