Cory Doctorow

This is like we used to not have a rat problem because we used rat poison.

And these guys said, you don't need the rat poison.

Rats are eating our faces off.

And they're like, why do you think that's my fault?

Maybe it's like sunspots that ushered in the time of the rat by making them more fecund than at any time in human history.

And yes, it's true, the rats did buy the rat poison factories and shut them down, but we're not using rat poison anymore.

That's just Pareto optimal economically rational behavior.

So these are not mysterious causes.

You have to have the kind of specific neurological injury that you can only get by paying for an economics degree to not understand how this arose.

So your solution is

to just increase pressure from regulators?

No, I think we have like four levers we can pull on to make the tech platforms work better, and it's what used to make them work better.

Oh, sorry, before we go on to that, I just thought we'd probably forget this, because you're hitting me with a lot here.

Some of us had very long ethernet cables that would reach our bathrooms, even back then.

So to quote one of my favorite TDS alums, John Hodgman, nostalgia is a toxic impulse.

And I'm not nostalgic here.

I think that we did have an old good internet and that the failings of the old good internet were not that we had a place where we could change how it worked or when tech companies screwed us over, we could alter how their technology worked.

The feelings was that our normie friends couldn't use it.

Because I like a lot of the people who couldn't figure out how to use PPP.

And I'm glad that they showed up.