#cory doctorow.txt

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Video and transcript of my OII talk

Last week, I was delighted to give an online lecture and Q&A for the Oxford Internet Institute entitled "What Big Tech does to discourse, and the forgotten tech tool that can make tech less big;" hosted by human rights lawyer Ravi Naik.

https://www.oii.ox.ac.uk/videos/what-big-tech-does-to-discourse-and-the-forgotten-tech-tool-that-can-make-tech-less-big-with-cory-doctorow/

Now, the Institute has put the talk online for anyone who missed the livestream:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qkGxqei3lOQ

And, thanks to Matt Arnold, we have a fulltext transcript:

https://www.oii.ox.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/What-Big-Tech-does-to-discourse-Cory-Doctorow.txt

Here's the talk precis:

-- It’s uncontroversial to say that our discourse is polarized, angry and unproductive – and to say that Big Tech is to blame. But what is Big Tech’s role in distorting discourse? Is it the use of machine learning and surveillance data to manipulate people at scale? Or is it just plain old monopolism, dressed up in a bunch of AI snakeoil repurposed from the ad-tech industry’s self-serving brags about how good it is at convincing people?

The answer matters, because machine-learning mind-control rays are an existential threat to human agency, while monopolies can be dismantled using competition law — and what’s more, there’s a tried-and-true competition tactics that is uniquely suited to dismantling tech monopolies. Adversarial interoperability turns tech’s market power on its head, allowing new market entrants to use incumbents’ own scale against them.

[jennbarrigar]

transcript:  https://www.oii.ox.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/What-Big-Tech-does-to-discourse-Cory-Doctorow.txt

[sensibletits]

cory doctorow.txt

This chapter is dedicated to Amazon.com, the largest Internet bookseller in the world. Amazon is amazing -- a "store" where you can get practically any book ever published (along with practically everything else, from laptops to cheesegraters), where they've elevated recommendations to a high art, where they allow customers to directly communicate with each other, where they are constantly inventing new and better ways of connecting books with readers. Amazon has always treated me like gold -- the founder, Jeff Bezos, even posted a reader-review for my first novel! -- and I shop there like crazy (looking at my spreadsheets, it appears that I buy something from Amazon approximately every six days). Amazon's in the process of reinventing what it means to be a bookstore in the twenty-first century and I can't think of a better group of people to be facing down that thorny set of problems.

ahahahahahahahaha

actual quote

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(proper post later today, just wanted to leave this here because ahahahahaha)