Whenever you see the words “ads”, “cryptocurrency”, “blockchain”, “web 3”, or “AI”, just replace them with “farts” and you’ll know whether you want them or not.
“Can the fediverse survive without farts?”
Yes, perfectly well.
“Will farts replace people?”
I hope not.
“The European Commission embraces farts.”
That’s unfortunate.
“This new startup wants to improve your life with farts.”
It's you, the consumer, that's losing out – it's your privacy that's at risk when #BigTech puts their profits first. That means higher prices, less choice, and no privacy.
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My next book is The Internet Con: How to Seize the Means of Computation: it's a #BigTech disassembly manual that explains how to disenshittify the web and bring back the old good internet. The hardcover comes from Verso on Sept 5, but the #audiobook comes from me - because Amazon refuses to sell my audio:
⟨ " Our economy is dominated by five aging tech giants – Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Meta, and Microsoft. In the last twenty years, no company has commercialized a new technology in a way that threatens them. Why?
We argue that the tech giants have learned how to coopt disruption.
They identify potentially disruptive technologies, use their money to influence the startups developing them, strategically dole out access to the resources the startups need to grow, and seek regulation that makes it harder for the startups to compete. When a threat emerges, they buy it off. And after they acquire a startup, they redirect its people and assets to their own innovation needs.
These seemingly unrelated behaviors work together to enable the tech giants to maintain their dominance in the face of disruptive innovations. " ⟩
In addition to the tactics noted in the paper, the manner in which incumbents use standards development organizations and industry consortia to slow-roll anything that disrupts their existing product lines, and try to re-direct anything disruptive to something that they can (barely) incrementally implement is something that is not appreciated enough!
Anyone over the age of 30 who has spend any time in tech-adjacent spaces still cheering for #BigTech "joining" the #Fediverse is fucking deluding themselves. We've been through so many cycles of this shit over the past twenty years, how some people can still trust #facebook to do anything remotely ethical is beyond me.
They're not here to join, they're here to destroy. This is just the most cost-effective, PR-friendly way of doing it.
Co-founder of Twitter joins new Mastodon board of directors. Right, so federating with Threads wasn’t a mistake. This is just the direction Mastodon is going. Oh, well. Another Mozilla emerges.
You wouldn’t have McDonald’s teaching your kids about nutrition or Philip Morris teaching them about maintaining a healthy lifestyle. Why are you happy having a surveillance capitalist like Google or Facebook teaching them about technology?
I love it. There’s a poll ongoing about whether folks would ban a Meta (Instagram/Facebook) instance and people are like “well, I’d give them the benefit of the doubt.”
I really have no words.
Is it learned helplessness? Stockholm Syndrome? Masochism? Something else?
This is wild: The #Chatcontrol#CSAM proposal, "the most criticised EU law touching on tech in the last decade, is the product of the #lobby of private corporations and law enforcement."
I still follow a relatively small number of people here but I’m already getting more value out of this network than I got out of late stage #Twitter.
Curation takes time & is ongoing, but I love the range I get from the #Fediverse: from people with quirky niche interests to - increasingly - real-time updates on global issues.
A network needs critical mass, but it doesn’t have to contain half the world’s population in order to be valuable. We should free ourselves from such #BigTech hype.
Just finished The Internet Con, by @pluralistic , and it's great. If you've ever wondered why we feel so helpless against bad behaviour by the tech giants, and whether there's anything we can do about it, this is the book for you. It'll make you (justifiably) very cross, but it also offers a path forward that benefits the rest of us, not just the power-hungry billionaires. Read it, send it to your elected representatives, spread the word. And the word is "interoperability".