Cory Doctorow: Freeing Ourselves from the Clutches of Big Tech

https://www.noemamag.com/freeing-ourselves-from-the-clutches-of-big-tech/

by zwieback • 3 years ago

108 118 3 years ago

zwieback• 3 years ago

comcom: competitive compatibility. Hadn't heard this term before but I like it.

jeffbee3• 3 years ago

A freedom that I desire more greatly is a durable liberation from having to see any more Cory Doctorow articles. Remember 20 years ago when this guy was telling everyone that Microsoft was going to use the TPM to prevent you from installing Linux? Did that happen?

esafak• 3 years ago

Was the scaremonger wrong, or simply effective in effecting change?

Another contemporary issue: the Y2K scare.

jeffbee3• 3 years ago

It was wrong. Only charlatans pretend that shouting about something that wasn't going to happen stopped the thing from happening.

adolph3• 3 years ago

Yes and no. As it turned out the problem wasn't with Microsoft and PCs but Apple and phones.

toomuchtodo• 3 years ago

Did you or do you work for Big Tech? Not asking to doxx, but to surface potential bias. I can guess from your comment history, but attempting to assume most charitable interpretation and intent.

I donate to the EFF because they pay Cory, and Cory attempts to contribute towards keeping Big Tech at bay. Let's not argue about Big Tech intent here; they would conquer the world if they could. The evidence around this thesis is...robust.

(recent example of Microsoft blocking Firefox from FIDO2 auth in a very public way: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38502340)

uoaei• 3 years ago

It is fascinating how the "corporations are people" ideological bent has been internalized by so many. You see discussions all the time in these comments where people argue that "is" implies "ought" when it comes to the strategies and tactics implemented by (the people within) these powerful companies.

tetris112• 3 years ago

Same. EFF is the one organization I will always send my money to

trelane• 3 years ago

Microsoft was going to use the TPM to prevent you from installing Linux? Did that happen?

Yes, but on ARM.

https://openrt.gitbook.io/open-surfacert/common/boot-sequenc...

Fortunately, that was forestalled on x86. Who knows if they'll ever stop signing the Linux Shim for "security reasons."

c0l02• 3 years ago

Actually, yes, they did so also on (some) vendors' x86 firmware: https://www.omglinux.com/boot-linux-modern-lenovo-thinkpads-...

These default firmware settings will prevent "third-party"-MSFT-signed EFI binaries from loading - gee, I wonder why that distinction is suddenly necessary, too? :)

In my view and experience, the threat model that Secure Boot and similar schemes to establishing a root of trust to assure that "noone (esp. not the owner) has tampered with this device" tries to protect against is VERY rarely relevant (to the owner of said device). The times that I have been inconvenienced or even prevented by that stuff from getting the software I, the owner of the device, want installed onto hardware that I paid good money for at a store/vendor have been numerous, however.

whatshisface• 3 years ago

Hah! You say King Henry the Fifth was a great strategist, but the French got stuck in the mud at Agincourt!

jauntywundrkind3• 3 years ago

Microsoft does install keys that you can't revoke on many computers, making it somewhat impossible to secure one's own computer against outsiders.

Also, recent laptops have started shipping where 3rd party OSes are blocked by default. https://mjg59.dreamwidth.org/60248.html https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32066919

In my opinion, Cory is a treasure, a rare voice that consistent advocates for a development where humanity at large has the freedom to pioneer & advance the open electronic frontiers.

AnimalMuppet• 3 years ago

A freedom that I desire more greatly is a durable liberation from having to see any more Cory Doctorow articles.

You know, it's really easy to just ignore articles that you're not interested in. Yet you chose to respond. Why?

And your accusation - he was wrong about something 20 years ago - even if true, so what? I've been wrong about a thing or two in 20 years. And, while I know that pretty much everyone else also has been, I don't keep track of what people said 20 years ago so that I can point to it to show the world how wrong that person was.

This almost seems like it's personal for you. If so, why?

adolph3• 3 years ago

I much prefer Sivers' vision of tech independence[0] over Doctorow's vision of a law-regulation for every problem. They aren't necessarily incompatible with one another. Sivers is exit compared to Doctorow's voice (in the Exit, Voice, and Loyalty framework[1]). However, I think what Doctorow advocates is more likely to result in regulatory-capture than people-power. I think that capture is more likely to result in a world with higher costs in choosing forms of exit.

0. https://sive.rs/ti

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exit,_Voice,_and_Loyalty

jauntywundrkind3• 3 years ago

We are in such a connected age though. I do want to exit and start my own shit, but I don't want to walk away from all my friends and family who aren't into pioneering a new digital existence.

Sure I can keep running my xmpp server & begging people to contact me over xmpp. But I'm going to miss all the life updates & chatter my friends are doing on Facebook or Instagram or Discord.

The points in this article seem super spot on. The anti-cirumvention laws obstruct any kind of fair rise of an interesting alternative. We can walk away, but only if we are ok severing ties. Competitive compatibility is the relief we need to allow meaningful choices.

The world of physical products allowed consumers a lot of property rights to the stuff they purchased, but in the cloud age these lords of the cloud have everything tightly sealed up in data-keeps and you likely stand 'in felony contempt of business model' (and are likely liable for these fines that start at half a million dollars for first infraction for just making the tool), if you do anything that isn't explicitly built into the app already.

This shift from the world having some property rights to being ruled over from afar by contract law was pointed out by Mark Lemley, decades ago, and highlighted in the lovely Web scraping for me but not for thee, which points out that big companies all got their start off the exact sort of violations & scraping & mercenary-done competitive compatibility that would get you or I blasted out of the waters in a heartbeat. https://blog.ericgoldman.org/archives/2023/08/web-scraping-f... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37264970

Exit is only interesting if it doesn't mean going off to live in a digital barrel. I absolutely fully agree, we need to own the means of connection. We fully need to bootstrap real alternatives. But if the alternative has to create a walk-away movement to succeed, that's a horrible thing. And, people everywhere should have some informational property rights. That there are digital system & cloud stuff involved shouldn't so fundamentally strip people of rights & freedom as it does.

ryandrake2• 3 years ago

Walking away from Social Media does not necessarily mean walking away from friends and family. Family/social connections existed before S.M. and they will exist after it’s gone. If your friends are not even willing to keep in touch unless it is over a specific BigTech-mediated advertising platform, well, that probably says more about them and about the reality of your relationship.

surge3• 3 years ago

I'd use matrix before xmpp.

I at least use Signal now, that's not bad.

ysofunny2• 3 years ago

My own take on [0] is that is way too focused on the technical aspects of the problems

but most of these problems aren't technical in nature.

no amount of 'tech hacking' can solve what are ultimately political (socioeconomic) issues.

these are matters of government policy and such. the law is not about the words used to write it down with, but about the principlies behind, about the intents of the people who wrote it; regardless of who is reading.

but I also consider that "law making" and computing are ultimately solving a very similar problem so do feel free to dismiss what I say

adolph3• 3 years ago

Sivers and Doctorow discuss different problem-solution pairs. Are the problems posed by Doctorow not technically solvable?

Primary Automobile diagnostic codes: Doctorow's hypothetical tech solution already exists in OpenPilot. This is due to a technical standard, CAN bus[0]. The CAN is is easier to access with the government mandate of an ODB connector[1] but that wasn't necessary, just helpful.

0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CAN_bus

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On-board_diagnostics

bitwize• 3 years ago

Welcome to Hackernews, where the strong hand of government is the cause of, and solution to, all of life's problems.

metabagel4• 3 years ago

Government has power which we individually lack. It makes sense to harness that power for individual freedom and the common good. The idea that this will be subverted by corporations to fulfill their ends is naive, because they are trying to do that anyway.

picometer• 3 years ago

Honestly, perhaps I’m a purist, but Derek Sivers’ list isn’t sufficient for this type of “tech independence”. You can’t get around having to essentially rent your domain from the registry, unless you set up a registrar yourself. Perhaps you’re fine with using a numeric IP address and you don’t need to engage DNS; then you are still relying on your ISP: Comcast, Centurylink, Starlink, etc. OK, set up your own ISP - it is possible. But your connectivity to other regions of the state/province, country, or globe is fundamentally an _interdependency_ relationship, and pursuing independence is anathema to that.

Not to say that this list isn’t incredibly valuable for most people; and I have a similar “tech independent” setup myself. But it’s definitely not an alternative to the types of solutions that Cory Doctorow puts forth.

Edit… I missed your note about them not being incompatible so this whole comment is a bit of a strawman. But I highly respect the depth of knowledge that Doctorow has on these matters and don’t think he means for government regulation to be an alternative to personal tech agility.

danaris• 3 years ago

Tech independence is, at best an individual solution. Sure, maybe you can be free, but you leave everyone else behind.

What we need are collective solutions. Solutions that work to protect your parents, your children, your friends, your co-workers—everyone—from tech megacorporations whose intention—in some cases openly and explicitly—is to own the world and make everyone pay rent to them for existing in the digital space.

At worst, "tech independence" is a mirage. You may have your own physical server, running an OS you've built from scratch, whose code you've inspected and verified free from infiltration, but you're still communicating over wires owned by those same megacorporations. If too many people walk away and say "not my problem anymore," rather than fighting for better laws and regulations to rein in the massive overreach of big tech companies, we lose the critical mass to be able to continue to fight them.

Which would you rather have:

A world where no one has to pay that digital rent? Where everyone can communicate, network, etc privately and safely, with end-to-end encryption over open protocols?

Or one where you get to play the Lone Hero Standing Alone Against The Evil, while others continue to be abused?

raziel2p2• 3 years ago

This works for certain things, like email and such - but it only works for very tech-savvy people, not the general consumer, and it stops working at a certain scale: One of the examples from the article is about car manufacturers (who also employ big tech like business methods). Good luck engineering your own car.

Similarly, while I could pay 2-3 times more for a Fairphone or such, it'd be better if tech independence was available to everyone, including for consumer-grade smartphones.

On a related note, I think devices such as Fairphone and Framework laptops prove that even without regulation, "free" (as in freedom) products are already more expensive, you don't need regulations to make that happen.

lasermike026• 3 years ago

Stop buying and using cars. Cars are the worst, most destructive invention in human history. Want global peace? Stop driving cars and burning oil. Want to save the environment? Stop driving cars and burning oil. Want to bring life back into your community? Walk. Want to get healthy and get into shape? Walk. Want to commute? Bike and take public transit. Want to take control of your life and dump these disgusting corporations? Don't buy, don't drive, and don't burn oil.

idopmstuff• 3 years ago

What about the large number of people who live in places where this isn't possible?

thejohnconway5• 3 years ago

The problem is that cars made it possible for people to live in those sorts of places, cheaply enough.

Not a solution, just an observation. If cars weren't really a thing, people would live in denser communities with walkable services (I include rural communities in this. Pre-car villages are pretty dense, and have, you know, things like shops, etc.).

lotsofpulp9• 3 years ago

That is the intractable political problem. Short term pain is unavoidable to get to the long term fix, and voters have no tolerance for short term pain (still measured in decades).

pharmakom• 3 years ago

Reversing decades of creeping car dependency will be difficult.

alfalfasprout• 3 years ago

Yeah, no. I enjoy my cars very much.

thejohnconway5• 3 years ago

I am in favour of making you pay for the externalities with taxes. Fair?

vitiral3• 3 years ago

I agree with the problems, however the solutions seem far fetched.

90% of these "solutions" are that the government will save the day with decisions that benefit its citizens and it's own bottom line. That doesn't represent reality and I don't see how you could get there from here.

nadermx5• 3 years ago

In some sense the government, which occasionally is run by sensible people, does save the day. Take Portland Oregon, or Curitiba Brazil as examples. They saw gains in multi modal design that benefited all citizens, not just the privileged elite who can afford the luxury of mono transit design.

gretch7• 3 years ago

Maybe this doesn't apply to your govt, but I live in the US and I don't have any confidence in the govt to "fix" tech related problems and get e.g. right to repair right.

Why?

Because they can't even solve the classic problems in front of them. Primarily healthcare. Healthcare is a thing that affects everyone. It's a problem as old as time. And it's vital to life. If the government can't get this right, what chance is there that we can trust them to regulate something like right to repair.

amelius• 3 years ago

The reality will probably be that the government will start supporting companies in their quest to lock down their hardware to prevent bad state actors from using the tech, but at the same time this is useful to track citizens.

snoopsnopp• 3 years ago

The government cured an incurable disease in a year and gave away its cure to its biggest enemies for free and people are still acting like the government is bad and oppressive. It really shuts down good dialogue when “the government” is demonized beyond all reason.

verdverm3• 3 years ago

What incurable disease has been cured?

atoav• 3 years ago

Even better are people who demonize governments and at the same time think it is somehow a good idea to vote people into government who run on not much more than claiming the government is evil and cannot function.

What do you even expect them to do? Enrich themselves? Make government even more dysfunctional to prove your point?

I don't know about you, but even if I believed governments are evil and dysfunctional I'd rather vote someone idealistic in who doesn't believe that and tries to really fix things. Unless of course you want the whole system to go down.

vitiral3• 3 years ago

A disease (covid, as they later stated) that 99% of people recover from naturally is not incurable. It is literally curred by your own immune system.

metabagel4• 3 years ago

90% of these "solutions" are that the government will save the day with decisions that benefit its citizens and it's own bottom line. That doesn't represent reality and I don't see how you could get there from here.

This attitude is poisonous. It's not constructive.

Edit: It's not constructive to dismiss government out of hand with vague hand-wavy arguments. Government may or may not be the solution. If you don't think it's the solution, you should be able to produce concrete arguments to support your thinking.

vitiral3• 3 years ago

I guess the problem is I don't believe there are solutions. So many of our problems stem from a collective insanity to solve every problem we set our eyes on. Not everything that hurts is bad, not everything that kills is harmful. Death and decay are part of all systems, resistance is the path of suffering.

Possibly the ultimate poison and deconstruction? We would be better off unlearning so many things we think we know.

blihp• 3 years ago

While it isn't impossible, I agree that it's unlikely in the current political climate. If we could ever get back to a place where government was even remotely functional, it could almost trivially address the right to repair issue via procurement policies (i.e. 'we will only buy from suppliers who...')

surge3• 3 years ago

Yeah the cognitive dissonance between writing "Little Brother" and "government can be trusted with more power" while its simultaneously advocating for encryption back doors is mind boggling.

hn_acker• 3 years ago

There isn't necessarily cognitive dissonance between "no government can't ever be trusted with encryption backdoors" and "the government could eventually made trustworthy enough to regulate oligpolies".

stillwithit• 3 years ago

For those who only lived post-Reagan where the Boomers who took advantage of the New Deal system dismantled it to then claim ownership of everything… government looks like the problem. Prior to that it was actually a quite capable social construct which has been hollowed out intentionally

But it’s the meat suits in charge of government that are the problem. We hide behind reductive euphemisms.

The problem is Nancy Pelosi, Trump, Biden, Mitch McConnell, Schumer, Feinstein, Grassley, RBG… the problem is leaving the same old ossified assholes in charge.

Electrical turnovers have flushed corruption and improved economic gains for public: https://www.nber.org/papers/w29766

Stop voting for post world war, Cold War paranoids, who huffed leaded gas fumes prior to the ban. Ageist? Who cares! Look their implicit ageism deflating the next generation, doing nothing but ignoring global warming.

The problem is not nebulous social terms like “government” or “capitalism”. It’s the fucking nutjobs in power.

Everyone wants to take the Leave it to Beaver approach to our elders. The result is nihilistic indifference to the future as we wax poetic about the problem. It’s bizarre and pathetic how we continue to debate the issue in vacuous abstraction

archsurface• 3 years ago

People won't even switch from chrome to firefox. The apathy is revolting.

verdverm3• 3 years ago

Why do you assume it's apathy and not a conscious choice?

ishanmahapatra• 3 years ago

For me, the reason I keep a Chromium browser around is because government websites sometimes just don’t work on anything other than bog standard Chrome.

surge3• 3 years ago

People used to say the same about IE. Most people don't think about it. I just Brave personally.

openthc• 3 years ago

We make software for the regulated cannabis space; we work with government agencies. Despite years of folks indside and outside the industry telling these government regulators to NOT use expensive single-use RFID tags -- they've been plowing forwared with it since 2014. The lobbiest and industry had their ear and the indivudual voices of reason couldn't effect change. How can government make good choices for the citizen when their is money in their ear? How can the citizens become a louder voice than the money-in-the-ear?

In one case; we spent like a year with an agency working on design goals for a track-and-trace system. At the end, they had only one conclusive finding -- use algorithimic IDs for a distrubted/federated type system; they even stated in the findings to use 128bit IDs (eg: ULID/UUID). Then when they implemented their system; that wasn't indidcated as a requirement and the other soft-findings from their year long study were completely ignored.

zer00eyz• 3 years ago

... That’s because William Shockley was more or less a Nazi.

... (“The Treacherous Eight,” in tech lore)

This whole section is just a bit off, I feel like cory's political agenda is bending the story. They would have stayed and worked with him but not for him, they tried... They weren't "treacherous" they were traitorous.

As for the whole non compete MA vs CA... well the boston area is loaded with all sorts of labs, doing all sorts of drug dev still. The non competes make more sense in that industry, where projects take years, and you dont want anything to slip out before your patent is filed. Bad for one kind of tech, good for another kind... it was a choice.

Cory used to be great, he was fresh and pithy. Hes got a Stalman like zelosy now, without the monotonic message.

pineaux• 3 years ago

Yeah, thats logical. He sees things getting worse and sees he was too reasonable in the past. "Maybe if I am more zealous and less reasonable, I might be able to be part of a less-worse future."

It's a biased way of seeing things, but very understandable.

DrDroop2• 3 years ago

Why does Cory Doctorow hate us so much, and why do we let him get away with this? We invite him to be the speaker at prestigious conferences, give him the keynote slot, just so we can all hear him lecture us on the evils of the companies we all work for, and that pay us so we can feed our family. Forget about Saudi Aramco, I the intellectual property lawyer thinks big tech deserves more mind shares in the big evil corp conspiracy. What needs to be done about this is what I can do about this, decades, I tell you, decades of refactoring intellectual/property/contract law.

WolfeReader• 3 years ago

"My company gives me a salary, therefore its behavior should not be criticized." Is that a pretty accurate summary of your post?

DrDroop2• 3 years ago

Yep, it is not just a accurate summary of my post, I say for it, it does it better.

earle_wa• 3 years ago

For small to medium size hardware companies that want to make their products easy for customers to repair and tinker with, and at the same time make it difficult for competitors to to copy the design, what are the options?

Adafruit has succeeded here, I think mostly due to the great online community, innovative support, and the large volume of products they offer. But some Kickstarters have been ripped off by Chinese firms, sometimes before the Kickstarter even ships.

I see a few options: - Build a brand and community around the product(s) - Lock the firmware down and make tinkering available through the use of an API or scripting (less flexible as firmware cannot be open sourced, and doesn't allow for better repair and tinkering) - File and enforce patents (expensive) - Tie to a cloud based service, i.e. Philips Hue (annoying if that's not the main product being sold)

If others have put more thought into this would be happy to hear your thoughts, or read any resources you are aware of.

JohnFen6• 3 years ago

Adafruit has succeeded here, I think mostly due to the great online community, innovative support, and the large volume of products they offer.

Yes to all of that. I'd also add that they benefit from being a company that doesn't make you feel like you need a shower after doing business with them.

nonrandomstring• 3 years ago

Always an enjoyable read from Doctorow.

Noticed this that stood out;

"emotional (or financial) strain of knowing ..."

As an astute observation about which few care to "psychologise". Namely, that beyond simple profit, the blind reason of markets, and business just being business, there's a lot of plain bloody-minded egotism out there in the corporate world. There's folks who will destroy value and opportunity, not because it's "competitive" or "necessary", but because it pleases them. And they throw their toys out of the pram if anyone threatens their lunch or questions their entitlement to have it.

We don't acknowledge or talk enough about the /emotional/ landscape in the tech world. That is a serious blind-spot when you have people like Musk and Bezos in the mix.

raziel2p2• 3 years ago

Discussion point: Is this exclusive to the tech world? Or occurring more often?

devaiops9001• 3 years ago

Government is not the answer here. Would like to see less advocacy for government and more working code from Doctorow.

Cory Doctorow: Freeing Ourselves from the Clutches of Big Tech

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