The Internet Con: How To Seize The Means Of Computation by Cory Doctorow (book review)
I have a lot of time for Cory Doctrow, even more so with his non-fiction books. This one, The Internet Con: How To Seize The Means Of Computation’ from 2024, is also the history of the Internet and the rise of the main companies monopolising the market. Although the USA has anti-monopolising laws, they are frequently evaded by companies happy to pay the fines knowing its business as usual. From my perspective, I wish Doctorow had compared what has happened to the Internet as typical of the American business model to buy out the competition and offering poorer services. It is with the social media websites, like facebook, where people could not move their content elsewhere, effectively trapping them and controlling the news and advertising they receive becomes a captive audience. I’ve never felt a need for social media but I’m not particularly social in real life neither. Medical problems cause that limit and although I’m known as a great communicator, I don’t really take the job home with me. The world hasn’t stopped because I don’t belong to social media but I do think people do get drawn in without understanding how controlling it can be on your time.
I think many of you reading this book will become appalled by a lot of these practices but there aren’t many places on the Net you can change to that doesn’t have similar regimes. You just have to be aware of what you’re walking into. How many of you read the details of any Internet company’s contracts before ticking them? Exactly. You might read the first one but then develop a sameness for them all. With social media, you are effectively signing away the rights to your own property even if you die and members of your family not having access to it when suicides happen. This book shows how it developed to where we are today.
What Doctorow brings out in this book is giving the history of American business practices before and after the Net, not whether its typical. What the Internet really gives them is a captive audience which they can sell and push advertising at but don’t really look at and make a lot of money. It also allows the likes of Google to blackball anyone for the slightest thing and deprive them of Internet access with no criminal redress and making it too expensive to fight in court. In other words, where democracy rules your country, don’t expect it on the Net. All of which is complicated by no one country has total authority on the Net. Well, not quite. For Apple, if they wanted their social media in China not to be cancelled which would have cost them a lot of lost money, they had to have backdoors into their social groups for its government to monitor its population and imprison them.
If anything, there is no consensus across the world on basic laws to govern the Internet so it becomes just another business model to make money from its customers. You might think you can escape a lot of it but, really, its often choosing the best from the bad which is scary enough in itself. The ones you think are the safest are probably not. If you see some of the social media sites handy for keeping non-subscribers out, you probably tend to not see it as also a means to keep you in if you want to leave. I doubt if that has changed in the two years since this book came out. Even if you opt to move to a new social media site, there’s no guarantee that one of the bigger ones will buy them out. Effectively, the Internet is less an open village but a closed prison which would be familiar with ‘The Prisoner’s Number 6. Watch out for Rovers.
I do think a lot of the time users have become institutionalised to these regimes simply because there’s nothing you can do about it other than taking care not to be scammed, not necessarily by the big companies but by the smaller ones using them.
If you want to have your eyes widened by some of the practices used on the Internet then this book must surely be amongst your read books of the year. Again, this is an important book and probably confirms your worse fears. Whether it can be changed or not depends on whether governments will step in or companies falling flat on their face.
GF Willmetts
January 2026
(pub: Verso, 2024. 184 page indexed small enlarged paperback. Price: £10.99 (UK), $193.95 (US), $25.95 (CAN). ISBN: 978-1-80429-214-3)
check out website: https://www.versobooks.com/en-gb/products/3035-the-internet-con?srsltid=AfmBOooJl2H9Ufzis3fY6g4GFy_XZmChmW2Dz940c7P6fkdUfvyqYWtZ
