Cory Doctorow

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.

The thing is that tech bosses want you to think that having normies accessible on the internet is somehow inseparable from them harming us.

That there's no way you could have friends without Mark Zuckerberg being in the conversation.

There's no way you can search the internet without Sundar Pinchai knowing what color underwear you're wearing.

There's no way you could have a phone that works unless you have a factory in China with a suicide net around it.

And I think that these are absolutely separable.

These are not things that go together naturally.

These are things that they have glued together.

And my goal is to build a new good internet where we take the parts that we like and we make them easy so that our friends can use them too.

And we get rid of the parasitic billionaires who sit in the middle and ruin everything.