We are living in an age of zombie platforms: platforms that shamble on long after they should have been double-tapped and stuffed in a shallow grave. The force that animates those zombies is desperation: not the desperation of the platforms’ owners; rather, the desperation of the platforms’ users and business customers, who can’t live without one another and don’t know how to leave without losing one another.

Quite the imagery here, but I also appreciate Doctorow’s apparent empathy with people not wanting to lose connections. I’ve left beloved platforms and am in the middle of figuring out a few more to leave, and the inertia is so real among so many people. I personally hate how much the art world is not investing in reasonable alternatives to Instagram, for one.

Nowadays especially people are worrying about so much related to affordability and government surveillance and human rights violations and so on, this feels like yet another piece of homework when the world is so bonkers (but I wish people would see how these platforms’ owners promote some of this stuff!!) Looking forward to seeing his actionable suggestions later in the book