The Internet Con: How to Seize the Means of Computation (audiobook outtake)

08/01/23 • 55 min

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This week’s podcast is a special one: the introduction and chapter one of the audio edition of The Internet Con: How To Seize the Means of Computation, which Verso will publish on September 5, 2023. I made my own DRM-free audiobook for this, reading it under the direction of the incredible Gabrielle de Cuir at Skyboat Media. You can pre-order DRM-free audiobooks, ebooks and hardcovers (both signed and unsigned) at my Kickstarter.

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Previous Episode

Let the Platforms Burn: The Opposite of Good Fires is Wildfires

This week on my podcast, I read a recent Medium column. “Let the Platforms Burn: The Opposite of Good Fires is Wildfires,” making the case that we should focus more on making it easier for people to leave platforms, rather than making the platforms less terrible places to be.

Tech bosses know the only thing protecting them from sudden platform collapse syndrome are the laws that have been passed to stave off the inevitable fire.

They know that platforms implode “slowly, then all at once.”

They know that if we weren’t holding each other hostage, we’d all leave in a heartbeat.

But anything that can’t go on forever will eventually stop. Suppressing good fire doesn’t mean “no fires,” it means wildfires. It’s time to declare fire debt bankruptcy. It’s time to admit we can’t make these combustible, tinder-heavy forests safe.

It’s time to start moving people out of the danger zone.

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(Image: Cameron Strandberg, CC BY 2.0, modified)

Next Episode

Enshitternet: The old, good internet deserves a new, good internet

This week on my podcast, I read a recent Medium column. “Enshitternet: The old, good internet deserves a new, good internet,” clarifying that our aspiration shouldn’t be to restore the internet’s former glory, but to make a new and glorious internet.

The enshitternet wasn’t inevitable. It was the result of specific policy choices: the decision to encourage monopoly formation, which created the corporate power and concentration that led to even more policies, granting the monopolist unlimited freedom to abuse us, and denying us any right to defend ourselves.

Anything that can’t go on forever eventually stops. The disenshittification of the internet isn’t a nostalgic bid to restore the old, good internet. It’s a plan to build a new, good internet, and to make the enshitternet a bad memory, a mere transitional stage between the old, good internet we had and the new, good internet we deserve.

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(Image: Cryteria, CC BY 3.0, modified)