Tech
@book{doctorow2015information,
title={Information Doesn’t Want to Be Free: Laws for the Internet Age},
author={Doctorow, C. and Gaiman, N. and Palmer, A.},
isbn={9781940450469},
lccn={2016295678},
url={https://books.google.com/books?id=oGv-sgEACAAJ},
year={2015},
publisher={McSweeney’s Publishing},
comment={Almost a self-help book on how to make a living as a creative person on the internet, but with a subtext of why open content is good.},
category={Tech, Economics, Criticality}
}
% Page 42: The internet is one giant copy machine, everything is a copy: “The difference between ‘streaming’ and ‘downloading’ is whether your program gives you a ‘Save as’ button.”
% Page 51: Any service on the internet that allows people to have conversations with each other is going to result in social conversation — even though the early internet was built to talk science, it rapidly also included discussions of Star Trek. Social conversation exists all over the internet alongside “content”.
% This page finally tipped off what I didn’t understand about tiktok: tiktok finally (after years of trying) enabled people to have social conversations on the internet via video rather than text. I don’t think this will ever kill off text conversations on the internet (reddit is going strong, and I think anyone who fully engages in a video sharing platform vs text will eventually come to understand that a video platform will always require much more work than text — just because there’s never going to be a way to make video editing as easy as text, mostly, you are just always going to have to do multiple takes of video if you want the quality to be reasonably high. But the power of video content is real, and the more people who consume it, the more people are going to want to make it. I’m wayyyy behind on understanding this.
% Page 69: He talks about how can force costs (externalities) onto middlemen: for example making ports liable for stopping counterfeit handbags from entering the country might not cost the handbag manufacturers anything, but would cost the ports billions. Though it often costs everyone else a lot more to externalize costs, since the government often ends up footing the bill (pollution) or it’s just inefficient (the best place to stop pollution is at the source).
% When I read this it’s obvious that this is exactly Trump’s low-grade “business” acumen at work: he thinks if the country is a business, then he can apply his Business 101 thinking and force other countries to pay America’s expenses. This, of course, fundamentally misunderstands not only the cost of externalities, but the basic functions of governments in the world: governments are the backstop that picks up business externalities costs to generate wealth, not generators of wealth themselves. That might be fucked up and one of the main critiques of capitalism, but it is core to capitalism working!
% Page 95: He talks about how the vast majority of the stuff on the internet is not copyrighted entertainment-industry product. Most of it is small seemingly trivial moments and communications: cat videos, youtube trollers, toddler videos, and whatnot. He then goes on to argue (rather nicely) that these “trivial” things are actually incredibly important to our ability to connect with other humans. And so, argues that this vast majority of trivial stuff is the reason the internet needs to be preserved as a place of free information exchange.
% This idea that what’s important on the internet is all the small personal stuff is the big takeaway of this book for me. Though it’s not a central point of the book, it is clearly one of Docotorow’s guideposts for reasons the to push for freedom on the internet. It had not occurred to me quite that way before.
% This section also points out that artists and creators are often enlisted in copyright fights (and go along with them, despite all the arguments in the previous two sections of the book for why restricting copyright is bad for them business-wise) because of the “intuitive” sense that “people are stealing my work” and so they get involved in trying to shut that down. Even though MOST stuff on the internet is not the product of creative professionals. (My God! The power of artists! The corporations will do anything to get creatives on board their copyright agenda because THEY are the only people anyone cares about!)
% There may be a parallel here to how poor republicans support lowering taxes on the rich: if they see themselves as possibly being rich someday, they want to make sure they get the most money. Likewise, creatives see themselves as possibly being famous someday, so they support copyright restrictions that protect their work.
% This is the part of the book he takes his title from: countering Stewart Brand’s old dichotomy that information both wants to be expensive and free, Doctorow says that information doesn’t want to be free, people do.
% Page 136: He references Lukas Kmit in 2011 improvising music over a nokia ringtone when someone’s phone goes off in a concert hall.
% Page 143: Think like a dandelion: spread the seeds of your work everywhere so they might land somewhere fertile to grow.
% Page 153: He points out that if you restricted films to a single company producing them, and that company made one film a year, that film would make tons of money due to scarcity alone. This, he points out, is exactly what Edison did with early film technology, and why a bunch of smart people went to the West Coast to produce films: to get out from under the tyranny of Edison in New Jersey. Of course the West Coast film studios eventually decided that one company was too restrictive, but six was just right. Docotorow wants to see millions.
% Epilogue: He discusses how the internet is the ultimate tool for organizing groups to get things done (the best since the invention of language, he says). He then goes on to hope that this will lead to the organizing of people to achieve freedom, while tempering this with a fear that totalitarians can use the same tools to spy on and repress people. From 13 years after this book was published, we now know that the internet can be used to organize normal people to irrationally support an authoritarian power structure. He has baked into this section the now-known-to-be-fallacy assumption that normal people want freedom (literal freedom not “land of the free, home of the brave” freedom — that is freedoms like free speech and habeas corpus and privacy). Turns out, normal people will happily give up actual freedoms in exchange for watching a new-ish feeling kind of powerful authoritarian stick it to the old fuddy power they have had their whole lives.
@article{metz2025deepseek,
Author={Metz, Cade and Tobin, Meaghan},
url={https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/23/technology/deepseek-china-ai-chips.html},
Title={How Chinese A.I. Start-Up DeepSeek Is Competing With Silicon Valley Giants},
journal={The New York Times},
date={2025-01-23},
comment={A small Chinese company pulls off similar capabilities in AI as giant US tech companies at a fraction of the price and using only much lower-powered chips. Markets panic.},
category={Tech, Criticality, ai, finance, open source}
}
% From article:
% While employees at big Chinese technology companies are limited to collaborating with colleagues, “if you work on open source, you work with talent around the world,”
% Many executives and pundits have argued that the big U.S. companies should not open source their technologies because they could be used to spread disinformation or cause other serious harm. Some U.S. lawmakers have explored the possibility of preventing or throttling the practice.
% But if the best open source technologies come from China, they argue, U.S. developers will build their systems atop those technologies. In the long-run, that could put China at the heart of A.I. research and development.
% Hours after his inauguration, President Trump rescinded a Biden administration executive order that threatened to curb open source technologies.