Someone is wrong about the internet! I have to agree with Levine here. On many fronts, I feel uncomfortable agreeing; Doctorow has a long list of achievements, and is prolific in a manner I cannot fathom. Yet I’ve always had the ick from the anonymity-as-a-right, libertarian tinged approach he presents. It’s always struck me a complex: rejecting big tech from an IBM laptop, decrying Microsoft (with which I cannot disagree) while arguing for the ad-hoc world of Linux and open software. There is a self-selecting hierarchy, tinged with libertarianism, at the heart of the old Wired-descended open software world: a meritocracy of engineers, driven by donations and labour surplus, groundless and fleeting as capital, westward ho in the electronic frontier, overwriting what might have been with John Perry Barlow’s naive laissez-faire view that early entrants will sort things out themselves, on their terms. Anonymity, ever at service of the theoretical hero-journalist we all are, overturning evil regimes, in denial of the mendacious and abusive adventures it enables far more frequently. The lousy platformised web we’re stuck in now is the natural evolution of those metastasised narratives of unfettered expansion, inevitably yielding to mass consolidation without oversight. There may have been a more innocent time online, but that innocence showed the way for the deeply cynical nihilism that is Bezos and Zuckerberg’s domain now.