Cory Doctorow - Surveillance Capitalism Monopoly
Description:
Cory Doctorow
Surveillance Capitalism is Monopoly Capitalism
New Zealand's privacy commissioner calls Big Tech "morally bankrupt liars." He's right. Everything that Big Tech claims about itself should be treated with suspicion -- including (especially) the marketing materials in which they claim that they can use surveillance to override our free will and convince us of any idea advertisers are willing to pay
to spread.
Big Tech *does* control our choices: by holding our friends hostage in their walled gardens, by using software locks to prevent us from choosing whose software we run or where we get our gadgets fixed, and by controlling the discourse by dominating search and recommendation.
We can choose to fix Big Tech -- by subjecting them to the kinds of expensive regulations that only the biggest companies can afford -- or we can choose to fix the internet -- by breaking up Big Tech into manageable pieces, which will not be able to afford to police their users for terrorism, harassment, extremism, copyright infringement, etc.
But we can't do both.
Better to have a free, fair and open internet than to drape golden chains around Big Tech and hope that they never outgrow them.