How to Destroy Surveillance Capitalism by Cory Doctorow

Author:Cory Doctorow
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: Stonesong Digital, LLC

Steering with the windshield wipers

It’s been 40 years since Bork’s project to rehabilitate monopolies achieved liftoff, and that is a generation and a half, which is plenty of time to take a common idea and make it seem outlandish and vice versa. Before the 1940s, affluent Americans dressed their baby boys in pink while baby girls wore blue (a “delicate and dainty” color). While gendered colors are obviously totally arbitrary, many still greet this news with amazement and find it hard to imagine a time when pink connoted masculinity.

After 40 years of studiously ignoring antitrust analysis and enforcement, it’s not surprising that we’ve all but forgotten that antitrust exists, that in living memory, growth through mergers and acquisitions were largely prohibited under law, that market-cornering strategies like vertical integration could land a company in court.

Antitrust is a market society’s steering wheel, the control of first resort to keep would-be masters of the universe in their lanes. But Bork and his cohort ripped out our steering wheel 40 years ago. The car is still barreling along, and so we’re yanking as hard as we can on all the other controls in the car as well as desperately flapping the doors and rolling the windows up and down in the hopes that one of these other controls can be repurposed to let us choose where we’re heading before we careen off a cliff.

It’s like a 1960s science-fiction plot come to life: People stuck in a “generation ship,” plying its way across the stars, a ship once piloted by their ancestors; and now, after a great cataclysm, the ship’s crew have forgotten that they’re in a ship at all and no longer remember where the control room is. Adrift, the ship is racing toward its extinction, and unless we can seize the controls and execute emergency course correction, we’re all headed for a fiery death in the heart of a sun.

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