The Internet Con

action. Winning tech back isn’t more important than preventing runaway climate change or ending gender-based violence and discrimination, but it’s hard to imagine how we’ll do either—or anything else of significance—without digital infrastructure to hold us together.

This is what “software is eating the world” really means: the positive externalities of computer improvements set up a virtuous cycle where improvements begat partisans for still more improvements, which created still more partisans.

After all, even if you’re a skilled machinist who can make adapters to plug your proprietary mixer attachments into a rival’s mixer, that only solves your problem. Your neighbor is still stuck buying a Microsoft mixer in order to preserve their investment in attachments. But software is different. It is universal. Tech is exceptional. The fact that all computers are universal, all capable of running every program, meant that there would always be a way to write a Mac program that could read and write Microsoft Office files better than Microsoft Office for Mac could. And once that program existed in the world, it could be given away or sold to anyone who had a Mac and an internet connection.

The consumer welfare standard led to industrial concentration across the board, so in that regard, tech is not exceptional. But tech is exceptional in that it is intrinsically interoperable, which means that we can use interop to make Big Tech a lot smaller, very quickly—we can attack network effects by reducing switching costs.

Making it easier for technology users—everyone—to leave Big Tech platforms for smaller tech created by co-ops, nonprofits, tinkerers and startups will hasten the day that we can bring Big Tech to heel in other ways. Siphoning off Big Tech’s users means reducing its revenues, which are otherwise fashioned into lobbying tools.

If we someday triumph over labor exploitation, gender discrimination and violence, colonialism and racism, and snatch a habitable planet from the jaws of extractive capitalism, it will be thanks to technologically enabled organizing. From street protests to mutual aid funds, from letter-writing to organizing sit-ins, from blockades to strikes, we need digital networks to prosecute our struggle. That is the other way that tech is exceptional. The fight for a free, fair and open digital future isn’t more important than any of those other fights, but it is foundational. Tech is the terrain on which our future fights will be fought. If we can’t seize the means of computation, we will lose the fight before it is even joined.

It was a lot easier to type “1..” than it was to remember “ls,” and while it took a fair bit of work to create these menuing overlays, the gopher programmers only had to do this once for each service, and then they could train the users they supported to use menus, rather than teaching each user a hundred obscure computing dialects. Gopher menus didn’t just let you interact with a service—they also let you hop from one service to another, the way modern web-pages today do. Gopher became both a directory of nearly everything connected to the internet and a means of connecting to and controlling all those services. Gopher was an open protocol. Any programmer who wanted to help other people interact with a service for which there was no menuing system could write their own, and make it available in “gopherspace.”

In this way, hundreds of proprietary interfaces designed for highly technical users, many of them the product of the world’s largest technology companies, were commodified, subsumed into a volunteer-managed, globe-spanning interface that was designed to welcome laypeople to the burgeoning internet.

Gopher simply became another kind of webpage, which you accessed by typing gopher:// rather than http:// into your location bar. The administrators who ran gopher servers stood up webservers alongside them, accessing the same documents, so you could type either gopher:// or http:// and have an identical experience. Gopher dwindled and disappeared (try to remember the last time you typed gopher://). But the collapse of gopher wasn’t the end of gopherspace. The files, services and sites that we once accessed with gopher are now part of the web.

But now, IBM lost. Twelve years of having to produce every memo and the minutes of every meeting took its toll. Running a company where every word committed to paper—let alone uttered in public—had to be vetted by paranoid lawyers locked in a high-stakes battle with the US government changed IBM, blunted its predatory instincts.

Once the IBM PC—built from commodity components, running a third-party operating system—hit the market, other manufacturers wanted to follow it. They could buy their operating systems from Microsoft and their parts from IBM’s suppliers—but they still needed a “ROM”—the “read-only memory” chip that had the low-level code that made a PC a PC. In stepped Phoenix Computers, a small startup, who reverse engineered the PC ROM and made its own, customizing it as needed for a booming market in “PC clones”—Compaq, Dell, Gateway and even electronics giants like Sony.

Many people have observed that Facebook’s customers aren’t the users who socialize on its platform, but the advertisers who pay to reach those users. “If you’re not paying for the product, you’re the product” is often invoked to explain why Facebook treats its users so badly.

they had laid off their newsrooms and replaced them with video producers—many lured away from stable jobs with huge cash promises based on Facebook’s fake video viewership numbers. Even after laying off their video producers, these media companies couldn’t recover. For one thing, they had jettisoned the staff and contract writers they’d need to pivot back to text, and even if they could get the band back together, they had blown through so much money on videos for an imaginary audience that they didn’t have anything left to pay these writers.

Media companies imploded. The industry shed hundreds of jobs—young, promising creators at the start of their careers met with ruin, and many old veterans exited the field in ignominy, unable to find another job.

(Attentive readers will notice that there’s a missing quadrant in this grid—the bottom left corner, where there is no surveillance and no control; that’s the quadrant where community-supported, free/open software lives; more on that later.)

Digital technology was sold to us as an infinitely customizable, responsive, idiosyncratic new way of living. Networked tools were supposed to give us more control over our lives. Instead, we find ourselves manipulated, controlled, corralled and milked dry.

The record industry may have billed itself as the steward of the world’s music heritage, but it had decided—for purely self-interested, commercial reasons—to render nearly all of that heritage effectively unavailable, relegating it to used record bins and library shelves. Napster, on the other hand, put all of that music back into fans’ hands, in a matter of months. The company’s users loved its service, and not (just) because the music was free.

VCRs by 1984, the year the Supremes ruled—there were six million VCRs in America’s living rooms by then, and video-rental stores in nearly every town; the justices knew that if they banned the VCR, they’d seem out-of-touch and lose legitimacy, inviting the public to view them as nine dotards in robes. This was the 1980s, when Supreme Court justices still cared about whether the American public acknowledged their legitimacy). The VCR was legalized, and though the Betamax itself lost out to the far more popular VHS format, the “Betamax rule” outlived both technologies: so long as a tool is capable of sustaining a substantial non-infringing use, it is legal.

Lots of musicians wanted their music distributed for free; many old public domain recordings were available on these networks, and the P2P tools that supported file formats beyond MP3 had all kinds of non-infringing material: ebooks of the Bible and fan-readings of Mark Twain novels

But remember: Sony advertised infringing uses for the Betamax. The company used copyright infringement as part of its sales pitch—and nevertheless, the Supreme Court in 1984 decided that VCRs were legit because of their “substantial non-infringing uses.” But the Supreme Court in 1984 cared a lot about its legitimacy. The 2005 court that ruled against Grokster—a decentralized successor to Napster—cared less. It neutered the “substantial non-infringing use” principle of Betamax and said that Grokster’s “inducement” of infringement made it illegal,

Gone were the bootlegs, live recordings and rarities that made P2P such a fannish delight. Instead, we got services like Pandora and Spotify, which offered a sanitized subset of the P2P catalog and raised investment capital

functioning as semi-autonomous product development shops for the labels,

You could make a great playlist, but you couldn’t chat with the author of that perfect playlist you just discovered. Spotify and Pandora were platforms where record labels could make works available to listeners, but they weren’t places where listeners could participate.

As a result, it has become nearly impossible to earn a living off of online classical performance: your videos are either blocked, or the ad revenue they generate is shunted to Sony. Even teaching classical music performance has become a minefield, as painstakingly produced, free online lessons are blocked by Content ID or, if the label is feeling generous, the lessons are left online but the ad revenue they earn is shunted to a giant corporation, stealing the creative wages of a music teacher.

One of the group’s chairs took the floor to explain that the goal wasn’t to control the future—it was to create a “polite marketplace,” where companies divided up their turf and stuck to it. If you wanted to make something involving entertainment, you’d have to get the entertainment industry’s permission.

That, in a nutshell, is the internet that Big Content wanted—a polite marketplace where no one surprised them by inventing something to help artists and/or audiences unless they cleared it with the cartel first.

Big Tech can’t afford terrorism filters without monopoly profits. Big Tech can’t afford to hire armies of moderators to chase harassers and scammers around on its platforms without monopoly profits. Every time we deputize tech companies with government-like enforcement duties, we make it that much harder to cut them down to size (because they need to be big to fulfill those duties) and that much harder for smaller tech to offer better, more user-centric services (because small tech companies, startups, co-ops, nonprofits and individual tinkerers can’t afford to comply with the regulations that force them to police their users’ conduct).

To make tech better, we have to make it smaller—small enough that the bad ideas, carelessness and blind spots of individual tech leaders are their problems, not everyone else’s. We need lots of tech, run by lots of different kinds of people and organizations, and we need to make it as close to costless as possible to switch from one to the other.

This was a problem for Epson: its printers were designed to block any ink cartridge unless it had an official Epson-configured chip—and it couldn’t get the chips! In the end, Epson started selling chipless cartridges, along with instructions for bypassing its own security chips. It’s hard to express just how weird and perverse this is: Epson is part of the coalition of companies that have waged technological and legal warfare upon anyone who dared challenge their anti-interoperability products. Now here the company was, telling anyone with an internet connection how to disable those anti-interop “features,” making it easy for Epson printer owners to use ink of their choosing. I admit a grudging respect for Epson, which chose its customers’ ability to use their printers during a global pandemic over its shareholders’ ability to collect 10,000 percent margins on its ink.

Today, the US government’s offer to product makers is: “If you add a chip to your gadget at a price of a mere $0.26, and load a digital lock onto that chip that nominally prevents a customer from using the product in a way you don’t like, we, the mighty US government, will lend you our courts, our federal prosecutors, and our prisons so you can terrorize anyone who provides your customer with a lock-removing tool. It does not matter if anyone’s copyright is violated. It does not matter if any right is violated. The mere act of providing a tool to remove the lock—no matter how benign and beneficial the purpose—triggers criminal and civil liability for your commercial rivals.”