Cory Doctorow Writes About Tech

In the neoliberal era the conventional view has been to celebrate the "tech" sector as the absolute epitome of free-market "entrepreneurship," "innovation" and "meritocracy" are supposed to be the foundation and essence and glory of economic vitality generally and American capitalism particularly. Indeed, the country's politics, media, popular culture ceaselessly glorify it as the great legitimator of the prevailing economic and social ideology and model, with this attitude underlined by how even as he set about satirizing it Mike Judge's exceedingly conventional admiration of that hub of the "tech" sector ended up making the satire tepid stuff (the more obviously so when compared against Judge's Idiocracy, in which Judge did not hesitate in the slightest about being brutal as he "punched down").

By contrast the journalism of Cory Doctorow at Pluralistic offers a very different view of the tech world--as a scene of sociopath hucksters fighting tooth and nail against market forces, entrepreneurship, innovation, in defense of rent-generating monopolies built up through every anticompetitive practice in and out of the books that foist garbage on customers whose choices are to "take it, or take it," from their unsafe-at-any-speed software underpinning major national operations from pharmaceutical prescription to car dealing, to their Digital Rights Management device-packed and bricked-at-a-stroke gadgets, with this whole predatory process aided and abetted by a credulous and corrupt media propagandizing on behalf of and policymakers bowing and scraping before "Big Tech" as they do every other "Big" out there. A far less flattering picture of the sector than that to which we are subjected nonstop elsewhere, those weary of the propaganda of Silicon Valley's courtiers can find in Doctorow's writing much-needed honesty and insight--which, if seeming like a voice crying out in the wilderness in the face of the ceaseless propounding of the conventional view, is along with other such voices playing a part in challenging a "myth of Silicon Valley" that has only ever stood in the way of serious consideration and address of the challenges posed by new technologies, and the economics of our time.