this post was submitted on 22 Sep 2024
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Personal review:

A good recap of his previous writings and talks on the subject for the first third, but a bit long. Having paid attention to them for the past year or two, my attention started drifting a few times. I ended up being more impressed with how much he's managed to condense explaining "enshittification" from 45+ minutes down to around 15.

As soon as he starts building off of that to work towards the core of his message for this talk, I was more-or-less glued to the screen. At first because it's not exactly clear where he's going, and there are (what felt like) many specific court rulings to keep up with. Thankfully, once he has laid enough groundwork he gets straight his point. I don't want to spoil or otherwise lessen the performance he gives, so I won't directly comment on what his point is in the body of this post - I think the comments are better suited for that anyways.

I found the rest to be pretty compelling. He rides the fine line between directionless discontent and overenthusiastic activist-with-a-plan as he doubles down on his narrative by calling back to the various bits of groundwork he laid before - now that we're "in" on the idea, what felt like stumbling around in the dark turns into an illuminating path through some of the specifics of the last twenty to forty years of the dynamics of power between tech bosses and their employees. The rousing call to action was also great way to end and wrap it all up.

I've become very biased towards Cory Doctorow's ideas, in part because they line up with a lot of the impressions I have from my few years working as a dev in a big-ish multinational tech company. This talk has done nothing to diminish that bias - on the contrary.

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[–] [email protected] 97 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (22 children)

Great talk, but I'm getting a little tired of Doctorow's calls to action that result in nothing but crickets from the community at large. He's written/spoken numerous calls to action for various issues since the early 2000's.

It's not Doctorow's fault, I think it's rather that the majority of the tech community isn't listening. Doctorow can talk until he's blue in the face and it won't matter if the larger community doesn't actually give a shit about his ideas.

[–] confuser 32 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (3 children)

i for one have never heard of this guy, i had read this talk but didnt even know the name of the person until just now. i am rather new to super niche internet spaces beyond the bigger niches though so i may not be a good representation.

[–] [email protected] 40 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

That's fair, but he has indeed been around a long time, and is even portrayed as wearing goggles and a hero-cape in tech-comic XKCD.

He was the main editor at zine-turned-blog BoingBoing in the early 2000's. I hope you enjoy finding out more about him, he's got good tech philosophies.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 3 months ago

A lot of his science fiction writing is available with a Creative Commons license, meaning that you can download and read it for free. I really enjoy his quirky, sardonic style.

https://craphound.com/tag/creative-commons/

Gets you to a page where you can download.

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