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Cory Doctorow on how we lost the internet

Cory Doctorow wears many hats: digital activist, science-fiction author, journalist, and more. [...]

He has also written many books, both fiction and non-fiction, runs the Pluralistic blog, is a visiting professor, and is an advisor to the Electronic Frontier Foundation(EFF); his Chokepoint Capitalism co-author, Rebecca Giblin, gave a 2023 keynote in Australia that we covered. The laws were a gift to monopolists and allowed companies like HP to continually raise the price of ink until it " has become the most expensive substance you, as a civilian, can buy without a permit"; printing a shopping list uses " colored water that costs more than the semen of a Kentucky-Derby-winning stallion". He finished with a veritable laundry list of all of the ills facing the world today (the " omni-shambolic poly-crisis"), both on and off the internet, and noted that the tech giants would willingly " trade a habitable planet and human rights for a 3% tax cut".

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