Cory Doctorow

And so, you know, 1981, first William Gibson story has been out for a couple of years.

I was pretty alive to the dystopian possibilities of computers at the time.

So I wouldn't call myself...

I would call myself hopeful and excited, but not purely optimistic.

And I would also like to say that, like John Hodgman, nostalgia is a toxic impulse.

And when I think about what I like about those days, it's not that I want to recover those days.

It's more that I kind of dispute that the only thing, an era in which people had lots of control over their computers could have turned into is one in which the computers had lots of control over them, that there was probably something else that we could have done.

So what I would do is contrast what happens when things aren't great now with how I felt about what happened when things weren't great before.

So I think when I was a larvum on the early internet and I saw things that sucked, I would think someone's going to fix this and maybe it could be me.

And now when I see bad things on the internet, I'm like, this is by design and it cannot be fixed because...

you would be violating the rules if you even tried.

Tim, how about you?

if I were having this conversation with your producer and we had some time to talk about it, I would probably walk them through a couple of the undisputed ways in which some people have found the internet get worse for them.

So Tim has talked a little about margins for small businesses.

There's also people who are performers who found that the take that's being sucked out of their pay packet every month is going up and up from the platforms.

There's people who would like

not like to be snatched by ICE snatch squads who installed ICE block on their iPhone only to have Tim Cook decide that ICE officers were a member of a protected class and remove that app.

And now you can't install that app because the iPhone only lets you install official apps.

And I'd say like, just because this hasn't hit you, I think unless you have a theory about why you are favored by these platforms, then you should at least be worried that

that this would come.