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The thing about shame is that it eats at you until it fully consumes you. Then you cannot tell the difference between their shame and your own— between a body and an apology. It’s not just that you internalize the shame; rather, it becomes you. You no longer need the people at school telling you not to dress like that; you already do it to yourself. You no longer need your family telling you to be quiet; you already do it to yourself. You edit yourself, and at some point, it becomes so normal that you can’t even tell that you’re doing it. And the worst part is that you no longer have anyone else to blame.

— Beyond the Gender Binary by Alok Vaid-Menon, Ashley Lukashevsky

How are you supposed to be believed about the harm that you experience when people don’t even believe that you exist? The assumption is that being a masculine man or a feminine woman is normal and that being us is an accessory. Like if you remove our clothing, our makeup, and our pronouns, underneath the surface we are just men and women playing dress up. The scrutiny on our bodies distracts us from what’s really going on here: control. The emphasis on our appearance distracts us from the real focus: power.

— Beyond the Gender Binary by Alok Vaid-Menon, Ashley Lukashevsky

The problems that blockchain technologies say they will fix are inevitably not the problems that I’m worried about.

For example, there are various proposals for blockchain-based social media, with posts, or identities, or both, hosted on immutable ledgers. I’m skeptical of these overall. These ledgers’ immutability is inextricably bound to a speculative market in some kind of token that incentivizes third parties to either “stake” or “mine” crypto assets. The speculative value of these assets is tied to a volatile and entirely mutable belief that they will continue to appreciate, and if that belief collapses, it takes the tokens with it, and the immutable ledger ceases to be a reliable source of ground truth.

— The Internet Con by Cory Doctorow

One thing we know for certain about the Big Tech companies is that they lie all the time: they lie about which data they collect from you; they lie to advertisers about whether you saw an ad; they lie to publishers about whether they collected money for an ad. They lie about their taxes, their labor practices and every other commercially significant subject.

Wouldn’t it be amazing if the only time they told the truth was when they boasted about how great their products are?

— The Internet Con by Cory Doctorow

But there are at least two ways in which tech is exceptional:

First, tech is foundational. The questions of tech monopoly aren’t inherently more important than, say, the climate emergency or gender and racial discrimination. But tech—free, fair, open tech—is a precondition for winning those other fights. Winning the fight for better tech won’t solve those other problems, but losing the fight for better tech extinguishes any hope of winning those more important fights.

Second, tech is interoperable. That means that, long before we break up Facebook or Google or Microsoft or Apple, we can offer immediate, profound relief to the people whose freedom of motion is hemmed in by tech’s walled gardens. We don’t have to wait for breakups to allow someone to install a third-party app, or bypass heavy-handed (or overly tolerant) moderation, or overcome the algorithmic burial of their material. We can do that right now,with interop.

— The Internet Con by Cory Doctorow

The prohibition on circumventing digital rights management, or DRM—embodied in Section 1201 of the DMCA, Article 6 of the EUCD and similar laws around the world—makes software the most copyrighted class of works in the world. Software authors (or rather, the corporations that employ them) enjoy more restrictions under copyright than the most talented composer, the most brilliant sculptor or the greatest writer.

— The Internet Con by Cory Doctorow

Federated social media devolves moderation choices to the groups they affect, and allows those groups to block or welcome other groups based on their own choices.

It’s likely that this will work better than the centralized moderation policies that Facebook or Twitter hand down, because the moderation will be carried out by people who understand the context of the community.

— The Internet Con by Cory Doctorow

It’s one thing to be stuck without the blender attachment that will make your smoothie perfectly smooth. But it’s another thing for your blender to refuse to operate because it can’t connect to its app because severe weather just knocked out your home internet and you’re trying to mix your kid’s medicine into a smoothie to get it down their throat.

— The Internet Con by Cory Doctorow

We’ve tried making Big Tech into better tech for decades. That project has been an abject failure. To make tech better, we have to make it smaller—small enough that the bad ideas, carelessness and blind spots of individual tech leaders are their problems, not everyone else’s. We need lots of tech, run by lots of different kinds of people and organizations, and we need to make it as close to costless as possible to switch from one to the other

— The Internet Con by Cory Doctorow

winning user loyalty by providing an excellent experience is harder work than punishing disloyal users

— The Internet Con by Cory Doctorow

If we someday triumph over labor exploitation, gender discrimination and violence, colonialism and racism, and snatch a habitable planet from the jaws of extractive capitalism, it will be thanks to technologically enabled organizing. From street protests to mutual aid funds, from letter-writing to organizing sit-ins, from blockades to strikes, we need digital networks to prosecute our struggle. That is the other way that tech is exceptional. The fight for a free, fair and open digital future isn’t more important than any of those other fights, but it is foundational. Tech is the terrain on which our future fights will be fought. If we can’t seize the means of computation, we will lose the fight before it is even joined.

— The Internet Con by Cory Doctorow