Review by Booklist Review
Doctorow is no fan of Big Tech. In fact, he makes it clear in the first sentences of his book that he holds Big Tech and the people who own and operate it in the deepest contempt, calling them "mediocre idiots" and "donkeys." The source of his ire, he contends, is that Big Tech has been able to establish monopolies in the field and has influenced policies that have prevented new technologies from supplanting their own. He spends several chapters explaining in great detail how this was achieved, why it's a bad thing, and how it can be combatted. He also spends several chapters dealing with issues like privacy, harassment, child sexual abuse material, nonconsensual pornography, and terrorist materials. Doctorow is clearly passionate about his cause and certainly knows his stuff. However, his book is not aimed at the general reader, but for those deeply immersed in information and technology fields.
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Journalist and novelist Doctorow (Red Team Blues) details a plan for how to break up Big Tech in this impassioned and perceptive manifesto. Today's large tech companies are legally able to quash "interoperators" (defined as: "new technologies that plug into their services, systems and platforms")--a privilege never granted to the likes of IBM in decades past, according to Doctorow. If the industry's "complex thicket of copyright, patent... and other IP rights" were swept away, Doctorow writes, a healthy market of secondary services would spring up--for instance, a service that could allow a user to message friends on various social media platforms without logging into them directly. Doctorow hypothesizes that legislating in favor of interoperability, and thus righting the market, would be a more direct route to breaking up Big Tech than other forms of antitrust legislation, since it would force big companies to innovate and compete. He also advocates for extralegal, "guerrilla" forms of interoperability. To illustrate his point, Doctorow tours the past several decades of technology history, highlighting such cases as the film industry's attempts to ban the VCR in the 1980s, Apple's reverse engineering of Microsoft Office in the 2000s, and several "right to repair" laws passed over the past decade in Massachusetts. Readers may find Doctorow's analysis too blithe on some points--for example, he is dismissive of the need for the kind of centralized content moderation practiced by giant social media platforms. Still, Doctorow's sense of urgency is contagious. (Sept.)
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Review by Kirkus Book Review
A meaty manifesto for, among other things, returning the internet to the public domain. "This is a book for people who want to destroy Big Tech," writes free-speech advocate and science-fiction writer Doctorow. "It's not a book for people who want to tame Big Tech. There's no fixing Big Tech." Do you hate Facebook? Most people do, notes the author, but we're on the platform by way of the process of "network effects"--i.e., we are there because our friends are there, and our friends are there because we're there--and no one wants to be the first to jump off. Still, Doctorow adds, there are ways to fight today's tech giants. One example comes from Apple, which for years endured a Microsoft Word that was so flawed outside the Windows platform that it lost computer sales to Microsoft by virtue of those same network effects: People who relied on a reliable version of Word for their livelihoods stuck to PCs even if they hated them. The solution: Steve Jobs tasked a group of programmers with reverse-engineering Microsoft Office--figuring out how the program worked from the ground up--and then doing Office one better by creating the software suite originally called iWork, which could open Word documents. The result was that "Microsoft gave up" and turned Office into an open format. Doctorow revisits other stories that were less successful--Napster, for example, which revived long-out-of-print music but was crushed by a litigious recording industry, a success story that should have been but came up against the forces of monopoly and the legal system that makes it possible. Doctorow calls for more reverse-engineering, more "adversarial interoperability," and more decentralized social media platforms such as Mastodon that, incidentally, are less likely to harbor trolls and Nazis. A small-l libertarian battle cry for a technology that's truly liberating, just as its pioneers intended. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
