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richardiporter's review
4.0
Tech folks and those concerned with policy and politics around tech and the outsized power tech firms now wield should read this.
Doctorow makes powerful arguments at the core of this that: tech firms lie. So one of the things they are most likely to lie about is their power to build a mind-control ray for advertisers. That while their power is concerning, most of that power comes from more traditional monopolist and oligopolist power- using privileged legal positions, dominant market control and obscene amounts of money to crush competitors and restrict consumers. To perform legal and regulatory capture and make competition, copying or integration legally restricted not just technically difficult.
He advocates for the core of a policy response to be: legal protections for competitive or adversarial interoperability. To make it so a Facebook cannot sue an innovator that operates on a users behalf, integrating with their facebook data, profile, messages, connection graph and interests to provide alternative feeds or interfaces with different moderation or experience. There may be room for requiring Open APIs, for breaking up companies that have gotten too big, from aggregators acquiring aggregators but mostly: just make them actually compete!
4 Star reviews mean I really enjoyed this book, I will likely read it again someday. I would recommend it to many people and it changed my mind about something important.
Doctorow makes powerful arguments at the core of this that: tech firms lie. So one of the things they are most likely to lie about is their power to build a mind-control ray for advertisers. That while their power is concerning, most of that power comes from more traditional monopolist and oligopolist power- using privileged legal positions, dominant market control and obscene amounts of money to crush competitors and restrict consumers. To perform legal and regulatory capture and make competition, copying or integration legally restricted not just technically difficult.
He advocates for the core of a policy response to be: legal protections for competitive or adversarial interoperability. To make it so a Facebook cannot sue an innovator that operates on a users behalf, integrating with their facebook data, profile, messages, connection graph and interests to provide alternative feeds or interfaces with different moderation or experience. There may be room for requiring Open APIs, for breaking up companies that have gotten too big, from aggregators acquiring aggregators but mostly: just make them actually compete!
4 Star reviews mean I really enjoyed this book, I will likely read it again someday. I would recommend it to many people and it changed my mind about something important.
noodal's review against another edition
4.0
Full book can be found here. Though it reads more like an extended critique of [a:Shoshana Zuboff|710768|Shoshana Zuboff|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1563298665p2/710768.jpg]'s [b:The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power|26195941|The Age of Surveillance Capitalism The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power|Shoshana Zuboff|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1521733914l/26195941._SY75_.jpg|46170685], it is a welcome one. Having only struggled through a few chapters of Zuboff's book myself, I find Doctorow's writing on the topic of "surveillance capitalism" much more refreshing and relatable. Doctorow grounds Zuboff's seemingly alarmist claims of disappearing free will on the Internet, though to some extent, it is true (in terms of privacy, at least). Perhaps worth a re-read if I ever finish Zuboff's book.
leaton01's review against another edition
4.0
Doctorow delivers another great exploration and distillation of the challenges, problems, and issues that are embedded in technological and economic systems in our world today. In particular, he looks at the complexities and misunderstandings about how surveillance capitalism thrives in the 21st century but not as a new threat but as an extension of corporate attempts at monopolies that have long been a threat to democracy and any meaningful and reasonable forms of capitalism. Doctorow's at his best when breaking down these relationships and offering an insightful critique of those who think surveillance capitalism is acceptable or inevitable. It's clear he's drawing on both his own experience, as an author who has made a living writing and not being as restrictive about intellectual property as many of the software companies are (and the problems with how they patent vague things in order to have further control over things they have no business controlling) as well as his frustration with the limitations that companies put on the things that we buy and own. It's a great book for folks trying to wrap their head around surveillance capitalism and the problems that it creates for any given society both in terms of consumer choice and also, a political choice. Where he seems to flail a little bit is connecting his argument with his title, how to destroy surveillance capitalism. One does not walk away with a stronger sense of what to do, how to do it, or what might it look light, rather, readers walk away with a sense that this is already a giant problem with no firm or easy solutions. In that way, it can feel frustrating to get to the end, feel the depth of Doctorow's argument and begin to see it in one's everyday life but not have a clear means to act. Still, it's worth the read or the listen for all of us.
iamnotaperson's review against another edition
2.0
It's unfortunate that I went into this after seeing someone frame it as a criticism of Zuboff, because based on what I've ascertained from her book, admittedly without reading it, this is largely the same but worse.
The first thing to note is that it makes next to no use of any studies or reporting, discussion of specific events, etc, though when it does it's for things that really don't matter. Just a straightforward narrative about the problems with Big Tech, their causes, and how to fix them, but almost entirely without convincing evidence. It's this kind of quotidian narrative-building from the accumulated background knowledge of reading about this stuff, rather than a more conscious effort at studying the historical, economic, and more types of changes, contexts, etc, that make this analysis clearly casual and surface-level. Other things that are signs of that are the small factual or logical mistakes littered throughout, the bad takes (LGBT rights expanded thanks to the existence of a private realm for LGBT people to explore themselves? Really?), and the self-contradictions (one chapter oscillates at least four times between saying that tech lobbying is muscular and that it's ineffective).
Doctorow is emphatic about what the ultimate problem behind all this is: monopolism. There are other things attached to this, like regulatory capture, more general corruption, and whatnot, but monopoly capitalism is the ultimate cause in Doctorow's eyes. This makes the analysis not that different from Zuboff's because it is not capitalism that is the problem, according to them, but capitalism gone awry, despite all evidence to the contrary, with the implication of this being that all it will take to fix things is essentially regulatory tinkering, whether it be Zuboff's consumer advocacy or Doctorow's antitrust strengthening. While there are problems with Evgeny Morozov's review of Zuboff (along with it having a different aim of evaluating whether or not surveillance capitalism really is a new economic order), it at least correctly targets capitalism (and collaboration with the state) as the main culprit of tech's social problems: https://thebaffler.com/latest/capitalisms-new-clothes-morozov
It sucks because there are some good parts in here. The hesitancy to treat information as property because of problems of ownership or to mandate tech companies to police themselves because it will ensure only those big enough to have the resources to police themselves will continue to exist are good points (though at least the latter implicitly hopes for the unlikely scenario of competition among tech firms incentivizing them to behave in more socially responsible ways, which lol). The point that there's nothing special about tech that forces it to tend toward monopoly, or acknowledging that tons of industries have become more monopolized, are all great acknowledgements. If only these types of insights could be widened into different levels and areas of analysis along more dimensions like the economic-historical to see that there's not much special about this era of capitalism and the state in general, and that these tech problems are not because we're doing capitalism and the state wrong, but because we're doing them at all.
The first thing to note is that it makes next to no use of any studies or reporting, discussion of specific events, etc, though when it does it's for things that really don't matter. Just a straightforward narrative about the problems with Big Tech, their causes, and how to fix them, but almost entirely without convincing evidence. It's this kind of quotidian narrative-building from the accumulated background knowledge of reading about this stuff, rather than a more conscious effort at studying the historical, economic, and more types of changes, contexts, etc, that make this analysis clearly casual and surface-level. Other things that are signs of that are the small factual or logical mistakes littered throughout, the bad takes (LGBT rights expanded thanks to the existence of a private realm for LGBT people to explore themselves? Really?), and the self-contradictions (one chapter oscillates at least four times between saying that tech lobbying is muscular and that it's ineffective).
Doctorow is emphatic about what the ultimate problem behind all this is: monopolism. There are other things attached to this, like regulatory capture, more general corruption, and whatnot, but monopoly capitalism is the ultimate cause in Doctorow's eyes. This makes the analysis not that different from Zuboff's because it is not capitalism that is the problem, according to them, but capitalism gone awry, despite all evidence to the contrary, with the implication of this being that all it will take to fix things is essentially regulatory tinkering, whether it be Zuboff's consumer advocacy or Doctorow's antitrust strengthening. While there are problems with Evgeny Morozov's review of Zuboff (along with it having a different aim of evaluating whether or not surveillance capitalism really is a new economic order), it at least correctly targets capitalism (and collaboration with the state) as the main culprit of tech's social problems: https://thebaffler.com/latest/capitalisms-new-clothes-morozov
It sucks because there are some good parts in here. The hesitancy to treat information as property because of problems of ownership or to mandate tech companies to police themselves because it will ensure only those big enough to have the resources to police themselves will continue to exist are good points (though at least the latter implicitly hopes for the unlikely scenario of competition among tech firms incentivizing them to behave in more socially responsible ways, which lol). The point that there's nothing special about tech that forces it to tend toward monopoly, or acknowledging that tons of industries have become more monopolized, are all great acknowledgements. If only these types of insights could be widened into different levels and areas of analysis along more dimensions like the economic-historical to see that there's not much special about this era of capitalism and the state in general, and that these tech problems are not because we're doing capitalism and the state wrong, but because we're doing them at all.
colonel2sheds's review against another edition
5.0
Please do your old pal Joey a solid and read this book. It's important.