Cory Doctorow

You had to squeeze that in there.

Roman, we are everywhere.

It's a way to talk about platform collapse, platform decay.

It describes this three-stage process where you have platforms that start off being good to their end users, but are also finding a way to lock those end users in.

And then having locked them in, it makes things worse for them in order to make things better for business customers.

The value is just hoovered up by the platform and given to its shareholders and its executives, even as the platform just turns into a pile of shit.

And I think a lot of us can recognize that pattern.

OK, that description makes a lot of sense to me.

Well,

Julian Gibson, the science fiction writer who coined the term cyberspace, he's quite a prophet.

And in one of his books, he has this line, cyberspace is everting.

So turning inside out.

And what he means is that like reality is being infected with digital stuff.

And digitization is becoming a feature of things that weren't digital before.

Everything's just becoming a computer in a fancy case.

Since Roman times, farmers have fixed their own gear because when the storm is coming and you need to get the crops in, you can't wait for someone else to come and fix your stuff.

The farmers still mostly fix their tractors.

They get the part they put it in and so on.

They're farmers.

They don't want to fix their stuff.