I’m not always a Cory Doctorow fan. Sometimes his jargon sort of backs up the flow of his point1. When he’s onto something, though, his observations about what is happening now in our spheres of information technology are frequently illuminating.
Back in January, Cory Doctorow published an article at Locus magazine called “Social Quitting.” My own ongoing2 ambivalence about social platforms runs in tandem with my curiosity about them, and so Doctorow’s title rang several of my bells. And these days, for anyone who’s watching, the platforms and the economy they support have been in flux. His point that these developments are cyclical is well-taken. However myopic we are day-to-day, the truth is that Meta and Twitter are just advertising companies and not utilities, and eventually we’ll all move on to something else.
Also worth a look is Doctorow’s piece in this week’s Atlantic, “How Google Ran Out of Ideas,” which I found equally interesting.