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Episode SummaryIt's been almost 30 years since Mosaic, the first popular web browser was released in 1993. So much has changed, both technologically and socially, but what has the web wrought?In its earliest days, the internet was seen as a tool that would democratize information and greatly expand our ability to share knowledge and expression. That certainly has happened to a large degree, but humanity's power structures seem to have adapted to the web as well, for good and ill.Thirty years after its emergence, was the web more of a technological revolution rather than a societal one? Have corporate monopolies and political extremists ruined the internet? And if so, what can the rest of us do about it? And what about cryptocurrencies? Are they a way to restore the zeitgeist of the early internet, or are they just another form of internet scam?Joining us to discuss today is Cory Doctorow, he's an author, activist, and journalist who blogs at Pluralistic.net. And he also works for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, that's an organization that works to protect digital rights.He's written many books, both fiction and non-fiction. His most recent novel is Attack Surface, a story about a cybersecurity expert caught between her job and justice. His most recent non-fiction book is going to be coming out in September called Choke Point Capitalism, that's a examination of how media monopolies are using their power to exploit content creators.The unedited video of our June 2, 2022 conversation is below. A transcript of the edited audio follows.TranscriptMATTHEW SHEFFIELD: Thanks for being here, Cory.CORY DOCTOROW: My pleasure. Thank you for having me.SHEFFIELD: All right. So as I said in the intro, people saw a lot of promise in the internet in its earliest days, in its infancy. And I was making websites in 1996. You were there in the early web as well. So I figured we could talk shop about what people saw in the web in the beginning, and whether that transpired, and then we'll get into some of the other things.DOCTOROW: Sure. The the glory days of the blink tag.SHEFFIELD: That's right. Yeah. The government did play a significant role in the creation of the internet, both in the United States, and and obviously in the beginning with CERN where Tim Berners-Lee was working. And so the government was always there in the beginning, but it wasn't always government. And there was, in the beginning, a sort of what cowboy ethos, is that fair to say?DOCTOROW: Well, sure. I mean, there were some literal cowboys involved, like John Perry Barlow. So I think you can say that for sure.I think I know where you're going with this and, I think there is a story about what went wrong with early technological optimism, and and how it went off the rails, or what its blind spots were.And the story, the nutshell version of it, is that people thought that once you added internet to the lives of everyone else, that it [00:04:00] would produce a kind of unalloyed good of personal technological liberation and self determination. People would seize the means of computation, figure out how to use it for themselves, and become more powerful and build better communities and solve collective action problems, do all kinds of amazing things. And what they, and they completely were blind to the possibility, that either states or corporations would hijack these new digital networks and use them for their own purposes.And I think that this is wrong as a purely technical matter, and having been associated with those people for a long time, the very same people are accused of this naivete. I've worked with Electronic Frontier Foundation now for 20 years.I just don't recognize that account of them. I don't think anyone would found an organization like Electronic Frontier Foundation if they think everything is going to be fine, you have to both be alive to the liberatory potential of computers and the problems of computers, the ways in which they could become nightmarish.I like to say that the ethic of that age was 'this could all be so great, but only if we don't all screw it up.'And I think that people were very worried about screwing it up, but that's not to say that they didn't have a blind spot, because obviously, I think there's a pretty good case that we screwed it up.And I think the blind spot that certainly I had back then, and I think a lot of my colleagues had back then, was a failure to appreciate just how weak and sick and dying antitrust law was.It was easy to think, in the wake of the AT&T breakup, which really gave us the modern digital revolution, AT&T at the time, it had allies who said, oh, we can't break up AT&T because there's this Asian authoritarian power who are militarily adverse to us who steal American technology and are bent on destroying American high tech capacity.They're talking about Japan, right? We got the same rhetoric today and we just moved one country over to China. And they [00:06:00] said AT&T is our national champion that's going to defend us from the hegemony.And I think that what actually was the case was that AT&T had been sort of standing on the face of American tech and in particular, trying to stop private individuals from having access to modems because modems, they're very worried about because modems fundamentally were about enabling the provision of service from the edge to the edge.So I could stand up a bulletin board, and you could get a modem, and you could dial into that bulletin board and I could provide you service that AT&T might otherwise have charged access for. Think about how back in those days, if you got an AT&T phone bill, it would have a line item on it for caller ID. Because they charged you extra to find out who the phone who was calling you before you picked up the phone.It's as though if AT&T had provided email, they might have charged you extra to see the from line before you clicked open. They like that, right? It was a kind of urinary tract infection business model, where all the value flowed in a kind of painful burning drip and every feature cost an extra dime on your bill.So they really didn't like, they really didn't like modems. And so getting rid of AT&T opened up a lot of room for new innovative firms and new forms of community, new ways to solve collective action problems, new ways to do all kinds of amazing things, because it was edge to edge. It was you over there in your hometown and me over here in my hometown, in our living rooms, communicating with each other without AT&T getting in the middle of it and extracting some rent for permission for us to talk to one another.So if you lived through that, and you lived through this seven year antitrust investigation into Microsoft, you could be forgiven for thinking, we actually have a powerful state that will intervene to prevent firms from dominating technology and from acting as defacto regulators, right? Deciding how we live our lives, because the [00:08:00] ability to control or blast modems was really the ability to decide whether or not people would be part of the digital world.And so it's every bit as much an act of law-making, as if the state had made the law, except it's not being made by people who are at least notionally, democratically, accountable. It's being done by people in a boardroom who only answer to their shareholders.So it was easy to, it was easy to think that maybe we were going to have this perpetual motion machine of tech, where you have a firm that grows very big and dominates, and then another firm comes out of nowhere, literally two college kids who were selling AT&T long distance defeat boxes, the blue boxes door to door who then go into a garage and invent the Apple I, and then turn it into the Apple II, and then the Apple II+, and launch a new computer that is as popular as anything that IBM is making. And IBM is this behemoth.It was easy at the time to think: 'Oh yeah, you're going to get the rise of AT&T, and then you're going to get the rise of Silicon Graphics off the back of AT&T, and then Silicon Graphics will collapse and you'll get a Compaq,' and so on, and so on. That you'll have all of these amazing foments and that if you are a technologist, and the people who were really excited about the future of technology at the time were mostly technologists.There was also this thing where like: 'Oh yeah, sure. I clock in every day at Silicon Graphics or whatever, but you know, couple of years from now, I'll just go off and start another company and then I'll, kill Silicon Graphics.' It was very much the very much the kind of ethic of the day.I mean, remember Mozilla stood for Mosaic killer, right? That was the original. That was why Netscape's code name for its internal browsers was Mozilla, or at least that's what they claimed when the Godzilla trademark holders came after them.And so what I think we missed was that this was the last hurrah. That the reason AT&T was shut down [00:10:00] in 82 is because the Reagan administration did understand that between AT&T and IBM, the American tech industry was being strangled, and they had to kill at least one of them. And they found it more politically palatable to kill the regulated monopoly than IBM, even though arguably, they were both as bad for the American tech sector.And so they ideologically chose one, and then they let IBM go. It had been in 12 years of antitrust hell, they called it 'antitrust's Vietnam.' Every year for 12 years leading up to 82 and the dropping of the suit, IBM outspent the entire Department of Justice antitrust division on lawyers to fight the DOJ.So all the cases the DOJ was prosecuting in every industry across America had a lower bill than IBM's one case, its own bill for one case. So we didn't realize that when they took out AT&T but let IBM go, that it wasn't because they were committing themselves to muscular antitrust. It was because it was like the last thing they were going to do.And more importantly, they weren't going to be on the job afterwards. So if the baby bells they split AT&T into wanted to merge with each other and recreate AT&T, they would just waive those mergers through, which in fact, they went on doing.And the Microsoft antitrust action looked like a big deal, and then it got overturned on appeal. And that wasn't accidental. There had been a foment in American politics, starting in the mid seventies from the Chicago School the far right economists who are really the architects of our modern system to revise antitrust law and neuter it. And that paid off.There was a thing called the Mann Institute, which was a seminar series that was held in Florida, where judges would go for a free luxury junket every summer under the guise of continuing education, where they would get lectured on something called the consumer welfare theory of antitrust, which basically counseled forbearance against monopolies.40% of the U.S. judiciary went through a Mann seminar and empirically, when you look at the outcome of their judgements before and after their attendance, you see that they became very [00:12:00] tolerant of monopolies. So it wasn't a coincidence that Microsoft got let go.What we failed to realize was that over time, the tech sector would use its access to the capital markets, not to found new, innovative firms, but to buy new innovative firms and crush them.That was the Yahoo model, right? Just buy every cool company and mire it in endless bureaucratic politics until it was dead. If you want to have a good time, look up the Wikipedia page for companies Yahoo bought and killed.It's really, it's like a tour down all the best online services you used for 15 years, until they kind of ran into money, until SoftBank-- Yahoo got all their money from SoftBank. SoftBank got all their money from the Saudi royal family, right?SHEFFIELD: Mm-hmm.DOCTOROW: We failed to perceive that we would arrive at a web consisting of five giant websites filled with screenshots of text from the other four. Because anyone who ever tried to build a service that was as innovative and novel: Mozilla, or Netscape, as Mosaic, as even MSN, or SGI, or Adobe would find itself unable to compete. Because if it was good enough, one of those companies would just buy it and crush it. And otherwise, those companies would use predatory pricing and exclusive dealing and retail, price maintenance, the panoply of ancient antitrust sins that we decided to start tolerating in the early eighties, they would use that to ensure that no firm could grow to be a rival.And that's where we are now. And I think we missed it just to put a button on it. We didn't miss that tech could be harmful. We did miss that access to the capital markets would produce this concentrated tech sector that would replace the distributed judgment of millions of people who operated services and use them with the judgment of five boardrooms, which is where we are.SHEFFIELD: Well and the other thing also, there might have been more internal industry pressure against some of [00:14:00] these developments, in terms of smaller companies resisting or talking about this concentration, but at the same time, there was also the rise of techno libertarianism, which was basically not really that different from the Robert Bork antitrust approach, it was a "Leetspeak" version of Robert Bork.And that mentality, it was always present in Silicon Valley from the very beginning, but it wasn't the regnant philosophy in the early days, not necessarily. But I feel like with techno libertarianism, and libertarianism generally, have kind of taken some really bad turns in a number of ways. Would you say?DOCTOROW: Yeah, so. I mean, I feel like, like again, I had a front row seat for a lot of this, because I work for Electronic Frontier Foundation. Its founders are closely associated with the techno- libertarian movement. John Perry Barlow wrote the Declaration of Independence of Cyberspace, which is a document that I find quite stirring, even though today I think many people hold it in quite bad odor. And we talked about this beforehand off-mic, but I guess that if you wanted to find a cleavage line to understand the different schools here, it would be in how you view regulatory capture.And regulatory capture also comes out of the same Chicago School, it's part of the body of economic thought called "public choice theory" that is very closely so associated with techno libertarians. And the theory goes: basically in most regulatory matters, there's a small group of people who have a strong interest in the outcome, right? So if you're like a polluter, it really matters to you what the pollution standards are.And then there's a bunch of people who have a weaker interest in what it should be. So like the people who might be downstream of the pollution, they might later on acquire a very strong interest in pollution regulation. But at the time that the regulation is being made, before the pollution is started, they are apt to be not particular exercised.They're not going to write comments for an EPA docket about the right amount of PCBs that can be released into the water [00:16:00] supply by a factory. And so, as a result, what you end up with is firms that end up capturing their regulators. And their regulators end up becoming a kind of agent of the firm, but with the power of the state behind them.And they use that to exclude rivals. To make a, say, a pollution regulation that accommodates the processes that they hold, and maybe that they've patented. So no one else can replicate those processes, but prohib…
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