Cory Doctorow

If your email provider says, until you click the message in the list pane, you don't get to find out who the from address is, you would just change email providers.

So by controlling the network, by centralizing the network, they were able to just basically kneel on the throat of the American tech industry.

And so it is always the case that when we defend monopolists in order to prevent foreign firms from destroying our high-tech sectors, what we're actually doing is we are defending the firms that are structuring and controlling the market domestically for our own innovation.

So these very large firms that are doing AI now, AI is only like one of the things they do.

Obviously we have Anthropic and OpenAI, but Microsoft, Google, Apple, Oracle, these are firms that are effectively market structures.

They get to decide what products exist and what products don't exist, how much they're going to cost, and who can see them and who can use them.

And when we defend them in the name of preventing China from pulling ahead in AI, what we're effectively doing is we're saying that we should maintain this shadow FTC that has more power than the FTC ever managed to exercise, but that never exercised it in the interest of the American public, but only in the interest of their shareholders.

Thank you.

It's good advice.

There's this idea from the finance sector, this acronym MIGO, my eyes glaze over.

It's when you lard so much complexity in a prospectus that no one can get through it and they assume that a pile of shit that big has to have a pony underneath it.

I have different advice, though.

So my daughter started college this year, and she wasn't sure what to do.

We had a lot of talks about what to do.

She didn't take my advice.

But I'll tell you what I told her, which is that if you don't know what you want to do at university, don't go to university.

Go to college and become an electrician.

There is so much work for electricians, and we are going to be solarizing for the next 40 years.

There's going to be infinity work for electricians.

It's like being a plumber, but you don't have to touch poo.