Cory Doctorow

12 July 2022

Amazon as a dumb pipe

I like this idea from Cory Doctorow, but monopolies tend to like exploiting their monopoly position. Still, it might be a way for Amazon to get around being scrutinised closely by regulators?

But what if buying local was as easy as shopping as Amazon? What if you could buy local while shopping on Amazon?

I got this idea from Library Extension, a browser plugin that notices if you’re looking at a book on Amazon and checks to see whether it’s available for checkout at your local library.

If the book is available to borrow at your public library, the extension shoves down Amazon’s “Add to Cart” button and draws a box with buttons to reserve that title at any of the local libraries that have it on the shelf.

This is basically awesome. It acknowledges that Amazon’s catalog, search, recommendations and reviews are useful to readers —and lets readers commodify all that stuff, treat it as infrastructure for discovering books to check out of your local library.

This is possible because books have standard identifiers: the ubiquitous ISBN. It’s easy for a plugin to recognize an ISBN when it sees it, and it’s easy for that plugin to look up the ISBN in another database.

In theory there’s no reason this has to be limited to checking books out of your library. You could just as easily write an extension that replaces Amazon’s “Add to Cart” button with a “Buy this on Bookshop.org” button. That’s the cool thing about unique identifiers — they’re great for cross-referencing.

Source: View a SKU. Let’s Make Amazon Into a Dumb Pipe | by Cory Doctorow | Medium

7 July 2022

Cory Doctorow: activist, technologist, sci-fi writer and all-round awesome human being has written a powerful article for Locus magazine. He likens the climate emergency to us being collectively trapped on a bus that’s speeding towards a cliff edge.

We’ll all die at the bottom of the canyon, but no-one will yank the wheel, as it would cause the bus to roll and many people to be hurt.

The good news is: climate denial is on the wane. The bad news is: deniers have pivoted to incrementalism: “We’ll fix the climate. Give us a couple decades to phase out oil and gas. Give us a couple decades to replace the cars and retrofit the houses. Give us a couple decades to invent cool direct-air carbon capture systems, or hydrogen cars that work just like gas cars, or to replace our overland aviation routes with high speed rail, or to increase our urban density and swap out cars for subways and buses. Give us a couple decades to keep making money. We’ll get there.”

In other words: “We’re pretty sure we can get some wings on this bus before it goes over the cliff. Keep your hands off the wheel. Someone could get really badly hurt.”

People are already getting really badly hurt, and it’s only going to get worse. We’re poised to break through key planetary boundaries – loss of biosphere diversity, ocean acidification, land poisoning – whose damage will be global, profound and sustained. Once we rupture these boundaries, we have no idea how to repair them. None of our current technologies will suffice, nor will any of the technologies we think we know how to make or might know how to make.

Source: Cory Doctorow: The Swerve | Locus Online

22 March 2022

Hamiltonians and Jeffersonians

Cory Doctorow quite rightly calls out that Big Tech’s “too big to fail” status has created “oligopolistic power” which limits our choice over how we’re connected to the people we want to interact with.

I like his reference of Frank Pasquale’s two approaches to regulation. I guess I’m a Jeffersonian, too…

Every community has implicit and explicit rules about what kinds of speech are acceptable, and metes out punishments to people who violate those rules, ranging from banishment to shaming to compelling the speaker to silence. You’re not allowed to get into a shouting match at a funeral, you’re not allowed to use slurs when addressing your university professor, you’re not allowed to explicitly describe your sex-life to your work colleagues. Your family may prohibit swear-words at Christmas dinner or arguments about homework at the breakfast table.

One of the things that defines a community are its speech norms. In the online world, moderators enforce those “house rules” by labeling or deleting rule-breaking speech, and by cautioning or removing users.

Doing this job well is hard even when the moderator is close to the community and understands its rules. It’s much harder when the moderator is a low-waged employee following company policy at a frenzied pace. Then it’s impossible to do well and consistently.

[…]

It’s not that we value the glorious free speech of our harassers, nor that we want our views “fact-checked” or de-monetized by unaccountable third parties, nor that we want copyright filters banishing the videos we love, nor that we want juvenile sensationalism rammed into our eyeballs or controversial opinions buried at the bottom of an impossibly deep algorithmically sorted pile.

We tolerate all of that because the platforms have taken hostages: the people we love, the communities we care about, and the customers we rely upon. Breaking up with the platform means breaking up with those people.

It doesn’t have to be this way. The internet was designed on protocols, not platforms: the principle of running lots of different, interconnected services, each with its own “house rules” based on its own norms and goals. These services could connect to one another, but they could also block one another, allowing communities to isolate themselves from adversaries who wished to harm or disrupt their fellowship.

[…]

Frank Pasquale’s Tech Platforms and the Knowledge Problem poses two different approaches to tech regulation: “Hamiltonians” and “Jeffersonians” (the paper was published in 2018, and these were extremely zeitgeisty labels!).

Hamiltonians favor “improving the regulation of leading firms rather than breaking them up,” while Jeffersonians argue that the “very concentration (of power, patents, and profits) in megafirms” is itself a problem, making them both unaccountable and dangerous.

That’s where we land. We think that technology users shouldn’t have to wait for Big Tech platform owners to have a moment of enlightenment that leads to its moral reform, and we understand that the road to external regulation is long and rocky, thanks to the oligopolistic power of cash-swollen, too-big-to-fail tech giants.

Source: To Make Social Media Work Better, Make It Fail Better | Electronic Frontier Foundation

Tag: Cory Doctorow (page 1 of 8)

Amazon as a dumb pipe

This bus ain’t growing wings