"..[Enshittification] is a seemingly inevitable consequence arising from the combination of the ease of changing how a platform allocates value, combined with the nature of a "two-sided market," where a platform sits between buyers and sellers, hold each hostage to the other, raking off an ever-larger share of the value that passes between them."
Cory Efram Doctorow is a Canadian-British blogger, journalist, and science fiction author who served as co-editor of the blog Boing Boing. He is an activist in favour of liberalizing copyright laws and a proponent of the Creative Commons organization, using some of its licences for his books. Some common themes of his work include digital rights management, file sharing, and post-scarcity economic
"A tablet without software is just an inconveniently fragile and poorly reflective mirror, so the thing I want to be sure of when I buy a device is that I dont have to implicitly trust one corporations judgment about what software I should and shouldnt be using."
"Any time someone puts a lock on something you own against your wishes, and doesnt give you the key, theyre not doing it for your benefit."
"The real damage from terrorist attacks doesnt come from the explosion. The real damage is done after the explosion, by the victims, who repeatedly and determinedly attack themselves, giving over reason in favor of terror. Every London cop who stops someone from taking a picture of a public building, every TSA agent who takes away your kids toothpaste, every NSA spook who wiretaps your email, does the terrorists job for him. Terrorism is about magnifying one mediagenic act of violence into one hundred billion acts of terrorized authoritarian idiocy."
"Open platforms and experimental amateurs … eventually beat out the spendy, slick pros. … Relying on incumbents to produce your revolutions is not a good strategy. Theyre apt to take all the stuff that makes their products great and try to use technology to charge you extra for it, or prohibit it altogether."
"Theres something to the idea of the autonomous character. Big chunks of our wetware are devoted to simulating other people, trying to figure out if we are likely to fight or fondle them. Its unsurprising that when you ask your brain to model some other person, it rises to the task. But thats exactly what happens to a reader when you hand your book over to him: he simulates your characters in his head, trying to interpret that characters actions through his own lens."
"Im not a lawyer— Im a kind of mouthpiece/activist type, though occasionally they shave me and stuff me into my Bar Mitzvah suit and send me to a standards body or the UN to stir up trouble. I spend about three weeks a month on the road doing completely weird stuff like going to Microsoft to talk about DRM."