A lire ! Le monopoles des entreprises de technologies et la façon dont ils ligotent leur adhérents - I care about monopolies for exactly one reason: self-determination. I don’t care about competition as an end unto itself, or fetishize “choice” for its own sake. What I care about is your ability to live your life in the way you think will suit you, to the greatest extent possible, and taking into account the obvious limits when other people’s needs and wants conflict with you realizing your own desires.
We live in a world of vast and increasing monopolization, with one, two, or a few companies controlling everything from the arts (publishing, movies, music, streaming, comics, bookselling, movie theaters, talent agencies, games, wrestling) to finance (banks, investment funds, auditors, bond-rating agencies) to agribusiness (seeds, livestock, tractors, fertilizer, pesticides, precision agriculture) and everything in between (radio stations, cruise lines, cheerleader uniforms, pharmaceuticals, glass bottles, airlines, eyeglasses, athletic shoes, fast food, food delivery, pet food).
When just a few people have the ultimate say over what you can read, or where you can work, or how our food is grown, or even what you feed your cat, you’d better hope that they value the same things as you!
Of course, the executives who run these corporations don’t assume you want the same things as they do. When Mark Zuckerberg set out to buy Instagram, he unwisely sent a series of emails to Facebook’s CFO setting out the case for the acquisition, namely, that younger users no longer liked Facebook, so much so that they were quitting his company’s service and signing up for Instagram. Zuckerberg wanted to buy Instagram so that users who had the gall to live their lives according to their own priorities (and not his shareholders’ priorities) would be thwarted. He wanted to make sure that wherever Facebook’s defectors found a new online home, he’d be able to control them, spy on them, and make money from them. ▻https://locusmag.com/2021/07/cory-doctorow-tech-monopolies-and-the-insufficient-necessity-of-interopera
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