2 Matching Annotations
  1. Mar 2023
    1. “A hundred years ago, the robber barons built libraries. Today, they build spaceships.”
      • Quote
        • A hundred years ago, the robber barons built libraries. Today they build spaceships.
        • Author Quinn Slobodian
  2. Feb 2019
    1. It’s not just logging off of Facebook; it’s logging off the countless websites that use Facebook to log in. It’s not just using DuckDuckGo instead of Google search; it’s abandoning my email, switching browsers, giving up a smartphone, and living life without mapping apps. It’s not just refusing to buy toilet paper on Amazon.com; it’s being blocked from reading giant swaths of the internet that are hosted on Amazon servers, giving up websites and apps that I didn’t previously know were connected to the biggest internet giant of them all.

      Few of us understand the reach of these companies and how ubiquitous they are. It's not just the original companies themselves but how many other companies they've bought to gain control of data. These are the robber barons of the 21 century, controlling a vast monopoly of personal information in a consumer economy.