The Internet Con

Vu les sous-titres, "manuel", "comment", on s'attend à quelque chose d'un peu faisable. Au lieu de ça, l'auteur utilise le livre pour expliquer toutes ses thèses... Intéressantes et justes, mais s'il n'y avait pas eu le sous-titre, ç'aurait été beaucoup plus "dans le ton".

Au lieu de ça, la seule véritable chose que l'auteur indique qu'il faut faire, c'est que les autorités américaines se sortent les doigts du cul et fassent revivre de véritables lois / procès antitrusts. En tant que citoyen français (et donc non américain), ça m'en touche une sans faire bouger l'autre.

Donc 2* pour qui veut savoir ce que pense Doctorow, et ça s'arrête là. Ne cherchez pas: il n'y a rien que vous pouvez faire et qui soit décrit dans cet ouvrage (ah si, évidemment, ne pas utiliser les services des GAFAM -- voilà, j'ai résumé le livre, vous n'êtes pas obligés de l'acheter).

I consider myself pretty well versed in the shortcomings of capitalism, but this book still managed to shock me time and time again with tales of the brazen greed of tech companies over time. It was an easy read, which I appreciated, and I greatly enjoyed the conversational and sometimes colorful tone of writing.

Yet even though the author said multiple times that he would explain how we go about fixing the problems of Big Tech, he never really did. That is, unless I somehow figure out how to suddenly make Congress listen to me instead of a huge corporation, or learn how to reverse-engineer my own social media company. Nevertheless, it’s a great read, and one that more people probably should. 

Cory's blog has been a source of unease for me for some time as he's reminded us what the internet used to be like before it was dominated by the monster siloes like Facebook and Google.

This book is a call to arms with some real strategies to seize back what we've lost.

I guess expecting the Anarchist's Cookbook of Adversarial Interoperability would be a bit much, but I did feel like it was lacking any real practical solutions to Big Tech's rampant monopolization.

Not really a very actionable for the person on the street. Kinda needs "Chokepoint Capitalism" to make sense. Well written, timely given gestures to twitter, facebook, reddit, tiktok, youtube, etc

While being a very concise walk though of the systemic nature of the problems of big tech, I found the title: "How to seize the means of computation" and the blurb: "A Shovel-Ready Plan to Fight Enshittification" to lead me to expect some activist-first analysis. Instead it's "solutions" are very much recommendation to congress or government level policy-types. There is nothing in it that tells me what to do. I have nothing against this - the title and the blurb is just misleading. The analysis is very good though. So if you don't already know Doctorows analysis, it's great. Just don't expect any shovels to grab.