Cory Doctorow: How Big Tech Captured Culture [video] | Hacker News Reader

Cory Doctorow: How Big Tech Captured Culture [video]

youtube.com

42 pointsthrow0101b11 comments

I find this kind of funny since I've always associated Doctorow with the EFF and the big tech-funded campaign to undermine copyright so Big Tech wouldn't need to share any revenues with the authors, artists and publishers. It was even hilarious at times when this crew was demonizing the so called "big publishers" even when Google, Yahoo and the rest of Big Tech were worth 10-100 times as much on the stock market.

Cory-- this is the world you built.

This is a willldddd take, that deeply mischaracterizes the EFF. There's a ton of places where EFF & Big Tech don't line up. Glomming them together & saying they all are trying to wreck content creators is a severe misdeed.

I do think the EFF does have an anti-IP platform, but it is directed very strongly at software patents & DRM, systems which firewall tech from humanity & technocratically enforce consumerdom, create the inflexibility that permits this capture.

DRM is anti-copyright. For Doctorow and the EFF, encryption is good when a person uses it but bad if a publisher uses it. The EFF was built by Big Tech to help support the wild, piracy-friendly growth of the Intertubes. All of the stances taken by Doctorow were anti-artist-rights because they got in the way of Big Tech making money.

To me, he definitely does symbolize the same, though I don't think it's fair to pin all the blame on him. People make mistakes and there are a lot of factors in play. Also, to Doctorow's credit I do think releasing through creative commons and touting remix culture is admirable.

That said, holding onto the scrappy tech-rebel free internet idealizer persona of early 2010s is just silly today, and those who do it look like fools. You can't just treat the fact that the big tech companies "went bad" as an incidental that can be fixed. The implicit promise of the early internet idealizers was that big tech companies were good because they were tech companies and that big copyright holders were bad because they were IP owners. This has been proven ridiculous.

I think now is the time for honest people who idealized the internet needs to take a few big steps back and reexamine their premises more deeply than just whinging about needing regulation for "big tech" so we can get back to our anarchist cyberpunk future and start giving some more respect to the people who they considered backwards ten years ago for not being excited about the newest shiny thing.

W.r.t artists and creators not getting paid well - how could it be otherwise? There's tons of content already produced and it's not perishable. After everything got digitalized and is available all, all the time to everyone, how could you expect to get paid well for producing more of it?

Because people are still spending on content and money is still being made off it. This is what the video is about.

I only managed to watch the first few minutes, but I assume he expounded his main points. I'd never heard the term 'chokepoint capitalism', but it does just about sum up the lopsided power dynamic that so few of these middlemen enjoy in just about any industry you can think of.

It is just more examples of late stage capitalisms where any individual contributor has no bargaining power. This is focused on 'content' creators like writer, but its really the same for anybody. Big Corp has stacked the deck against any competition. But conservative/republican's belief in the rugged individual, and belief that companies are individuals, then all manor of dog-eat-dog brutal competition is ok, even if Big Corp gets big enough to re-write laws to remove the ability to compete. If many many individuals happen to be destroyed, then it is just the state of nature, the 'corporation as individual' have won fair and square by being last entity standing.

This video is actually pretty infuriating. I can't believe we've let this happen. Why is the 'free market' mantra pushed by the same people that are ok with big corp reducing the competition in the 'free market'. There is no longer a free market, it's just big corp merging into giant monoliths.

> But conservative/republican's belief in the rugged individual, and belief that companies are individuals, then all manor of dog-eat-dog brutal competition is ok, even if Big Corp gets big enough to re-write laws to remove the ability to compete.

A "fact" one often reads on social media. I wonder: could being exposed to the same idea repeatedly have any effect on individual perceptions of whether it is true?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illusory_truth_effect

Another popular truth online is that democracy is our most sacred institution, yet it isn't it democracy that brings us this?

Marxism turns to fascism

Capitalism turns to oligarchy

People argue that these systems are wrong but maybe it's just that humans will corrupt any system they're a part of

Reply on news.ycombinator.com