DEF CON 31 - An Audacious Plan to Halt the Internet's Ensh*ttification - Cory Doctorow
Why Hacker News recommends it
Recommended in threads on big tech, monopolies and adversarial interoperability as the clearest statement of his argument.
What it is
Cory Doctorow's DEF CON 31 talk describes how platforms decay in a pattern he calls enshittification. He lays out a plan to stop it through antitrust, interoperability and fixing the law.
Recommended by 4 HN commenters across 3 different months, 2023 to 2024.
What Hacker News said
Strong rec parski · 2023-10 · on “To Fight Big Tech, We Must Seize the Means of Computation”
I really recommend Cory's talk at DEF CON and he was a guest on the Srsly Wrong podcast. DEF CON: [this video] Srsly Wrong: [LINK] It's a great podcast. I recommend the episodes on degrowth and half earth socialism in particular.
Recommends neycoda · 2023-09 · on “FTC Sues Amazon for Illegally Maintaining Monopoly Power”
Finally. This is the kind of thing that needs to happen to all of these giant corporations and utilities fighting for monopolies. Incidentally I heard today how many laws against anti-competitive behavior were stripped with Carter and Reagan onward, and it's become a trend in our hyper-corporatist world now that's hurting workers and income classes below the highest. Watch "DEF CON 31 - An Audacious Plan to Halt the Internet's Ensh*ttification - Cory Doctorow" on YouTube [this video]
Recommends takeda · 2023-09 · on “Google's 25th Birthday”
What is needed is what Cory Doctorow is saying. [this video] We need to push politicians to fix the antitrust law. It isn't just Google that is benefiting from this now toothless law.
Recommends smashah · 2024-01 · on “Haier hits Home Assistant plugin dev with takedown notice”
You can see "Adversarial Interoperability" on Youtube to see talks on this. This is a good one: [this video]
Cites dudefeliciano · 2023-09 · on “Amazon Prime Video content to start including ads next year”
this was also my first thought after watching the DEF CON talk: An Audacious Plan to Halt the Internet's Ensh*ttification[1] 1: [this video]
Cites flipgimble · 2023-10 · on “John Riccitiello steps down as CEO of Unity after pricing battle”
It strikes me that this Penny Arcade cartoon is more prescient that I originally gave it credit for: [LINK] On the surface the cartoon is silly and extreme but speaks a deeper truth. Consider that SilverLake is the entity that has proven itself to care only about extracting profit and nothing about games as cultural expression of the community and welfare of those who make them. Riccitiello was incompetent in how he made the exploitation of game developers obvious but given Unity's funding structure they will keep doing the same. Maybe now they're scared that they are losing a valuable resource of developer trust, but they consider it only as far as it is a resource for profit extraction. Th