Technology

Love Doctrow, but this is a loooong article. I've used AI to summarize it:

1. Big tech companies grew explosively due to network effects, but are now too big to govern effectively.
2. Social media platforms in particular are poorly suited to moderate billions of diverse users and are prone to failure and scandal.
3. Governments and regulators have failed to rein in big tech, often protecting companies rather than users.
4. Low switching costs mean that tech companies' growth could rapidly reverse if people leave the platforms.
5. However, tech companies use acquisitions, lobbying, and legal threats to lock in users and block competitors.
6. Instead of trying to fix inherently flawed large platforms, we should make it easy for people to leave them.
7. If we could export networks of relationships from platforms, people would have the power to migrate based on companies' practices.
8. Allowing people to easily leave would force platforms to respect users and address problems to retain them, or else face implosion.
9. The alternative is an endless cycle of scandal, ineffective reform, and accumulating 'fire debt' that eventually erupts in crisis.
10. It's time to stop trying to perfect huge tech companies and instead give people the means to choose alternatives.

"Companies cannot unilaterally mediate the lives of hundreds of millions — or even billions — of people, speaking thousands of languages, living in hundreds of countries.The real problem is that no one should have that job. That job shouldn’t exist. We don’t need to find a better Mark Zuckerberg. We need to abolish Mark Zuckerberg."

"Rather than passing laws requiring Threads to prioritize news content, or to limit the kinds of ads the platform accepts, we could order it to turn on this Fediverse gateway and operate it such that any Threads user can leave, join any other Fediverse server, and continue to see posts from the people they follow, and who will also continue to see their posts."

"Tech companies are even more concerned with criminalizing the things you want to do to them.

Frank Wilhoit described conservativism as “exactly one proposition”:

There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.

This is likewise the project of corporatism. Tech platforms are urgently committed to ensuring that they can do anything they want on their platforms — and they’re even more dedicated to the proposition that you must not do anything they don’t want on their platforms."