Publishers Weekly
07/24/2023
Journalist and novelist Doctorow (Red Team Blues) details a plan for how to break up Big Tech in this impassioned and perceptive manifesto. Today’s large tech companies are legally able to quash “interoperators” (defined as: “new technologies that plug into their services, systems and platforms”)—a privilege never granted to the likes of IBM in decades past, according to Doctorow. If the industry’s “complex thicket of copyright, patent... and other IP rights” were swept away, Doctorow writes, a healthy market of secondary services would spring up—for instance, a service that could allow a user to message friends on various social media platforms without logging into them directly. Doctorow hypothesizes that legislating in favor of interoperability, and thus righting the market, would be a more direct route to breaking up Big Tech than other forms of antitrust legislation, since it would force big companies to innovate and compete. He also advocates for extralegal, “guerrilla” forms of interoperability. To illustrate his point, Doctorow tours the past several decades of technology history, highlighting such cases as the film industry’s attempts to ban the VCR in the 1980s, Apple’s reverse engineering of Microsoft Office in the 2000s, and several “right to repair” laws passed over the past decade in Massachusetts. Readers may find Doctorow’s analysis too blithe on some points—for example, he is dismissive of the need for the kind of centralized content moderation practiced by giant social media platforms. Still, Doctorow’s sense of urgency is contagious. (Sept.)
From the Publisher
"This book fills me with hope that a radical yet plausible alternative to computational tyranny can be developed and deployed. Indeed, demanding interoperability from today's tech monopolitists-or imposing it by force when they refuse-is the most actionable strategy I've yet encountered for turning our devices from tools of repression to ones of emancipation"
—Douglas Rushkoff, author of Survival of the Fittest
"Thoughtfully written and patiently presented, The Internet Con explains how the promise of a free and open internet was lost to predatory business practices and the rush to commodify every aspect of our lives. An essential read for anyone that wants to understand how we lost control of our digital spaces and infrastructure to Silicon Valley’s tech giants, and how we can start fighting to get it back."
—Tim Maughan, author of INFINITE DETAIL
"Nobody gets the internet-both the nuts and bolts that make it hum and the laws that shaped it into the mess it is-quite like Cory, and no one's better qualified to deliver us a user manual for fixing it. That's The Internet Con: a rousing, imaginative, and accessible treatise for correcting our curdled online world. If you care about the internet, get ready to dedicate yourself to making interoperability a reality.'"
—Brian Merchant, author of Blood in the Machine
"This book is the instruction manual Big Tech doesn't want you to read. It deconstructs their crummy products, undemocratic business models, rigged legal regimes, and lies. Crack this book and help build something better."
—Astra Taylor, author of Democracy May Not Exist, but We'll Miss It When Its Gone
"A brilliant barn burner of a book. Cory is one of the sharpest tech critics, and he shows with fierce clarity how our computational future could be otherwise"
—Kate Crawford, author of The Atlas of AI
"One of the Internet's most interesting writers"
—Edward Snowden
"One of our most important science fiction writers"
—Kim Stanley Robinson, author of The Ministry for the Future
"Doctorow has been thinking longer and smarter than anyone else I know about how we create and exchange value in a digital age."
—Douglas Rushkoff, author of Present Shock
"Journalist and novelist Doctorow (Red Team Blues) details a plan for how to break up Big Tech in this impassioned and perceptive manifesto….Doctorow's sense of urgency is contagious."
—Publishers Weekly
"A meaty manifesto."
—Kirkus Reviews
"A simple, well-crafted vision of a more civil, civic-minded online life ... illuminating"
—Frank Bajak, Independent
Kirkus Reviews
2023-06-15
A meaty manifesto for, among other things, returning the internet to the public domain.
“This is a book for people who want to destroy Big Tech,” writes free-speech advocate and science-fiction writer Doctorow. “It’s not a book for people who want to tame Big Tech. There’s no fixing Big Tech.” Do you hate Facebook? Most people do, notes the author, but we’re on the platform by way of the process of “network effects”—i.e., we are there because our friends are there, and our friends are there because we’re there—and no one wants to be the first to jump off. Still, Doctorow adds, there are ways to fight today’s tech giants. One example comes from Apple, which for years endured a Microsoft Word that was so flawed outside the Windows platform that it lost computer sales to Microsoft by virtue of those same network effects: People who relied on a reliable version of Word for their livelihoods stuck to PCs even if they hated them. The solution: Steve Jobs tasked a group of programmers with reverse-engineering Microsoft Office—figuring out how the program worked from the ground up—and then doing Office one better by creating the software suite originally called iWork, which could open Word documents. The result was that “Microsoft gave up” and turned Office into an open format. Doctorow revisits other stories that were less successful—Napster, for example, which revived long-out-of-print music but was crushed by a litigious recording industry, a success story that should have been but came up against the forces of monopoly and the legal system that makes it possible. Doctorow calls for more reverse-engineering, more “adversarial interoperability,” and more decentralized social media platforms such as Mastodon that, incidentally, are less likely to harbor trolls and Nazis.
A small-l libertarian battle cry for a technology that’s truly liberating, just as its pioneers intended.
