Cory Doctorow, "The Internet Con: How to Seize the Means of Computation" (Verso, 2023)
New Books in Economics
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The Disruption of Large Tech Firms
When Facebook first opened up to the general public it had this really big problem which is that everybody who would want to use social media already had an account on MySpace. Mark Zuckerberg bought Instagram for a billion dollars and when a CFO questioned this he got up in the middle of the night and sent an email to a CFO basically saying we have to buy Instagram because our users like Instagram better than Facebook. A company called power ventures made a unified inbox tool that would just scrape your inbox for Facebook, LinkedIn and for Twitter and put them all in a single dashboard so you could manage all your social telephones in one place. The court gave Facebook what they wanted - felony contempt of business model
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