My point is to avoid government overreach like how China, Russia, UK & almost India behave with regards to the internet existing & wanting companies to make backdoors within encryption or get booted out of such markets
> In the early 2000s, there was all this hype that the next frontier for American tech companies was China. Yahoo went into China and started ratting out its users to the politburo and having them arrested and tortured because that was what it took to stay in China. And Google, the “don’t be evil” company was like, “We’re going to do that, too.”
Even then, I think, they were like, “We don’t have any ideas. We can’t do better than Yahoo. We just have to do what Yahoo’s doing better than them. We’re not going to have a better idea than Yahoo has.” So, they went into China. (Project Dragonfly anyone?)
> In the early 2000s, there was all this hype that the next frontier for American tech companies was China. Yahoo went into China and started ratting out its users to the politburo and having them arrested and tortured because that was what it took to stay in China. And Google, the “don’t be evil” company was like, “We’re going to do that, too.”
Even then, I think, they were like, “We don’t have any ideas. We can’t do better than Yahoo. We just have to do what Yahoo’s doing better than them. We’re not going to have a better idea than Yahoo has.” So, they went into China. (Project Dragonfly anyone?)
Never really understood what draws people to Cory Doctorow. Over-the-top polemics aren't really good for much except making you angrier about something you're already angry about.
I mean its posted to jacobin.com -> go look up who the jacobins were and the time of terror and you realize the point of the site is over the top polemics. They named themselves after a group that slaughtered their political enemies. It's basically a more obscure older equivalent of khmer-rouge.com - naming yourself after historical political mass murderers.
But Doctorow's fiction is better than his opinion pieces.
Oh so he's idolizing the perpetrators of the 1804 massacre of the white population by the haitian revolutionaries on the orders of Jean-Jacques Dessalines, who then enacted racist policies in 1805?
You find with these revolutions the massacres of the innocent are easy to find after. The haitians were not somehow more moral and upstanding than the french.
> No, by 1804 the "Black Jacobins" were mostly deported with Toussaint L'Ouverture already dead.
Except Dessalines, who was previously one of his Black Jacobin generals, but then turned on him, then rejoined him, then turned on him once again when L'Overture declared a ceasefire with the french but then went back on it, and Dessalines went on to massacre the white population of hiati, so exactly L'Ouverture's legacy. It's just that L'Ouverture lost internal power struggles in the revolution.
Dessalines was L'Ouverture's principle lieutenant and general. It wasn't until after the Battle of Crete-a-Pierrot, where Dessalines forces kicked the french out of fort Crete-a-Pierrot, then massacred the french civilians, and then themselves were forced out of the fort due to heavy losses on Leclerc's counterattack, that Dessalines switched alliegences. Dessalines than switched sides which led to the surrender of L'Ouverture. The massacre of french civilians there still happened under L'Ouverture.
He didn't have a different ideology, he was literally L'Ouverture's primary supporter and ally, until defeated militarily.
The site got its name from, "The Black Jacobins". The history of the enslaved Africans in Haiti casting off their European Christian oppressors by force (Haitian formerly enslaved people were the first to defeat Napoleon-- many had been trained as soldiers in Africa before being kidnapped by the European Christians).
Oh so he's idolizing the perpetrators of the 1804 massacre of the white population by the haitian revolutionaries on the orders of Jean-Jacques Dessalines, who then enacted racist policies in 1805?
You find with these revolutions the massacres of the innocent are easy to find after. The haitians were not somehow more moral and upstanding than the french.
that's the fate of all lecturing and politicized fiction and I think Nabokov summed up very well what is wrong with it:
[...] I am neither a reader nor a writer of didactic fiction, and, despite John Ray's assertion, Lolita has no moral in tow. For me a work of fiction exists only insofar as it affords me what I shall bluntly call aesthetic bliss, that is a sense of being somehow, somewhere, connected with other states of being where art (curiosity, tenderness, kindness, ecstasy) is the norm. There are not many such books. All the rest is either topical trash or what some call the Literature of Ideas, which very often is topical trash coming in huge blocks of plaster [...]
Doctorow and quite a few contemporary sci-fi writers are very strong offenders on this front.
I’m all against such embellishments but crypto really has little societal benefit and many negatives. The biggest way it’s impacted my life is the rise of ransomware!
If you see it more from the perspective of what value these markets actually contribute to the world, then he's spot on. I cant count how many times an open source alternative has saved me from the price gouging tactics of some seedy firms that cornered or bought out an entire market. At least socialists believe in and contribute to something higher than themselves for the benefit of all, even if their implementation is sometimes poor.
> Take any controversial situation and sift it down to a simple good\bad binary pitch that props up some weird view point
The argument Doctorow makes against Big Tech is not that they're 100% evil, but that they don't (and don't want to) compete.
> "monopolistic sociapaths"... Lame. I've benefited GREATLY from some of the open source tools that these big bad tech companies have made freely available.
You can benefit from monopolistic sociopaths. You would benefit more from a free (as in competitive) market.
> And the non-stop self-masterbratory articles about the evils of "crypto" from these guys is obvious and cheesy (individuals making money = bad).
This is not close to an honest reconstruction of his argument. He argues that crypto scams are taking advantage of people's good intentions, which is absolutely true. The vast majority of crypto content is promoting shitcoins and Ponzi schemes, not promoting the freedom of [insert country's citizens] to transact without their government intervening.
> Merkle-tree's were popularized by these crypto-bro's...
I don't know what "popularizing" Merkle trees means, but you can easily see that there is no relationship between interest in Merkle trees[1] and interest in Bitcoin (which I used as a term because it predated the mainstream discussion of "crypto" or "cryptocurrency" as a general topic).
In fact, peak interest in Merkle trees happened well before Bitcoin was invented.
> ...and have helped other distributed forms of technology.
Crypto has not created or helped any other distributed form of distributed technology except crypto. The closest thing to a distributed technology that has become more popular since 2011 is Mastodon, and that got its surge of attention because of Elon Musk antagonizing Twitter's user base.
BFT data stores have been around for a long time, and their usage in industry hasn't increased recently.
A lot of talk about agile digital monopolies maneuvering quickly to crowd out competition but little talk about actual consumer harm or extracted rents. Amazon subsidizing one-day shipping or Facebook rapidly building out new features may harm competitors but it makes me better off, at least in a narrow sense.
He also makes the argument that the quick-moving digital world allows monopolists to pivot to protect their position in a way erstwhile analog monopolists could not, but neglects mentioning that the same logic also removes significant barriers to entry for competitors:
> John D. Rockefeller was doing all this stuff one hundred twenty years ago, but if Rockefeller was like, “I secretly own this train line and I use the fact that it’s the only way to get oil to market to exclude my rivals, and I’m worried that there’s a ferry line coming that will offer an alternate route that will be more efficient,” he can’t just click a mouse and build another train line that offers the service more cheaply until the ferry line goes out of business and then abandon the train line. The non-digital example is capital intensive, and it demands incredibly slow processes. With digital, you can do a thing that I call “twiddling,” which is just changing the business logic really quickly.
It's pretty crazy to suggest removing capital-intensive constraints like those of physical infrastructure strengthens monopolistic positions.
Also the implication that the digital equivalent of adding entire new lines (new products, new features, or new backend infrastructure, I guess?) is just a "click of a mouse" glosses over the large amount of work that goes into software and tech development, especially at the largest scales. Yes, it might be faster than building a rail line in the early 1900s, but the "button click" metaphor seems a little silly.
I feel like this is a general bias of people who look at reality through a Marxist framing - for their theory of reality to make sense, they need to undervalue any kind of work that does not take the form of "producing material objects".
> Facebook rapidly building out new features may harm competitors
Facebook has not grown by rapidly building out features. They did it by buying competitors, which harms competition (not necessarily the competitors themselves).
It makes me worried how people look at this and say it's "the unvarnished truth" because it confirms their biases, even if there is next to no actual evidence that current monopolists are more powerful than historic ones, or that people are actually worse off.
It also bothers me how this kind of article seems to always be written by people who have no idea about what is the kind of work and challenges that go into building products that can actually get adopted by people.
"I think that we need to understand that capitalists hate capitalism. They don’t want to be in an environment in which they have to compete."
I think he means they hate the free market. Many people think capitalism and the free market depend on each other but free markets existed for a long time before capitalism. It's the free market that forces capitalists to compete.
> Google has never, since the development of its search, innovated
This (a direct quote from the interview, not just a subtitle) seems false to me. Unless we tweak the definitions to desirable innovations, or to the leadership and not the employees of Google, this has to be false.
At the very least we need to credit them for Gmail, which by showing that a non-terrible app could be done in the browser, lit a fire under web devs’ collective arses that is still going today. (Again, whether this was a good idea is orthogonal—one way or another, it was a contribution to the state of the art even if the browser tech was already there. IIRC it was also born as an employee-driven initiative, but that’s also orthogonal.)
We’ve also forgotten what a wonder Maps and Earth were at the time. Perhaps ladling out a gigantic pot of money in exchange for every commercially available bit of satellite imagery in the world isn’t that inventive. And yet—for some reason nobody did it before that in such quantity, and that quantity acquired a quality of its own.
Books were castrated by copyright law, but they’re still an impressive achievement. You still encounter those Google-watermarked PDFs on Archive.org (proper, not the Wayback Machine), and if they don’t have the polish of pirate libraries, neither do they make you remember how much OCR sucked in the 2000s.
And Search, well, web search is a moving target, and what reads as operational competence at a high level is almost certainly dozens of researchers inventing new things for years. I can’t say it’s been an unequivocal good for the world, but to call it staying still seems an exaggeration.
Also, Chrome. It was great at first, the thing that finally made me abadon Opera. And V8 brought to the mainstream the more dynamic bits of the Self research from Sun that wasn’t useful for the JVM. Not only Node—I don’t think we’d have LuaJIT today if not for V8 and the *Monkeys, and the initial V8 work was what breached the ivory tower there.
(Does Android count? Undeniably most of what it is now is from after the Google acquisition, but they say it’s an enclave with a separate culture within the company. Dunno.)
48 comments
[ 5.6 ms ] story [ 107 ms ] threadJust wish we could crowd fund another country or planet to avoid all this BS....
1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JZ-utvfgK8Q
Even then, I think, they were like, “We don’t have any ideas. We can’t do better than Yahoo. We just have to do what Yahoo’s doing better than them. We’re not going to have a better idea than Yahoo has.” So, they went into China. (Project Dragonfly anyone?)
Even then, I think, they were like, “We don’t have any ideas. We can’t do better than Yahoo. We just have to do what Yahoo’s doing better than them. We’re not going to have a better idea than Yahoo has.” So, they went into China. (Project Dragonfly anyone?)
But Doctorow's fiction is better than his opinion pieces.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacobin_(magazine)#Title_and_l...
You find with these revolutions the massacres of the innocent are easy to find after. The haitians were not somehow more moral and upstanding than the french.
That other Hatians committed atrocities does not detract from L'Ouverture's legacy.
Except Dessalines, who was previously one of his Black Jacobin generals, but then turned on him, then rejoined him, then turned on him once again when L'Overture declared a ceasefire with the french but then went back on it, and Dessalines went on to massacre the white population of hiati, so exactly L'Ouverture's legacy. It's just that L'Ouverture lost internal power struggles in the revolution.
He lost to someone who clearly did not share his ideology, the ideology that the Jacobin took it's name from.
I find much of the rest of your post strange, but it's already getting way off topic.
He didn't have a different ideology, he was literally L'Ouverture's primary supporter and ally, until defeated militarily.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Black_Jacobins
If you ever have a chance to attend a lecture or listen to an interview with Jacobin Magazine's founder, it will be worth your time.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacobin_(magazine)#:~:text=Jac...
You find with these revolutions the massacres of the innocent are easy to find after. The haitians were not somehow more moral and upstanding than the french.
[...] I am neither a reader nor a writer of didactic fiction, and, despite John Ray's assertion, Lolita has no moral in tow. For me a work of fiction exists only insofar as it affords me what I shall bluntly call aesthetic bliss, that is a sense of being somehow, somewhere, connected with other states of being where art (curiosity, tenderness, kindness, ecstasy) is the norm. There are not many such books. All the rest is either topical trash or what some call the Literature of Ideas, which very often is topical trash coming in huge blocks of plaster [...]
Doctorow and quite a few contemporary sci-fi writers are very strong offenders on this front.
> Take any controversial situation and sift it down to a simple good\bad binary pitch that props up some weird view point
The argument Doctorow makes against Big Tech is not that they're 100% evil, but that they don't (and don't want to) compete.
> "monopolistic sociapaths"... Lame. I've benefited GREATLY from some of the open source tools that these big bad tech companies have made freely available.
You can benefit from monopolistic sociopaths. You would benefit more from a free (as in competitive) market.
> And the non-stop self-masterbratory articles about the evils of "crypto" from these guys is obvious and cheesy (individuals making money = bad).
This is not close to an honest reconstruction of his argument. He argues that crypto scams are taking advantage of people's good intentions, which is absolutely true. The vast majority of crypto content is promoting shitcoins and Ponzi schemes, not promoting the freedom of [insert country's citizens] to transact without their government intervening.
> Merkle-tree's were popularized by these crypto-bro's...
I don't know what "popularizing" Merkle trees means, but you can easily see that there is no relationship between interest in Merkle trees[1] and interest in Bitcoin (which I used as a term because it predated the mainstream discussion of "crypto" or "cryptocurrency" as a general topic).
In fact, peak interest in Merkle trees happened well before Bitcoin was invented.
> ...and have helped other distributed forms of technology.
Crypto has not created or helped any other distributed form of distributed technology except crypto. The closest thing to a distributed technology that has become more popular since 2011 is Mastodon, and that got its surge of attention because of Elon Musk antagonizing Twitter's user base.
BFT data stores have been around for a long time, and their usage in industry hasn't increased recently.
1. https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=m...
2. https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=b...
He also makes the argument that the quick-moving digital world allows monopolists to pivot to protect their position in a way erstwhile analog monopolists could not, but neglects mentioning that the same logic also removes significant barriers to entry for competitors:
> John D. Rockefeller was doing all this stuff one hundred twenty years ago, but if Rockefeller was like, “I secretly own this train line and I use the fact that it’s the only way to get oil to market to exclude my rivals, and I’m worried that there’s a ferry line coming that will offer an alternate route that will be more efficient,” he can’t just click a mouse and build another train line that offers the service more cheaply until the ferry line goes out of business and then abandon the train line. The non-digital example is capital intensive, and it demands incredibly slow processes. With digital, you can do a thing that I call “twiddling,” which is just changing the business logic really quickly.
It's pretty crazy to suggest removing capital-intensive constraints like those of physical infrastructure strengthens monopolistic positions.
Facebook has not grown by rapidly building out features. They did it by buying competitors, which harms competition (not necessarily the competitors themselves).
Previous discussions: https://hn.algolia.com/?q=enshitification
It also bothers me how this kind of article seems to always be written by people who have no idea about what is the kind of work and challenges that go into building products that can actually get adopted by people.
I think he means they hate the free market. Many people think capitalism and the free market depend on each other but free markets existed for a long time before capitalism. It's the free market that forces capitalists to compete.
This (a direct quote from the interview, not just a subtitle) seems false to me. Unless we tweak the definitions to desirable innovations, or to the leadership and not the employees of Google, this has to be false.
At the very least we need to credit them for Gmail, which by showing that a non-terrible app could be done in the browser, lit a fire under web devs’ collective arses that is still going today. (Again, whether this was a good idea is orthogonal—one way or another, it was a contribution to the state of the art even if the browser tech was already there. IIRC it was also born as an employee-driven initiative, but that’s also orthogonal.)
We’ve also forgotten what a wonder Maps and Earth were at the time. Perhaps ladling out a gigantic pot of money in exchange for every commercially available bit of satellite imagery in the world isn’t that inventive. And yet—for some reason nobody did it before that in such quantity, and that quantity acquired a quality of its own.
Books were castrated by copyright law, but they’re still an impressive achievement. You still encounter those Google-watermarked PDFs on Archive.org (proper, not the Wayback Machine), and if they don’t have the polish of pirate libraries, neither do they make you remember how much OCR sucked in the 2000s.
And Search, well, web search is a moving target, and what reads as operational competence at a high level is almost certainly dozens of researchers inventing new things for years. I can’t say it’s been an unequivocal good for the world, but to call it staying still seems an exaggeration.
Also, Chrome. It was great at first, the thing that finally made me abadon Opera. And V8 brought to the mainstream the more dynamic bits of the Self research from Sun that wasn’t useful for the JVM. Not only Node—I don’t think we’d have LuaJIT today if not for V8 and the *Monkeys, and the initial V8 work was what breached the ivory tower there.
(Does Android count? Undeniably most of what it is now is from after the Google acquisition, but they say it’s an enclave with a separate culture within the company. Dunno.)