My world on the web
The swerve is our hopeful future. Our happy ending isn’t averting the disaster. Our happy ending is surviving the disaster. Managed retreat. Emergency measures.
In the swerve, we’ll still have refugee crises, but we’ll address them humanely, rather than building gulags and guard-towers.
We’ll still have wildfires, but we’ll evacuate cities ahead of them, and we’ll commit billions to controlled burns.
We’ll still have floods, but we’ll relocate our cities out of floodplains.
When the state allows the online world to become the near-exclusive domain of a small coterie of tech execs, with the power to decide on matters of speech – to say nothing of all the other ways in which our rights are impacted by the policies on their platforms, everything from employment to education to romance to (obviously) privacy – for all the rest of us, they are making policy.
Because inaction in the face of danger is a form of action.
A restored internet is one that values pluralism (power diffused into many hands) and self-determination (you get choose which tech you use and how you use it). Achieving a pluralistic internet of technological self-determination will be a long process.
This is a part of Doctorow’s wider discussion of adversarial interoperability. It is also interesting to consider this alongside John Harris’ investigation of the punk rock internet.
Doctorow also recorded an audio version of the essay.
There’s a name for societies where a small elite own property and everyone else rents that property from them: it’s called feudalism. DRM never delivered a world of flexible consumer choice, but it was never supposed to. Instead, twenty years on, DRM is revealed to be exactly what we feared: an oligarchic gambit to end property ownership for the people, who become tenants in the fields of greedy, confiscatory tech and media companies, whose inventiveness is not devoted to marvelous new market propositions, but, rather, to new ways to coerce us into spending more for less.