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Let the Platforms Burn
(doctorow.medium.com)
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Love Doctrow, but this is a loooong article. I've used AI to summarize it:
"Companies cannot unilaterally mediate the lives of hundreds of millions — or even billions — of people, speaking thousands of languages, living in hundreds of countries.The real problem is that no one should have that job. That job shouldn’t exist. We don’t need to find a better Mark Zuckerberg. We need to abolish Mark Zuckerberg."
"Rather than passing laws requiring Threads to prioritize news content, or to limit the kinds of ads the platform accepts, we could order it to turn on this Fediverse gateway and operate it such that any Threads user can leave, join any other Fediverse server, and continue to see posts from the people they follow, and who will also continue to see their posts."
"Tech companies are even more concerned with criminalizing the things you want to do to them.
Frank Wilhoit described conservativism as “exactly one proposition”:
There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.
This is likewise the project of corporatism. Tech platforms are urgently committed to ensuring that they can do anything they want on their platforms — and they’re even more dedicated to the proposition that you must not do anything they don’t want on their platforms."
This is great. What AI did you use?
This was done with Claude.
Wow, thanks for this! Still giving the link a click.
Using an AI to summarize the article is likely something he would dislike. There's a whole host of issues with putting AI between us and the written word and asking it to interpret it for us.
Like...just read, people.
I'm a fairly slow reader. I figure I've got something like a mild dyslexia, if I read too fast the words get all jumbled up in my head. Never was diagnosed with anything when I was in school, though looking back at it now it seems odd the way I was shadow-banned from the speed reading class in High School.
So, anyway, I'm all about getting some summaries. Yes, I realize it's really hard for writers to condense things, and sometimes the journey of a story lifts the point. So, I'm gonna use the tools to help me out.