December 15, 2021 • 54 mins
We chat with author and journalist Cory Doctorow (Little Brother, Attack Surface) about internet privacy and the importance of hope.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:04):
Welcome to it could happen here. Um the show that
is normally introduced by me shouting a tonally, but today
I did like a professional. Um, because today myself and
my colleagues Garrison and Christopher are talking to someone. I'm
very excited to chat with Mr Corey. Doctor. Oh Corey, Well,
hello the show. Thank you very much. It is my
(00:25):
pleasure to be on it. It's great to meet you
all and to be talking to you today. Corey. You
do a lot of writing about kind of technology and
surveillance and cultural issues around those. You're also an author.
You've written some great fiction. I think today will probably
talk most around books like Attack Service and walk Away,
But you've written a lot of wonderful stuff. Um. And
(00:47):
you've also worked with the e f F for years
and years. UM. So you you you're coming at what
I love about I mean, we're gonna be talking today
broadly about surveillance and kind of the future of of
the Internet. Will probably talk about some Metaversey stuff. What
I love about the way in which you think and
write about the future is that you're kind of coming
about it from a number of angles, both as like
(01:07):
a tech industry journalist, as a fiction writer imagining the
future and as somebody who's kind of weighted in as
an activist to this, And UM, I'm kind of wondering,
where do you see like the greatest potential for actual
like change? Um? Is it? Is it in kind of
Is it in lobbying and engaging as an activist or
(01:29):
is it in sort of imagining as a as a
as a fiction writer? What might be? So I I
see them as adjuncts uh, you know, diversity of tactics
and all that stuff. Um. The thing is that tech
policy arguments are often very abstract, uh, and they are
(01:50):
only visceral for the people who would provide the kind
of political will to do something about them. Usually that
that comes when it's too late, right, people, people care
about tech monopolies once the web is turned into five
giant websites filled with scripted shots of text from the
other four, But not when Yahoo is on a buying
(02:10):
spree of tech companies and we're saying, oh, that's how
tech companies grow, and all tech companies will grow in
the future by buying all their nascent competitors and rolling
them up into a big vertically integrated monopoly, which is
kind of how we got Facebook and Google and the
rest of it. And um, you need to be able
to make policy arguments to policy people, but you also
need to be able to put uh, some some sinew
(02:31):
and muscle on the bone of that highly abstract kind
of argument. And and that's where fiction comes in. It's
kind of a like a fly through of like an
emotional architects rendering of what things might look like if
we get it wrong or if we change it. It
preserves the sense of possibility, you know. I think one
of the great enemies of change is the inevitable is
(02:55):
um of capitalist realism and the idea that there is
no alternative. So if you can make people believe in
an alternative, than they might work for one. And certainly
the opposite is true. If people don't believe there is
any alternative possible, they won't work for one. Why why
would you? Uh? And so all of that together, I
think is part of how you mobilize people to care
(03:16):
about stuff. Yeah, I mean, that makes that makes total sense,
and it is. It's difficult, I think because I first
came into technology as a journalist, and it's very difficult
to get people to care about stuff. And I think
in particular privacy, which there was. It has been one
of the most interesting cases of like the kind of
(03:37):
thought leaders in in an industry freaking out over something
and people not really having an issue with it because
we kind of all agreed to hand over all of
our data to a number of big side not all,
but I don't know. I'm interested in your thoughts on that.
I understand the idea that like fiction is um is
a much better way to try to get people to
care about these things because it makes them feel as
(03:59):
opposed to kind of boarding on. I think people can
get kind of lost in the weeds of acquisitions and
like uh pivots and you know, tech companies acquiring each
other and whatnot. Well, look, I think that the part
of the problem with privacy, the reason that we were
late to wake up and do something about it, is
because it was obfuscated. You know, if you've ever seen
(04:21):
the maps of like how an ad tech stack works,
the flow diagrams, and there are some things that are
complicated because um, there are some things that are hard
to understand because they're complicated. And then there are some
things that are made complicated so they will be hard
to understand. And I think in the case of the
surveillance industry, the latter is true. And it wasn't just
(04:45):
that they were trying to play us for suckers, they
were also playing their customers for suckers. Right. One of
the reasons that the ad tech stack is such a
snarled hair ball is so that the people who buy
ads and the publishers who run ads can't tell how
badly they're being RiPP off by their intermediaries. But this
also has the side effect of making it very hard
for us to know as the as the kind of
(05:07):
inputs to that system, how our own dignity and private
lives and safety and integrity are being put to risk
by these systems as well. Um. And you know, it
may be that people, if they had been well informed
about what was going on, they might have been indifferent
as well. But I think that when most people were
(05:27):
very poorly informed, right when all there was was this
kind of that privacy discourse was just like stuff as
being your personal information is being siphoned up, but no
kind of specifics on how that was being used and
how that was being done and how it might bring
you to harm. Um, it's not clear that that you
(05:48):
can say that that the reason they were indifferent is
because they were fully informed and inn care if you
know that they weren't fully informed, if you know that
they were barely informed. M h, I mean yeah, I
think are absolutely right. Because when the Cambridge analytic a
scandal broke, which was I think one of the first
times that there was a really huge international story that
made it clear some of the consequences of all this, like,
(06:11):
it did provoke a lot of a lot of anger.
Um I I do you worry at all that, Like
there's a degree to which because it because people got
tricked or wherever you want to frame it, and it's
gone the the kind of um financialization of people's private data,
of people's like personal information, because that has gone so far,
(06:33):
there's a risk that people are just kind of inured
to it. Um yeah, well, well, I mean that kind
of gets to my theory change here, which is that
there is always gonna be uh a point of um
maximum and difference peak in difference. You know, Um, if
you think about something like being a smoker, the likelihood
(06:55):
that you care about cancer goes up the long or
you smoke, and the more health effects you feel. And
certainly there will come a point in your life when
you will only ever grow more worried about the effects
of smoking on your life. But there's also a point
of no return. Right. If the point at which you
you're you're concern reaches the point where you're actually going
(07:19):
to do something about smoking is the day you get
diagnosed with stage four lung cancer, then that um denialism
can slide into nihilism. You can say, why bother, right,
it's too late. It's like if if we spend years
arguing about the crashing population of rhinos and then finally
there's only one left, and you say you're right, there
(07:41):
was a problem, you might as well say, like, why
don't we eat him and find out what he tastes like?
It's not like the rhinos are ever going to come back, right,
And so for me, so much of the work is
about shifting the point of peak indifference to the left
of the point of no return on the timeline, so
that people actually start to care earlier, because it's it's
(08:04):
if you haven't a genuine problem, right, like the overcollection
of our private data, the mishandling of it, the abuse
of it, that genuine problem will eventually produce tangible effects
that are undeniable, right that that the our ability to
ignore it just goes monotonically down. It's the thing about
the climate emergency. You know, even if Shell had not
(08:26):
our Exon had not hidden the data it had on
the role that it's products were playing in climate change
in the seventies, it would have been hard to muster
a sense of urgency in the seventies, right because the
story is that in fifty years something bad's going to happen.
But here we are, fifty years on something bad is
really happening, and a lot of people are caring about it.
(08:46):
They still don't seem to care about it enough, or
maybe they've slid into nihilism. There's certainly, i think on
the part of the elites, a kind of nihilistic sense
that maybe they can all retreat to like mountaintops and
build fortresses and breathe their children by Harrier jet you know,
and and and you know that nihilism, I think is
(09:07):
is what you get when the point of no return
is passed before peak denial. Uh and the privacy um
catastrophe that is looming in our future that we haven't
quite reached yet. I mean, we've just had the first
kind of trickles of the dam breaking that's in our future.
(09:27):
It hasn't been enough yet to shift people away from it,
but but we might be getting there right. We might
we might eventually be able to do something about it.
And one of the things that will hasten that moment
is um restoring competition to those industries. That one of
the reasons that uh, the industry that spies on us
(09:48):
is able to foster denial and indifference is because it
is a monopolized industry. To companies control eighty percent of
the ad market, Google and Facebook, and as as monopolists,
they're able to extract huge monopoly rents. They're among the
most profitable companies in the history of the world. And
some of those monopoly rents, rather than being returned to shareholders,
(10:11):
can be mobilized to distort policy, to to make us
think that there's nothing wrong with the way that they
collect data and use it to forestall regulation, to pay
Nick Clegg four million a year to go around Europe
and the world and say, as the former Deputy Prime
Minister of the United Kingdom, I'm here to tell you
that Facebook is the friend of the democratic regimes of
(10:31):
the world. And and you know, if if the anti
monopoly movement, which is a thing I've become very involved with,
is able to go from strength to strength, it's surging now,
then one of the things that we might do is
is destroy the ammunition that's being used by these large
monopolistic firms to distort our policy and harm us in
(10:55):
these ways with impunity. And and then maybe we can
actually take the the nascent and natural alarm that people
do feel about the invasions of their privacy and and
actually turn that into privacy policy that is meaningful in
respect of these big companies that actually reigns them in. Yeah,
(11:17):
and I think I like that you frame it as
a privacy catastrophe because I think, I mean, what I
just exhibited earlier in this episode, is this this tendency
that I certainly see in myself and I see in
other people to get kind of beaten down by the
continued um excesses of this industry and the continued kind
of failure of anything to be done to curb it.
And I think you're right, it has to be viewed
(11:39):
as um as a calamity. And I and nothing I
think makes that clearer than some of watching some of
the stuff Facebook in particular has put out about their
plans for the metaverse, and kind of thinking back from
all of these sensors they want to store in your house,
all of the ways in which they want to map
everything around you. Um, they never you know, they they
kind of advertise as like you'll be able to play
(12:00):
basketball with somebody who's in a different state. But really
what it is is you're giving Facebook access to every
measurement of your body and you know, the pulse of
the beat of your heart and all this this stuff
that like maybe we don't quite know what it would
be useful for from a financialization standpoint, but it's unsettling
to think that they'll have to find a way because
(12:21):
they'll have it. You know, I don't know. I don't
know what is to be done about that, other than,
as you say, kind of breaking up these monopolies. Well,
and and I mean breaking up is like one of
the things we can do to monopolies, and and it
takes a long time, you know, Um A T and T.
The first enforcement action against it happened sixty nine years
before it was broken up in N two. I don't
(12:42):
think we can wait that long. But there's a lot
of intermediate steps, right, Like we can force them to
do interoperability, we can block them from from predatory acquisitions.
We can force them to divest of companies and engage
in structural separation. We can do all kinds of things.
It actually looks like the United King it was going
to stop them from buying Giffey, which might seem trivial
(13:03):
after all, it's just like animated jifts, but um, what
it actually is surveillance beacons in every social media application,
right because if you're hosting a Jeff from Giffey in
your message to someone else, Facebook has telemetry about that message. Um.
And so the the the not the i c O,
(13:26):
the Competition Competition and Markets Authority in the UK was like, yeah,
this is just gonna strengthen your market power. That's why
you're buying this company. You have too much market power already.
We're not gonna let you do it. Um. It was
almost the case that the Fitbit merger was blocked. Google's
Fitbit merger. I think it's still not too late to
roll it back. And Lena Cohn, who's the new fire
(13:46):
breathing dragon in charge of the FTC, who is an
astonishing person who was a law student three years ago.
Uh she has said, oh yeah, this this like one
point three trillion dollars worth of mergers and acquisitions that
you're doing right now to get in under the wire
before we start enforcing. Guess what, We're going to unwind
those fucking mergers if it looks like they were anti competitive.
(14:07):
And not only are you going to lose all the
money you spent on the M and A due diligence
and the paperwork and the corporate stuff, but all that
integration you're going to do between now and then, you're
gonna have to de integrate those companies when we tell
you that you don't have uh, you don't have merger
approval and you're on notice. You can't come and complain later, right, Like,
you can either get in line and wait for us
(14:28):
to tell you whether or not your merger is legal,
or you can roll the dice. But I tell you
what if you come up sneake, guys, you are fucked.
And that is amazing, right, that is a powerful change
in American industrial policy that really makes a difference. Yeah,
I mean, and that is a beautiful thing to think
of being in place and actually hitting as hard as
(14:50):
it could. Obviously, the concern is that like who will
be you know, picking the head of the FTC in
three years in change, and like how how how much
influence is Peter You're going to have their in the like, um, yeah, well,
and Peter Tiel of course love's monopolies. He says, competition
is for losers. So you're right, I mean, obviously, elections
have consequences, but you know, one of the ways that
(15:13):
you win elections is by making material differences in people's lives,
and so you know, if people are policy, then uh.
One of the most important policies Biden has set so
far is hiring Lena Khan and her colleagues Canter at
the d J and Tim Wu and the White House. Yeah,
I mean, I would I would love nothing more than
(15:33):
to see particularly like Facebook reigned in at this point
because I'm one of the casualties of the of the
of the the ad market, like crash of started in
like two sixteen seventeen. It feels like the odds of
them being able to like, I don't know, We've got
three years where we know, you know, theoretically these policies
(15:57):
will be in place, and and I don't know, I'm
well like when I when I because the Republicans are
talking a lot about regulating social media too, about even
breaking up these companies, but they often tend to be
talking about it in a very different way and with
a very different kind of end goal in mind. Um
And I guess you know obviously they know that, right Facebook,
they are well aware that like this might be a
(16:18):
weight out the clock situation for them, and they have
some arrows in that quiver. I mean that may be so,
but also remember that Facebook's users are outside of the US,
and that even a change in administration here won't won't
um put Margaret vest Dagger, who's the Competition commissioner in
the EU, back in the bottle. And she's another fire breather, right,
(16:39):
She's another amazing person, And so you know I wouldn't
be too quick to write that off. I mean Facebook
needs its foreign markets, Yes, It's U S customers are
worth more to anyone else because we have the most
primitive privacy frameworks, so it can extract a lot more
data for like we're the we're the richest people with
a worse privacy, so that's that's um. You know, it's
a real home court advantage for Facebook, but it needs
(17:01):
that other eight percent of its users. It wouldn't be
what it is without them, and that makes it subject
to their jurisdiction. And you know, one of the things
about ad driven firms like Facebook, UM is that they
really need sales offices in country. Uh. So you know,
even before we we had the proliferation national firewalls, which
don't get me wrong, I don't think it's a good thing. Um.
(17:23):
These large global firms that operated UM sales offices in country,
in every territory they worked in, were vulnerable to regulation
because if you have staff in a country, then you
have someone that can be arrested, right, And so it's
not like they can just be like I don't know,
(17:43):
like the Tour Project, which just you know, it has people,
um who who sit in hack on tour who are
close to lawyers who can defend people who sit on
hack and on tour. Uh. You know, if the Tour
Project had to have staff full time in Turkey and
China and Russia and Syria in order to operate, it
(18:04):
would be a very different project. But you know, Facebook
and Twitter and Google they all have staff in those
countries and it makes them vulnerable to regulation. And so,
you know, China is really interesting because because um she
Jin Ping, for his own reasons which are not my
reasons and distinct from the Democrats and the Republicans reasons,
(18:26):
is doing stuff to rein in big tech in China.
And it's actually quite interesting because you know the argument
that Nick Klegg makes when he says why we shouldn't
break up Facebook, as he says, uh, you know, China
is coming for your UM, for your I P and
for your industrial competitiveness with its big tech giants that
it treats as national champions that projects soft power around
(18:48):
the world. Meanwhile, China is like these tech giants. We
hate these tech giants. They present a countervailing force to
the hedgemony of the the Communist Party and the and
the executive branch that she should bring sets at the
off of we're gonna neuter them and we're gonna we're
gonna disappear their founders like Jack Montt fucking googlogs right like,
they're like, we don't want national champions because the nation
(19:11):
that you know, we bow and Ali Baba is the
champion four is we Bow and Ali Baba and tense
that they're not They're not champions for China by any
stretch of the imagination. They don't give a shit about China.
And so you know, they're all of these companies are
going to face regulatory pressure, anti monopoly regulatory pressure all
over the world, and you're you're so much more um optimistic.
(19:36):
I guess about about the potential for that to bite
than a lot of people I talked to, and I
think more knowledgeable as well. And I kind of wonder
because there's this very strong, obviously influenced by decades of
cyberpunk attitude that like, we're in this age of mega
corporations whose power is you know, there's nothing that can
stop Amazon from doing what Amazon wants to do, right,
(19:56):
Facebook is going to keep doing whatever they want to
do forever. You clear really don't believe that, and I
you know, you clearly know your stuff. I'm wondering why
you think that that image is still persist, so persistent
that like attitude in our heads of these these these
are kind of monolithic forces in our society that um
(20:17):
just have to be endured. So I think it's a
belief in the great forces of history, right, um, and
the great man theory. You know that the the these
um Uh you know that these rich people are driving history. Yeah,
these these these powerful figures are driving history. They're in
(20:37):
charge there in the driver's seat. I mean, that's kind
of what's behind Trump arrangement syndrome, right, the idea that
Trump is uniquely powerful and talented demagogue as opposed to
just like a demagogue shaped puzzle piece that fit in
the demagogue shaped hold that was left by the collapse
of credibility of capitalism. Uh. And you know, a man
who is clearly too stupid to be a cause of
(20:59):
any thing and will only ever be the effect of something.
And uh, you know the for me, the theory of
history and how it goes was really transformed by an
exercise that my friend Ada Palmer does. So. Aida is
a science fiction novelist. She's she's just published the fourth
book of her Terra Ignota series, her debut series. It's
(21:22):
in an incredible series of books. But she's a real
like kind of multi talented, multi threat. So she's a
librettiston singer who has produced album length operas based on
the Norse mythos. She's also a tenured history of um
a tenured professor of Renaissance history in Florence at the
University of Chicago, where she studies heterodox information, pornography, homosexuality, witchcraft,
(21:46):
and so on. During the Inquisitions and every year with
her undergrads, she reenacts through a four week long live
action role playing game, the Election of the Medici's Pope,
and each of her students takes on the role of
a cardinal from a great family and the in the
actual election of the I forget what year was, uh
(22:08):
fourteen ninety or something, I forget, but they each take
on this role and they have a character sheet and
has motivations like a dinner party, murder mystery. But for
four weeks they make alliances, break alliances, stab each other
in the back uh stage surprise reversals. And at the
(22:29):
end of the four weeks there's this u faux Gothic
cathedral on campus and they dress up in costume. Aida
has a a Google alert for theater companies that are
getting rid of their costumes, so she clothes them in
the garb of the Medici's cardinals and they gather and
they go into a room and then a puff of
(22:51):
smoke emerges and you get the new pope. And every
year four of the final candidates, Uh, there are four
final candidates rather, and two of them are always the
same because the great forces of history bear down on
that moment to say those people will absolutely be in
the running for the for the papacy, and two of
(23:12):
them have never once been the same, because human action
still has space to alter the outcomes that are prefigured
by the great forces of history. And so for me,
the idea of being an optimist or a pessimist has
always felt very fatalistic. It's this either way, this idea
(23:33):
that the great forces of history have determined the outcome
and human action has no bearing on it. And I
think that rather than optimism or pessimism, we can be hopeful.
And that's the word you use before. Hope is the
idea not that you can see a path from here
to the place you want to get to, but rather
that you haven't run out of things that you can
do to advance your your goal, right, Because if you
(23:54):
can take a step to advance your goal, you can
ascend the gradient towards the heat that you're trying to reach,
then you will attain a new vantage point, and from
that vantage point, you may have revealed to you courses
of action that you didn't suspect before you took that step.
So so long as the step is available, there's always
another step lurking in the wings that you can't see
(24:16):
from where you are. And the reason I'm hopeful about
this is I can think of like fifty things that
could improve the monopoly picture that we're living in now,
and it's up from thirty things last year. And so
even though I don't know how we get from here
to a better future, and even though I absolutely see
the blockers you're talking about Trump landslide, uh losing Congress
(24:38):
because they let Joe Mansion and Christmas Cinema Newter the
build back better Bill, Um, you know all of those
things that can happen. I have hope, you know, which
is not the same as optimism or a belief that
things will be great, or even even like a sense
a lack of a sense of foreboding. I have that
in spades. But I have that when the next phase
(25:01):
of the fight begins, that we will have many um
vulnerable spots we can strike at, and that we can
capitalize on whichever victories we attain to find more vulnerabilities
and move on. I think that's so important and I
think it goes in line with to bring up climate
change again. The idea that like one of the most
toxic things you can think are e climate change is
(25:23):
that there's nothing to do. We're already past every point
of no return and there's no there's no positive action
because it just leads you to doing the same thing
as the people who deny it. Um. And it's Yeah,
I think it's it's very important to um recognize that like,
not only are there things you can do, but when
you do those things, you start taking those steps, other
steps reveal themselves. Yeah. Um. And you know what, if
(25:47):
you're feeling nihilistic about about climate I'm nearly through Saul
Griffith's book Electrify Uh. Saul's an old friend of mine.
He's MacArthur Winner's electrical engineer, and he's just done the
He's it's a popular engineering book. It's one of my
favorite genres. They're like popular science books, except instead of
telling you about how science works, they tell you about
how engineering works. And he's basically like, here is why
(26:10):
all the estimates of how much renewable as we need
are hugely overestimated, And it's basically that like keeping uh
fossil fuel power online requires a lot of fossil fuel, right,
so something like of that estimate is just it's the
energy that we need to make the energy and it's
(26:30):
not present in electrical models. Here's how we can manufacture it.
Here's how we can distribute it. Here is basically how
if we can figure out the financing, Americans can uh
spend less money every year than they do now to
get more stuff that they love every year that we
can do this without hair shirts. It's a spectacular book. Um,
(26:52):
And you know, I don't agree with everything Saul says
every all the time, but he is very careful about
is technical facts. There aren't technical errors in this. There
might be assumptions that we disagree with, but as a
technical matter, he's basically written a piece of design fiction
in which, over the next fifteen years, using clever finance
(27:14):
and and solid engineering, we really actually do avert the
climate emergency. And yeah, as always, kind of the main
barriers to doing the best version of the thing is
the political realities on the ground. You know, you have
to but I think that's the that's the value of
at least trying to make it clear that there are options.
(27:45):
I wanted to shift for a moment um. I was
thinking recently about I think probably the earliest back book
of yours that I've read, Pirate Cinema, which is heavily involved.
I think I'm going to you know, if you're one
of the folks like me, uh was on the Internet
back when you know, file sharing sites, when that was
a huge topic of discussion, when the r i A
(28:06):
Was going after people, when like copyright was kind of
a a much more prevalent part of kind of the
online discourse. Um. It deals a lot in that and
these kind of I think there's elements of it that
kind of prefigured what Disney has done buying up every
imaginable fictional property in the world. And that's kind of
(28:27):
the the elements of dystopia that book deals with is is,
you know, the attempts of these this these giant multinational
entertainment corporations to shut down the free tape trading of ideas,
remixing and all that stuff. And then kind of thinking
about the difference between the focus of that and the
focus of books like Attack surface where you're really delving
more into you know, I the fictional versions of real
(28:50):
life companies like Tiger Swan that do it uh the
surveillance on protesters and all around the world, and that
are kind of using tactics that were and yeared by
other contractors, and like Iraq and Afghanistan years earlier. I
guess kind of the things that I find interesting about that,
as I can remember when I was first on the Internet,
(29:10):
the big social kind of crusades online with the people
that that I paid attention to at least was all
around copyright. It was about not just you know, the
attempts to stop people from remixing and sharing copyrighted work,
but about um attempts to like buy up copyrights and
like into these these ever kind of larger uh UM agglomerations,
(29:34):
and and that's kind of hit. It seems to have
hit like a terminal point with the you know, movies
like Ready Player one and kind of a lot of
the stuff we're seeing in Marble where everything is showing
up everywhere, Space Jam two UM. I guess the part
of it that feels less dystopian the days attempts to
crack down on file sharing, which I don't think went
(29:55):
kind of in the worst case scenario. I'm interested actually
in your thoughts on that, um, because I can remember,
you know, when the r I A would be threatening
people with years in jail and whatnot over sharing stuff
on kaza we seem to be I don't know. Is
it just that it gets less like I'm interested in
your in your thoughts on that. Is it just that
it's less publicized when they cracked down on people, or
has kind of the nature of their response to that
(30:17):
really changed. Well, I think that what's happened with the
kind of steady state of the copyright wars has been
the introduction of brittleness and fragility into our speech platforms
like Twitter, uh and and Facebook and YouTube, where it's
very easy to get material removed by by making copyright
claims um. And you know, we see that with the
(30:39):
sleazier side of the reputation management industry, where they use
bogus copyright claims to take down criticisms. You you know,
there was a group of leftists who are really celebrating
the idea that if you if Nazis were marching in
your town, you could stop them from uploading their videos
by playing copyrighted music in the background, and I was like,
(31:00):
you have no idea, what a terrible fucking idea that is.
And you know, within a couple of years, cops and
Beverly Hills were doing it. Whenever people tried to film
the police there, they would just turn on some Taylor
Swift to try and stop uploading. Um. You know, the
thing about the copyright wars is that the real action
turned out to be in um wage theft through monopolization. So,
(31:24):
you know, the neutering and destruction of label independent music
distribution platforms like Kazah or Groxter or Napster, and the
Supreme Court decision, the Groster decision that supported that meant
that the only um way that you could launch a
service like that was in cooperation with the big labels,
(31:45):
and the you know, most successful one is Spotify. Spotify
is actually partially owned by the labels, and the labels
use that ownership steak to negotiate a kind of formalized
wage theft where they allowed for a lower perse stream
rate because when they get royalties for a stream, part
(32:06):
of that money goes to their musicians. And that meant
that the firm Spotify retain more profits which it returned
to it in the form of higher dividends, and dividends
go just straight to their shareholders. They don't that there's
no claim that musicians can make on this. And because
they set the benchmark rate, it meant that everyone, irrespective
(32:26):
of whether you were assigned to one of the big
three labels, ended up getting the same per stream rate
as as Universal's artists, so they were able to structure
the whole market. In the meantime, in the industrial side,
UH copyright laws, notably Section twelve of one of the
Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which is a law past that
(32:48):
makes it a felony to remove DRM to bypass a
technical protection measure UM that has become the go to
system for blocking, repair, interoperability UH and to prevent third
parties from um UH from from creating services or add
ons that accomplish positive ends like improved accessibility, improved security,
(33:12):
um AD blocking and privacy and so on. They just say, well,
you know, we we put a one molecule thick layer
of DRM around, say YouTube, and when you make a
YouTube downloader for archival purposes or whatever, UM you you
just create a um A. UH you bypass our technical
protection measure, and so you're committing a felony and you
(33:33):
can go to prison for five years and and pay
a five thousand dollar fine. And so you have this
like relentless monotonic expansion of DRM into like automotive tractors.
Medtronic uses it to block people from fixing ventilators. UM.
So you know this, this UM assault on the ability
to reconfigure a technology that is ever more prevalent in
(33:58):
our lives and that recently holds our lives in its
in its hands right its choices determine whether we live
or die has been really consequential. And I know, we
don't really think of it as a copyright problem. We
think of it as right to repair. We think of
a security auditing our accessibility. But the rule that is
being used to block into operability is a copyright law.
(34:20):
It's what printer companies used to stop you from buying
third party inc um. It's what Apple uses to stop
you from installing a third party app store. And you
know the absence of a third party app store is
why when Apple removed all the working VPNs in China,
Chinese users couldn't just switch to another app store that
had working VPNs in it. And so you know that
(34:41):
this um endgame of the copyright wars is I think
a lot more dystopian than merely suing college kids. Uh,
it's it's actually really screwed us in ways that are
that are hard to fathom. Yeah, it's a fascinating example
of kind of Dystopi creep because, at least kind of
(35:02):
from my more more ignorant position, when I was nineteen,
I was like worried that all of these these people
remixing music and movies that I liked, like we're going
to get cracked down on or have their stuff pulled
um And the kind of thing that I didn't I
don't think a lot of people saw coming until it hit.
I certainly didn't, was what you were just talking about
the fact that kind of the logic of how these
(35:24):
these entertainment companies were looking at like an album or
you know, a movie and and cutting up pieces of
that they've they've applied to like a tractor, you know,
and now you can't like repair your John Deer or
modify your John Deer so it works better. And then
you know, you you get situations like we just kind
of averted with the John Deer strike, where there was
a very real possibility that we wouldn't be able to
(35:45):
get a large chunk of a harvest because there wouldn't
be parts and you can't put your own in. And
that's to think that that the thought process that let
us there started with like trying to protect Metallica. In
some ways, it's kind of funny. And this is why
the anti monopoly critique is great because it shows you
that there's cause for solidarity between John Deere tractor owners
and John Deere tractor UH makers the workers who work there.
(36:10):
Because the same force that has allowed John Deere to
cram down its workforce for forty years is the is
the force that allows it to um uh take away
the agency and economic liberties of farmers who own John
Deere tractors. And it's it's the it's the political power
that comes with monopoly. And so you know, if John
(36:31):
Deere were a smaller, weaker firm, it would be less
able to resist both the claims of its workforce and
the claims of its um UH customers. Mhm yeah, I
mean that makes that makes sense, and it is like
I like that idea of of because it's not just
kind of solidarity between John Deere purchasers UM and and
(36:54):
the people who work in the factories. It's also there's
kind of solidarity between a wide like anyone concerned with
UM copyright. It's a much broader base of solidarity than
just people who are worried about you know, what's happening
uh to fiction or like what Disney is doing to
like copyrights around Mickey Mouse or whatever. Like it's it.
(37:14):
You can you can draw in concerns from right to
repair to a bunch of other things, which potentially means
there's there's a greater body of people available for action
if you can make them see kind of um converging
interests there, which is I think is an interesting idea. Well,
I think you're getting something really important and this is UM.
This comes from James Boyle, who's a copyright scholar at
(37:36):
Duke University and was really involved and found in creative
commons and in those early copyright fights and and Jamie
makes an analogy to the coining of the term ecology.
He says that before the term ecology came along, you know,
someone us cared about owls and someone us cared about
the ozone layer, but it wasn't really clear that we
were on the same side. You know, it's not clear.
(37:57):
If you're Martian looking through a telescope, you might be
hard pressed to explain why. You know, the destiny of
charismatic charismatic nocturnal birds and the gaseous composition of the
upper atmosphere were the same issue. Right in the term ecology.
Let all these people who cared about different things find
a single point to rally around. It turned a thousand
issues into one movement. And I think that in the
(38:19):
in the course of resisting corporate power, which is to say,
resisting monopoly, we have the potential to weld together people
from very diverse fields. You know, farmers and people who
make tractors. Sure, but you know, if you grew up
watching professional wrestling and now you're aghast that the wrestlers
that you loved are begging on go fund me for
(38:39):
pennies to die with dignity, you know once someone explains
to the reason that that's happening is that thirty wrestling
leagues became one wrestling league that was able to practice
worker's classification, turn those performers into contractors, take away their
health insurance and leave them to die. Then suddenly you're
on the same side of the people who were worried
about big tech and big tractor, and the people are
(39:00):
worried about the fact that there's only one manufacturer of
cheerleading uniform uniforms, and two manufacturers of athletic shoes, and
two manufacturers of spirits, and two manufacturers of beer. One
manufacturer of eyewear that also owns all the eye wear
stores and the eyewear ensure. You know that Duff Beer
thing from the early Simpsons, where there's like Duff Beer,
(39:20):
Rispberry Thing, Dulci, Gabana, Oliver, People's Bauschan, Loam, Versaci. Every
eyewear brand you've ever heard of is one company coach
all of them. And they also own Sunglass Hut and
uh Target Optical and Sears Optical, and lens Crafters and
(39:41):
Spec Savers and every other eyewear story you've ever heard of.
And they bought all the labs that make the lenses,
so more than half the lenses in the world come
from them. A division called and they bought Imed, which
is the company that bought all the insurance companies that
ensure I wear and so they're also the company that's
ensuring glasses your your eyes one company, and I Wear
(40:04):
costs a thousand percent more than it did a decade ago.
They stole our fucking eyes. Right, So people who care
about that have common cause with people who care about
wrestlers and people who care about beer and big tech
and the fact that there's four shipping companies and they
have no competitive pressure and so they just keep building
bigger ships that gets stuck in the fucking Suez canal Right,
(40:25):
we're all on the same side. Yeah, And I I
like the idea that I like. I like hoping that
that kind of inherent solidarity, if you can point it
out to people, is potentially an antidote to, or at
least a partial antidote to the level of the layer
of politicization that's fallen down over everything, um that stops
(40:46):
people from actually considering matters but instead considering like, I
don't know, is this owning the libs? Right? Like if
you if they if if you can get them to
see that, like, yeah, their favorite wrestler is like dying
because he couldn't afford insulin, and that that that's t
i'd to the issue of like the reason his dad
can't get tractor parts this year or whatever, um, and
that that's tied to other issues that are maybe championed
(41:07):
by people he would reflexively dismiss. But like, yeah, I
I I find that really inspiring. It's still a significant
there's a significant challenge for people who are trying to
make those connections, for folks who are who are trying
to like inform them of that state. I mean, yeah,
that's true. And you know, like Steve Bannon will tell
(41:28):
you that the reason to do cultural world culture culture
war bullshit is because politics are down downstream from culture,
and there's probably an element of truth to that. But
I also think the reason that people find culture war
bullshits so attractive is because they got nothing else. Yeah,
I think we we talked about that a lot within
the context of conservative for politics. I grew up very conservative,
(41:50):
and I do remember how the tenor of things I
was hearing through the bush ears changed from advocation of
policies to just all culture war, all the time, all
all striking the dims all the time. And it was
the kind of um it. And that's not the only
place that's happen. You see it on the left to
absolutely like it's it's endemic now it's it's a poison
(42:12):
and kind of the discourse. But I think that there's
a lot that needs to be I think there's a
lot to be discovered still for like how to break
people out of that. I'm kind of bullish when we
(42:32):
talk about these issues like you were bringing up with
sort of the monopolization of these industries you wouldn't expect
to be monopolized. I'm hopeful about the future that stuff
like three D printing presents for that. We have an
organization in Portland that does kind of three D printing glasses,
frames and stuff and is helping people with that sort
of stuff. And I'm in conversations with like the Four
(42:54):
Thieves Vinegar Collective. I think it's called UM. Yeah. Some
of the folks doing like ing to do working on
pharmaceutical hacking making at the moment like lower cost UH
kind of home scratch brood versions of like different AIDS medications,
and the Holy Grail is doing that with um insulin
effectively UM and I think it is. And I do
(43:17):
think one of the things that's exciting about that is
because the way in which the way in which collaboration
on three D printing works in the way in which
actually spreading, like the ability to do stuff works. I
think it synergizes nicely with the ability of people to
kind of reach other folks through writing or other forms
of content, because they can both spread through the same
You can have a video or a story, and you
(43:38):
can have like kind of embedded guides on how to
do that. Um I I I don't know that I've
I've runned into a lot of your writings on kind
of the potential of three D printing in this space,
But I'm interested, like to what do you do? Are
you looking at that as kind of an area of
hope or do you see that still is kind of
too too niche and labor focus to really actually take
(44:00):
off in the way that it would need to to
crack some of these nuts. This is where I do
my my Woody Allen. You know nothing of my work
stick because I had this novel Maker Makers in two thousand.
It's it's why uh Bree Pettis went out and founded
Maker bought uh and it's you know, credited with like
(44:22):
kickstarting the homebrew three D printed revolution. Blah blah blah blah,
blah and um, and it was a very bullish novel
about three D printing. I Um, you know, the reality
hasn't lived up to the hype yet. It may just
be that we're in the long trough of despair, as
the Gardner hype cycle model has it. Uh. But you know,
I think the problem with UM three D printing was
(44:44):
that the patents had been concentrated into the hands of
two large firms that had bought all their competitors, including
Maker Bought and UM. When those patents finally expired, the
big one was the laser centering of of powder patent expired.
It just wasn't a big bang. And I think it's
because the supply chain for it still had a lot
(45:05):
of proprietary elements, and so producing the powder and producing
the components that allowed for that powder printing remained a
very high bar, and so we just didn't see the
kind of new industry emerged that we would have hoped for.
And you know, it's like seven years since those patents expired.
Five years since those patent expired. Now we're seeing a
(45:26):
few more of those powder printers. You get a lot
more like you've cured epoxy printers because those came off
patent earlier and they have a less complicated supply chain. Um.
But still, I mean mostly when we talk about printers,
we're talking about filament, and just filaments just not a
great technology. It's been pushed in ways that you wouldn't
(45:47):
even believe, and people have figured out how to do
absolutely incredible things with it. But it's not It's not
something that you would make aerospace components for, you know,
It's it's something that you make um novelty dungeons and
dragons dice out, Yeah, which is an important industry to disrupt.
Don't get me wrong, but I'm with you. I can
(46:10):
remember paying thirty bucks for a set of dice as
a kid and thinking, somebody's gotta fix this scam. I
can produce something for Christmas, Robert, thank you, Garrison. And
you know now I I own a I bought a
comic con a couple of years ago. I bought a
tiny little D twenty made out of meteoric or I
have a sky metal D twenty. Oh now that's yeah,
that's that's classy. Um. I'm curious. We've got a little
(46:34):
bit of time left and I wanted to ask in
your your novel Attack Surface. I know it was released
right October, if I'm not mistaken. UM. And obviously a
lot of that deals with again these kind of like
corporations that have been contractors for the D O D
doing like fucked up surveillance shit in Iraq and Afghanistan
bringing that technology to crack down on like US, uh,
(46:57):
sort of dissident left wing political movements. Him's out the
year that we have a nationwide kind of uprising. UM
that a lot of fucked up surveillance ship that had
been kind of demoed state side around it, like standing
Rock and whatnot, gets gets really put into its own
How much of that was written before ship went down?
(47:18):
And I and I'm assuming, like, I don't know exactly
how your process works, but I'm wondering, like, I assume
you started the project before everything went the way it
did last summer. How much did kind of what happened
last summer affect the way you imagined that technology in
those tactics functioning in that book. Yeah, the the timeline
goes the other direction. I wrote that book before the
(47:41):
summer uprising, UM, long long, long long before that, And
I wrote it about things like UM, the surveillance technology
we saw in Belarus and chev and also at Occupy
and Standing Rock and at other Black Lives Matter demonstrations
and uprisings in Americus, Assimila, and if you you know,
(48:02):
also the monotonic expansion of surveillance leagues right where you know,
first we learned about MC catchers, and then we learned
about dirt boxes, which are MC catchers on airplanes, and
you know, like we just all of that stuff leaked
like crazy because you know, these surveillance giants are are
not good at what they do, right, which isn't a
(48:25):
reason we should be hopeful. A company that's bad at
what it's it does is in some ways even worse
because one of the ways that they're incompetence expresses itself
is that they often gather a bunch of data on
innocent people and then leak it right, not maliciously, just
through incompetence. Um. And so you know, the this expansion
(48:48):
of surveillance has like been on my mind for a
long time, and I've been writing about it, well at
least since Little Brother, right, so two thousand and six,
I wrote that novel, and I've had my finger in
that Yeah, So I've had my finger in that for
all that time, and and working with the f F,
it's impossible to miss. Sure. Was there a degree to which, um,
(49:09):
I don't know. I guess we're you surprised by anything
that happened last him? Or did it just kind of
comprehensively feel like these are everything slotting into place that
I knew was heading in this direction? Because yeah, I mean,
you're right, I did, like there was like everything was
kind of presaged um years before. Yeah, I'm wondering if
if there was anything that kind of surprised you, um
(49:31):
or was it? Was it all just sort of what
you've been braced for. Yeah, I don't feel like there
were any kind of surveillance surprises. I mean the reverse
the use of reverse warrants. I think we all kind
of assumed was going on. There had been hints of
it in Google's warrant canarias beforehand. But you know those
(49:51):
geofense warrants, which again, if you're like sitting there going oh,
geofense warrants are awesome because they're catching the one six rioters, Like, dude,
you are going to be so disappointed, Holy sh it,
that's not where they're going to keep using this. Yeah. UM,
so you know, learning more about those reverse warrants I
think was was interesting. UM, but I don't feel like,
(50:14):
I don't well off the top of my head, I
can't say that there was any new technical stuff that emerged,
you know. I I, um kick started the audio book
for Attack Surface UH, and I offered as like the
top tier you could commission short stories in the Little
Brother universe, and there were three of those and I
just finished the first of them, and it's about um
future pipeline protests and uh. You know, I spent a
(50:38):
lot of time in my research looking at the surveillance
that was done on the pipeline protests, and a lot
of it was provocateurs and undercovers who were just terrible
at their jobs, right, like the intercepts, long publication of
of uh, you know, long documents about how those operators worked.
We just like showed up in military haircuts and combat
(50:59):
boots and then we're like, Hey, I'm from Portland and
I'm here because we're gonna funk up some bad guys.
Let's go do it. Let's go do violence and save
Indian country. And like everyone was like you, like, does
anyone want to buy drugs and and the actual protesters
were like you're a provocateur, like go away, you know,
(51:19):
like they could tell I mean, I guess you know,
there are a lot more effective in the UK and
infiltrating the climate movement. You know, they impregnated several protesters,
so you know, and had long term relationships with them
and raised kids with them. So there is no here stories.
Yeah here, it was not that we did just didn't
see that incredible efficacy. Yeah, And I do think that
(51:41):
that's I think kind of the message I took out
of it because I I was I started reporting on
like dirt boxes back during Standing Rock, just having them,
like it explained to me by people who were on
the ground when I showed up that like, yeah there's
this your like phones don't work the same out here,
and like we're trying to figure out what's going on,
but like everything is is in it's not just that
we're out in the sticks or anything. And I think
(52:03):
the only surprise, the big surprise for me last year
was how I think how little the technology accomplished for
them and how much it just it just wound up
back down to violence. Was like that was kind of
the for all of the toys they had, the toys
that actually made the most difference was gassing and beating
people and violence and like old fashioned informants that was
(52:24):
that was the stuff, and just having a dude there. Yeah,
they were really relied on. And the fact that you
that that you, Corey, weren't super surprised, but anything last year,
I think kind of just more shows kind of the
strength of your work in terms of how you're very
good at seeing the trends that are already happening but
taking them to their next logical place. Um. And it's
(52:45):
a really great way to kind of get a sense
of what is something, what what will something maybe look
like in the next decade or so, because it's it's
all based on already existing stuff, just in different kind
of original ways. So that's why I think it's it's
so useful to look at your books as as an activist,
specifically around like surveillance and stuff, because it's it's just
(53:07):
really it's it's really good for kind of keeping keeping
an eye on keeping your head, yeah, and keeping an
eye on what's keeping an eye on you, um, and
all that kind of stuff. This was a really lovely
conversation was a lovely last thing to do in my
home office in because I leave tomorrow and won't be
back until the next year, and then I'm actually gonna
(53:28):
be offline for a month after a joint replacement, so
it was it was really lovely to meet you all
on to chat with you. Thanks so much for chatting
with us today. Glory My pleasure. It Could Happen Here
is a production of cool Zone Media. For more podcast
on the cool Zone Media, visit our website cool zone
media dot com, or check us out on the I
(53:49):
Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts.
You can find sources for It Could Happen Here, updated
monthly at cool zone Media dot com slash sources. Thanks
for listening.
Welcome to it could happen here. Um the show that
is normally introduced by me shouting a tonally, but today
I did like a professional. Um, because today myself and
my colleagues Garrison and Christopher are talking to someone. I'm
very excited to chat with Mr Corey. Doctor. Oh Corey, Well,
hello the show. Thank you very much. It is my
(00:25):
pleasure to be on it. It's great to meet you
all and to be talking to you today. Corey. You
do a lot of writing about kind of technology and
surveillance and cultural issues around those. You're also an author.
You've written some great fiction. I think today will probably
talk most around books like Attack Service and walk Away,
But you've written a lot of wonderful stuff. Um. And
(00:47):
you've also worked with the e f F for years
and years. UM. So you you you're coming at what
I love about I mean, we're gonna be talking today
broadly about surveillance and kind of the future of of
the Internet. Will probably talk about some Metaversey stuff. What
I love about the way in which you think and
write about the future is that you're kind of coming
about it from a number of angles, both as like
(01:07):
a tech industry journalist, as a fiction writer imagining the
future and as somebody who's kind of weighted in as
an activist to this, And UM, I'm kind of wondering,
where do you see like the greatest potential for actual
like change? Um? Is it? Is it in kind of
Is it in lobbying and engaging as an activist or
(01:29):
is it in sort of imagining as a as a
as a fiction writer? What might be? So I I
see them as adjuncts uh, you know, diversity of tactics
and all that stuff. Um. The thing is that tech
policy arguments are often very abstract, uh, and they are
(01:50):
only visceral for the people who would provide the kind
of political will to do something about them. Usually that
that comes when it's too late, right, people, people care
about tech monopolies once the web is turned into five
giant websites filled with scripted shots of text from the
other four, But not when Yahoo is on a buying
(02:10):
spree of tech companies and we're saying, oh, that's how
tech companies grow, and all tech companies will grow in
the future by buying all their nascent competitors and rolling
them up into a big vertically integrated monopoly, which is
kind of how we got Facebook and Google and the
rest of it. And um, you need to be able
to make policy arguments to policy people, but you also
need to be able to put uh, some some sinew
(02:31):
and muscle on the bone of that highly abstract kind
of argument. And and that's where fiction comes in. It's
kind of a like a fly through of like an
emotional architects rendering of what things might look like if
we get it wrong or if we change it. It
preserves the sense of possibility, you know. I think one
of the great enemies of change is the inevitable is
(02:55):
um of capitalist realism and the idea that there is
no alternative. So if you can make people believe in
an alternative, than they might work for one. And certainly
the opposite is true. If people don't believe there is
any alternative possible, they won't work for one. Why why
would you? Uh? And so all of that together, I
think is part of how you mobilize people to care
(03:16):
about stuff. Yeah, I mean, that makes that makes total sense,
and it is. It's difficult, I think because I first
came into technology as a journalist, and it's very difficult
to get people to care about stuff. And I think
in particular privacy, which there was. It has been one
of the most interesting cases of like the kind of
(03:37):
thought leaders in in an industry freaking out over something
and people not really having an issue with it because
we kind of all agreed to hand over all of
our data to a number of big side not all,
but I don't know. I'm interested in your thoughts on that.
I understand the idea that like fiction is um is
a much better way to try to get people to
care about these things because it makes them feel as
(03:59):
opposed to kind of boarding on. I think people can
get kind of lost in the weeds of acquisitions and
like uh pivots and you know, tech companies acquiring each
other and whatnot. Well, look, I think that the part
of the problem with privacy, the reason that we were
late to wake up and do something about it, is
because it was obfuscated. You know, if you've ever seen
(04:21):
the maps of like how an ad tech stack works,
the flow diagrams, and there are some things that are
complicated because um, there are some things that are hard
to understand because they're complicated. And then there are some
things that are made complicated so they will be hard
to understand. And I think in the case of the
surveillance industry, the latter is true. And it wasn't just
(04:45):
that they were trying to play us for suckers, they
were also playing their customers for suckers. Right. One of
the reasons that the ad tech stack is such a
snarled hair ball is so that the people who buy
ads and the publishers who run ads can't tell how
badly they're being RiPP off by their intermediaries. But this
also has the side effect of making it very hard
for us to know as the as the kind of
(05:07):
inputs to that system, how our own dignity and private
lives and safety and integrity are being put to risk
by these systems as well. Um. And you know, it
may be that people, if they had been well informed
about what was going on, they might have been indifferent
as well. But I think that when most people were
(05:27):
very poorly informed, right when all there was was this
kind of that privacy discourse was just like stuff as
being your personal information is being siphoned up, but no
kind of specifics on how that was being used and
how that was being done and how it might bring
you to harm. Um, it's not clear that that you
(05:48):
can say that that the reason they were indifferent is
because they were fully informed and inn care if you
know that they weren't fully informed, if you know that
they were barely informed. M h, I mean yeah, I
think are absolutely right. Because when the Cambridge analytic a
scandal broke, which was I think one of the first
times that there was a really huge international story that
made it clear some of the consequences of all this, like,
(06:11):
it did provoke a lot of a lot of anger.
Um I I do you worry at all that, Like
there's a degree to which because it because people got
tricked or wherever you want to frame it, and it's
gone the the kind of um financialization of people's private data,
of people's like personal information, because that has gone so far,
(06:33):
there's a risk that people are just kind of inured
to it. Um yeah, well, well, I mean that kind
of gets to my theory change here, which is that
there is always gonna be uh a point of um
maximum and difference peak in difference. You know, Um, if
you think about something like being a smoker, the likelihood
(06:55):
that you care about cancer goes up the long or
you smoke, and the more health effects you feel. And
certainly there will come a point in your life when
you will only ever grow more worried about the effects
of smoking on your life. But there's also a point
of no return. Right. If the point at which you
you're you're concern reaches the point where you're actually going
(07:19):
to do something about smoking is the day you get
diagnosed with stage four lung cancer, then that um denialism
can slide into nihilism. You can say, why bother, right,
it's too late. It's like if if we spend years
arguing about the crashing population of rhinos and then finally
there's only one left, and you say you're right, there
(07:41):
was a problem, you might as well say, like, why
don't we eat him and find out what he tastes like?
It's not like the rhinos are ever going to come back, right,
And so for me, so much of the work is
about shifting the point of peak indifference to the left
of the point of no return on the timeline, so
that people actually start to care earlier, because it's it's
(08:04):
if you haven't a genuine problem, right, like the overcollection
of our private data, the mishandling of it, the abuse
of it, that genuine problem will eventually produce tangible effects
that are undeniable, right that that the our ability to
ignore it just goes monotonically down. It's the thing about
the climate emergency. You know, even if Shell had not
(08:26):
our Exon had not hidden the data it had on
the role that it's products were playing in climate change
in the seventies, it would have been hard to muster
a sense of urgency in the seventies, right because the
story is that in fifty years something bad's going to happen.
But here we are, fifty years on something bad is
really happening, and a lot of people are caring about it.
(08:46):
They still don't seem to care about it enough, or
maybe they've slid into nihilism. There's certainly, i think on
the part of the elites, a kind of nihilistic sense
that maybe they can all retreat to like mountaintops and
build fortresses and breathe their children by Harrier jet you know,
and and and you know that nihilism, I think is
(09:07):
is what you get when the point of no return
is passed before peak denial. Uh and the privacy um
catastrophe that is looming in our future that we haven't
quite reached yet. I mean, we've just had the first
kind of trickles of the dam breaking that's in our future.
(09:27):
It hasn't been enough yet to shift people away from it,
but but we might be getting there right. We might
we might eventually be able to do something about it.
And one of the things that will hasten that moment
is um restoring competition to those industries. That one of
the reasons that uh, the industry that spies on us
(09:48):
is able to foster denial and indifference is because it
is a monopolized industry. To companies control eighty percent of
the ad market, Google and Facebook, and as as monopolists,
they're able to extract huge monopoly rents. They're among the
most profitable companies in the history of the world. And
some of those monopoly rents, rather than being returned to shareholders,
(10:11):
can be mobilized to distort policy, to to make us
think that there's nothing wrong with the way that they
collect data and use it to forestall regulation, to pay
Nick Clegg four million a year to go around Europe
and the world and say, as the former Deputy Prime
Minister of the United Kingdom, I'm here to tell you
that Facebook is the friend of the democratic regimes of
(10:31):
the world. And and you know, if if the anti
monopoly movement, which is a thing I've become very involved with,
is able to go from strength to strength, it's surging now,
then one of the things that we might do is
is destroy the ammunition that's being used by these large
monopolistic firms to distort our policy and harm us in
(10:55):
these ways with impunity. And and then maybe we can
actually take the the nascent and natural alarm that people
do feel about the invasions of their privacy and and
actually turn that into privacy policy that is meaningful in
respect of these big companies that actually reigns them in. Yeah,
(11:17):
and I think I like that you frame it as
a privacy catastrophe because I think, I mean, what I
just exhibited earlier in this episode, is this this tendency
that I certainly see in myself and I see in
other people to get kind of beaten down by the
continued um excesses of this industry and the continued kind
of failure of anything to be done to curb it.
And I think you're right, it has to be viewed
(11:39):
as um as a calamity. And I and nothing I
think makes that clearer than some of watching some of
the stuff Facebook in particular has put out about their
plans for the metaverse, and kind of thinking back from
all of these sensors they want to store in your house,
all of the ways in which they want to map
everything around you. Um, they never you know, they they
kind of advertise as like you'll be able to play
(12:00):
basketball with somebody who's in a different state. But really
what it is is you're giving Facebook access to every
measurement of your body and you know, the pulse of
the beat of your heart and all this this stuff
that like maybe we don't quite know what it would
be useful for from a financialization standpoint, but it's unsettling
to think that they'll have to find a way because
(12:21):
they'll have it. You know, I don't know. I don't
know what is to be done about that, other than,
as you say, kind of breaking up these monopolies. Well,
and and I mean breaking up is like one of
the things we can do to monopolies, and and it
takes a long time, you know, Um A T and T.
The first enforcement action against it happened sixty nine years
before it was broken up in N two. I don't
(12:42):
think we can wait that long. But there's a lot
of intermediate steps, right, Like we can force them to
do interoperability, we can block them from from predatory acquisitions.
We can force them to divest of companies and engage
in structural separation. We can do all kinds of things.
It actually looks like the United King it was going
to stop them from buying Giffey, which might seem trivial
(13:03):
after all, it's just like animated jifts, but um, what
it actually is surveillance beacons in every social media application,
right because if you're hosting a Jeff from Giffey in
your message to someone else, Facebook has telemetry about that message. Um.
And so the the the not the i c O,
(13:26):
the Competition Competition and Markets Authority in the UK was like, yeah,
this is just gonna strengthen your market power. That's why
you're buying this company. You have too much market power already.
We're not gonna let you do it. Um. It was
almost the case that the Fitbit merger was blocked. Google's
Fitbit merger. I think it's still not too late to
roll it back. And Lena Cohn, who's the new fire
(13:46):
breathing dragon in charge of the FTC, who is an
astonishing person who was a law student three years ago.
Uh she has said, oh yeah, this this like one
point three trillion dollars worth of mergers and acquisitions that
you're doing right now to get in under the wire
before we start enforcing. Guess what, We're going to unwind
those fucking mergers if it looks like they were anti competitive.
(14:07):
And not only are you going to lose all the
money you spent on the M and A due diligence
and the paperwork and the corporate stuff, but all that
integration you're going to do between now and then, you're
gonna have to de integrate those companies when we tell
you that you don't have uh, you don't have merger
approval and you're on notice. You can't come and complain later, right, Like,
you can either get in line and wait for us
(14:28):
to tell you whether or not your merger is legal,
or you can roll the dice. But I tell you
what if you come up sneake, guys, you are fucked.
And that is amazing, right, that is a powerful change
in American industrial policy that really makes a difference. Yeah,
I mean, and that is a beautiful thing to think
of being in place and actually hitting as hard as
(14:50):
it could. Obviously, the concern is that like who will
be you know, picking the head of the FTC in
three years in change, and like how how how much
influence is Peter You're going to have their in the like, um, yeah, well,
and Peter Tiel of course love's monopolies. He says, competition
is for losers. So you're right, I mean, obviously, elections
have consequences, but you know, one of the ways that
(15:13):
you win elections is by making material differences in people's lives,
and so you know, if people are policy, then uh.
One of the most important policies Biden has set so
far is hiring Lena Khan and her colleagues Canter at
the d J and Tim Wu and the White House. Yeah,
I mean, I would I would love nothing more than
(15:33):
to see particularly like Facebook reigned in at this point
because I'm one of the casualties of the of the
of the the ad market, like crash of started in
like two sixteen seventeen. It feels like the odds of
them being able to like, I don't know, We've got
three years where we know, you know, theoretically these policies
(15:57):
will be in place, and and I don't know, I'm
well like when I when I because the Republicans are
talking a lot about regulating social media too, about even
breaking up these companies, but they often tend to be
talking about it in a very different way and with
a very different kind of end goal in mind. Um
And I guess you know obviously they know that, right Facebook,
they are well aware that like this might be a
(16:18):
weight out the clock situation for them, and they have
some arrows in that quiver. I mean that may be so,
but also remember that Facebook's users are outside of the US,
and that even a change in administration here won't won't
um put Margaret vest Dagger, who's the Competition commissioner in
the EU, back in the bottle. And she's another fire breather, right,
(16:39):
She's another amazing person, And so you know I wouldn't
be too quick to write that off. I mean Facebook
needs its foreign markets, Yes, It's U S customers are
worth more to anyone else because we have the most
primitive privacy frameworks, so it can extract a lot more
data for like we're the we're the richest people with
a worse privacy, so that's that's um. You know, it's
a real home court advantage for Facebook, but it needs
(17:01):
that other eight percent of its users. It wouldn't be
what it is without them, and that makes it subject
to their jurisdiction. And you know, one of the things
about ad driven firms like Facebook, UM is that they
really need sales offices in country. Uh. So you know,
even before we we had the proliferation national firewalls, which
don't get me wrong, I don't think it's a good thing. Um.
(17:23):
These large global firms that operated UM sales offices in country,
in every territory they worked in, were vulnerable to regulation
because if you have staff in a country, then you
have someone that can be arrested, right, And so it's
not like they can just be like I don't know,
(17:43):
like the Tour Project, which just you know, it has people,
um who who sit in hack on tour who are
close to lawyers who can defend people who sit on
hack and on tour. Uh. You know, if the Tour
Project had to have staff full time in Turkey and
China and Russia and Syria in order to operate, it
(18:04):
would be a very different project. But you know, Facebook
and Twitter and Google they all have staff in those
countries and it makes them vulnerable to regulation. And so,
you know, China is really interesting because because um she
Jin Ping, for his own reasons which are not my
reasons and distinct from the Democrats and the Republicans reasons,
(18:26):
is doing stuff to rein in big tech in China.
And it's actually quite interesting because you know the argument
that Nick Klegg makes when he says why we shouldn't
break up Facebook, as he says, uh, you know, China
is coming for your UM, for your I P and
for your industrial competitiveness with its big tech giants that
it treats as national champions that projects soft power around
(18:48):
the world. Meanwhile, China is like these tech giants. We
hate these tech giants. They present a countervailing force to
the hedgemony of the the Communist Party and the and
the executive branch that she should bring sets at the
off of we're gonna neuter them and we're gonna we're
gonna disappear their founders like Jack Montt fucking googlogs right like,
they're like, we don't want national champions because the nation
(19:11):
that you know, we bow and Ali Baba is the
champion four is we Bow and Ali Baba and tense
that they're not They're not champions for China by any
stretch of the imagination. They don't give a shit about China.
And so you know, they're all of these companies are
going to face regulatory pressure, anti monopoly regulatory pressure all
over the world, and you're you're so much more um optimistic.
(19:36):
I guess about about the potential for that to bite
than a lot of people I talked to, and I
think more knowledgeable as well. And I kind of wonder
because there's this very strong, obviously influenced by decades of
cyberpunk attitude that like, we're in this age of mega
corporations whose power is you know, there's nothing that can
stop Amazon from doing what Amazon wants to do, right,
(19:56):
Facebook is going to keep doing whatever they want to
do forever. You clear really don't believe that, and I
you know, you clearly know your stuff. I'm wondering why
you think that that image is still persist, so persistent
that like attitude in our heads of these these these
are kind of monolithic forces in our society that um
(20:17):
just have to be endured. So I think it's a
belief in the great forces of history, right, um, and
the great man theory. You know that the the these
um Uh you know that these rich people are driving history. Yeah,
these these these powerful figures are driving history. They're in
(20:37):
charge there in the driver's seat. I mean, that's kind
of what's behind Trump arrangement syndrome, right, the idea that
Trump is uniquely powerful and talented demagogue as opposed to
just like a demagogue shaped puzzle piece that fit in
the demagogue shaped hold that was left by the collapse
of credibility of capitalism. Uh. And you know, a man
who is clearly too stupid to be a cause of
(20:59):
any thing and will only ever be the effect of something.
And uh, you know the for me, the theory of
history and how it goes was really transformed by an
exercise that my friend Ada Palmer does. So. Aida is
a science fiction novelist. She's she's just published the fourth
book of her Terra Ignota series, her debut series. It's
(21:22):
in an incredible series of books. But she's a real
like kind of multi talented, multi threat. So she's a
librettiston singer who has produced album length operas based on
the Norse mythos. She's also a tenured history of um
a tenured professor of Renaissance history in Florence at the
University of Chicago, where she studies heterodox information, pornography, homosexuality, witchcraft,
(21:46):
and so on. During the Inquisitions and every year with
her undergrads, she reenacts through a four week long live
action role playing game, the Election of the Medici's Pope,
and each of her students takes on the role of
a cardinal from a great family and the in the
actual election of the I forget what year was, uh
(22:08):
fourteen ninety or something, I forget, but they each take
on this role and they have a character sheet and
has motivations like a dinner party, murder mystery. But for
four weeks they make alliances, break alliances, stab each other
in the back uh stage surprise reversals. And at the
(22:29):
end of the four weeks there's this u faux Gothic
cathedral on campus and they dress up in costume. Aida
has a a Google alert for theater companies that are
getting rid of their costumes, so she clothes them in
the garb of the Medici's cardinals and they gather and
they go into a room and then a puff of
(22:51):
smoke emerges and you get the new pope. And every
year four of the final candidates, Uh, there are four
final candidates rather, and two of them are always the
same because the great forces of history bear down on
that moment to say those people will absolutely be in
the running for the for the papacy, and two of
(23:12):
them have never once been the same, because human action
still has space to alter the outcomes that are prefigured
by the great forces of history. And so for me,
the idea of being an optimist or a pessimist has
always felt very fatalistic. It's this either way, this idea
(23:33):
that the great forces of history have determined the outcome
and human action has no bearing on it. And I
think that rather than optimism or pessimism, we can be hopeful.
And that's the word you use before. Hope is the
idea not that you can see a path from here
to the place you want to get to, but rather
that you haven't run out of things that you can
do to advance your your goal, right, Because if you
(23:54):
can take a step to advance your goal, you can
ascend the gradient towards the heat that you're trying to reach,
then you will attain a new vantage point, and from
that vantage point, you may have revealed to you courses
of action that you didn't suspect before you took that step.
So so long as the step is available, there's always
another step lurking in the wings that you can't see
(24:16):
from where you are. And the reason I'm hopeful about
this is I can think of like fifty things that
could improve the monopoly picture that we're living in now,
and it's up from thirty things last year. And so
even though I don't know how we get from here
to a better future, and even though I absolutely see
the blockers you're talking about Trump landslide, uh losing Congress
(24:38):
because they let Joe Mansion and Christmas Cinema Newter the
build back better Bill, Um, you know all of those
things that can happen. I have hope, you know, which
is not the same as optimism or a belief that
things will be great, or even even like a sense
a lack of a sense of foreboding. I have that
in spades. But I have that when the next phase
(25:01):
of the fight begins, that we will have many um
vulnerable spots we can strike at, and that we can
capitalize on whichever victories we attain to find more vulnerabilities
and move on. I think that's so important and I
think it goes in line with to bring up climate
change again. The idea that like one of the most
toxic things you can think are e climate change is
(25:23):
that there's nothing to do. We're already past every point
of no return and there's no there's no positive action
because it just leads you to doing the same thing
as the people who deny it. Um. And it's Yeah,
I think it's it's very important to um recognize that like,
not only are there things you can do, but when
you do those things, you start taking those steps, other
steps reveal themselves. Yeah. Um. And you know what, if
(25:47):
you're feeling nihilistic about about climate I'm nearly through Saul
Griffith's book Electrify Uh. Saul's an old friend of mine.
He's MacArthur Winner's electrical engineer, and he's just done the
He's it's a popular engineering book. It's one of my
favorite genres. They're like popular science books, except instead of
telling you about how science works, they tell you about
how engineering works. And he's basically like, here is why
(26:10):
all the estimates of how much renewable as we need
are hugely overestimated, And it's basically that like keeping uh
fossil fuel power online requires a lot of fossil fuel, right,
so something like of that estimate is just it's the
energy that we need to make the energy and it's
(26:30):
not present in electrical models. Here's how we can manufacture it.
Here's how we can distribute it. Here is basically how
if we can figure out the financing, Americans can uh
spend less money every year than they do now to
get more stuff that they love every year that we
can do this without hair shirts. It's a spectacular book. Um,
(26:52):
And you know, I don't agree with everything Saul says
every all the time, but he is very careful about
is technical facts. There aren't technical errors in this. There
might be assumptions that we disagree with, but as a
technical matter, he's basically written a piece of design fiction
in which, over the next fifteen years, using clever finance
(27:14):
and and solid engineering, we really actually do avert the
climate emergency. And yeah, as always, kind of the main
barriers to doing the best version of the thing is
the political realities on the ground. You know, you have
to but I think that's the that's the value of
at least trying to make it clear that there are options.
(27:45):
I wanted to shift for a moment um. I was
thinking recently about I think probably the earliest back book
of yours that I've read, Pirate Cinema, which is heavily involved.
I think I'm going to you know, if you're one
of the folks like me, uh was on the Internet
back when you know, file sharing sites, when that was
a huge topic of discussion, when the r i A
(28:06):
Was going after people, when like copyright was kind of
a a much more prevalent part of kind of the
online discourse. Um. It deals a lot in that and
these kind of I think there's elements of it that
kind of prefigured what Disney has done buying up every
imaginable fictional property in the world. And that's kind of
(28:27):
the the elements of dystopia that book deals with is is,
you know, the attempts of these this these giant multinational
entertainment corporations to shut down the free tape trading of ideas,
remixing and all that stuff. And then kind of thinking
about the difference between the focus of that and the
focus of books like Attack surface where you're really delving
more into you know, I the fictional versions of real
(28:50):
life companies like Tiger Swan that do it uh the
surveillance on protesters and all around the world, and that
are kind of using tactics that were and yeared by
other contractors, and like Iraq and Afghanistan years earlier. I
guess kind of the things that I find interesting about that,
as I can remember when I was first on the Internet,
(29:10):
the big social kind of crusades online with the people
that that I paid attention to at least was all
around copyright. It was about not just you know, the
attempts to stop people from remixing and sharing copyrighted work,
but about um attempts to like buy up copyrights and
like into these these ever kind of larger uh UM agglomerations,
(29:34):
and and that's kind of hit. It seems to have
hit like a terminal point with the you know, movies
like Ready Player one and kind of a lot of
the stuff we're seeing in Marble where everything is showing
up everywhere, Space Jam two UM. I guess the part
of it that feels less dystopian the days attempts to
crack down on file sharing, which I don't think went
(29:55):
kind of in the worst case scenario. I'm interested actually
in your thoughts on that, um, because I can remember,
you know, when the r I A would be threatening
people with years in jail and whatnot over sharing stuff
on kaza we seem to be I don't know. Is
it just that it gets less like I'm interested in
your in your thoughts on that. Is it just that
it's less publicized when they cracked down on people, or
has kind of the nature of their response to that
(30:17):
really changed. Well, I think that what's happened with the
kind of steady state of the copyright wars has been
the introduction of brittleness and fragility into our speech platforms
like Twitter, uh and and Facebook and YouTube, where it's
very easy to get material removed by by making copyright
claims um. And you know, we see that with the
(30:39):
sleazier side of the reputation management industry, where they use
bogus copyright claims to take down criticisms. You you know,
there was a group of leftists who are really celebrating
the idea that if you if Nazis were marching in
your town, you could stop them from uploading their videos
by playing copyrighted music in the background, and I was like,
(31:00):
you have no idea, what a terrible fucking idea that is.
And you know, within a couple of years, cops and
Beverly Hills were doing it. Whenever people tried to film
the police there, they would just turn on some Taylor
Swift to try and stop uploading. Um. You know, the
thing about the copyright wars is that the real action
turned out to be in um wage theft through monopolization. So,
(31:24):
you know, the neutering and destruction of label independent music
distribution platforms like Kazah or Groxter or Napster, and the
Supreme Court decision, the Groster decision that supported that meant
that the only um way that you could launch a
service like that was in cooperation with the big labels,
(31:45):
and the you know, most successful one is Spotify. Spotify
is actually partially owned by the labels, and the labels
use that ownership steak to negotiate a kind of formalized
wage theft where they allowed for a lower perse stream
rate because when they get royalties for a stream, part
(32:06):
of that money goes to their musicians. And that meant
that the firm Spotify retain more profits which it returned
to it in the form of higher dividends, and dividends
go just straight to their shareholders. They don't that there's
no claim that musicians can make on this. And because
they set the benchmark rate, it meant that everyone, irrespective
(32:26):
of whether you were assigned to one of the big
three labels, ended up getting the same per stream rate
as as Universal's artists, so they were able to structure
the whole market. In the meantime, in the industrial side,
UH copyright laws, notably Section twelve of one of the
Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which is a law past that
(32:48):
makes it a felony to remove DRM to bypass a
technical protection measure UM that has become the go to
system for blocking, repair, interoperability UH and to prevent third
parties from um UH from from creating services or add
ons that accomplish positive ends like improved accessibility, improved security,
(33:12):
um AD blocking and privacy and so on. They just say, well,
you know, we we put a one molecule thick layer
of DRM around, say YouTube, and when you make a
YouTube downloader for archival purposes or whatever, UM you you
just create a um A. UH you bypass our technical
protection measure, and so you're committing a felony and you
(33:33):
can go to prison for five years and and pay
a five thousand dollar fine. And so you have this
like relentless monotonic expansion of DRM into like automotive tractors.
Medtronic uses it to block people from fixing ventilators. UM.
So you know this, this UM assault on the ability
to reconfigure a technology that is ever more prevalent in
(33:58):
our lives and that recently holds our lives in its
in its hands right its choices determine whether we live
or die has been really consequential. And I know, we
don't really think of it as a copyright problem. We
think of it as right to repair. We think of
a security auditing our accessibility. But the rule that is
being used to block into operability is a copyright law.
(34:20):
It's what printer companies used to stop you from buying
third party inc um. It's what Apple uses to stop
you from installing a third party app store. And you
know the absence of a third party app store is
why when Apple removed all the working VPNs in China,
Chinese users couldn't just switch to another app store that
had working VPNs in it. And so you know that
(34:41):
this um endgame of the copyright wars is I think
a lot more dystopian than merely suing college kids. Uh,
it's it's actually really screwed us in ways that are
that are hard to fathom. Yeah, it's a fascinating example
of kind of Dystopi creep because, at least kind of
(35:02):
from my more more ignorant position, when I was nineteen,
I was like worried that all of these these people
remixing music and movies that I liked, like we're going
to get cracked down on or have their stuff pulled
um And the kind of thing that I didn't I
don't think a lot of people saw coming until it hit.
I certainly didn't, was what you were just talking about
the fact that kind of the logic of how these
(35:24):
these entertainment companies were looking at like an album or
you know, a movie and and cutting up pieces of
that they've they've applied to like a tractor, you know,
and now you can't like repair your John Deer or
modify your John Deer so it works better. And then
you know, you you get situations like we just kind
of averted with the John Deer strike, where there was
a very real possibility that we wouldn't be able to
(35:45):
get a large chunk of a harvest because there wouldn't
be parts and you can't put your own in. And
that's to think that that the thought process that let
us there started with like trying to protect Metallica. In
some ways, it's kind of funny. And this is why
the anti monopoly critique is great because it shows you
that there's cause for solidarity between John Deere tractor owners
and John Deere tractor UH makers the workers who work there.
(36:10):
Because the same force that has allowed John Deere to
cram down its workforce for forty years is the is
the force that allows it to um uh take away
the agency and economic liberties of farmers who own John
Deere tractors. And it's it's the it's the political power
that comes with monopoly. And so you know, if John
(36:31):
Deere were a smaller, weaker firm, it would be less
able to resist both the claims of its workforce and
the claims of its um UH customers. Mhm yeah, I
mean that makes that makes sense, and it is like
I like that idea of of because it's not just
kind of solidarity between John Deere purchasers UM and and
(36:54):
the people who work in the factories. It's also there's
kind of solidarity between a wide like anyone concerned with
UM copyright. It's a much broader base of solidarity than
just people who are worried about you know, what's happening
uh to fiction or like what Disney is doing to
like copyrights around Mickey Mouse or whatever. Like it's it.
(37:14):
You can you can draw in concerns from right to
repair to a bunch of other things, which potentially means
there's there's a greater body of people available for action
if you can make them see kind of um converging
interests there, which is I think is an interesting idea. Well,
I think you're getting something really important and this is UM.
This comes from James Boyle, who's a copyright scholar at
(37:36):
Duke University and was really involved and found in creative
commons and in those early copyright fights and and Jamie
makes an analogy to the coining of the term ecology.
He says that before the term ecology came along, you know,
someone us cared about owls and someone us cared about
the ozone layer, but it wasn't really clear that we
were on the same side. You know, it's not clear.
(37:57):
If you're Martian looking through a telescope, you might be
hard pressed to explain why. You know, the destiny of
charismatic charismatic nocturnal birds and the gaseous composition of the
upper atmosphere were the same issue. Right in the term ecology.
Let all these people who cared about different things find
a single point to rally around. It turned a thousand
issues into one movement. And I think that in the
(38:19):
in the course of resisting corporate power, which is to say,
resisting monopoly, we have the potential to weld together people
from very diverse fields. You know, farmers and people who
make tractors. Sure, but you know, if you grew up
watching professional wrestling and now you're aghast that the wrestlers
that you loved are begging on go fund me for
(38:39):
pennies to die with dignity, you know once someone explains
to the reason that that's happening is that thirty wrestling
leagues became one wrestling league that was able to practice
worker's classification, turn those performers into contractors, take away their
health insurance and leave them to die. Then suddenly you're
on the same side of the people who were worried
about big tech and big tractor, and the people are
(39:00):
worried about the fact that there's only one manufacturer of
cheerleading uniform uniforms, and two manufacturers of athletic shoes, and
two manufacturers of spirits, and two manufacturers of beer. One
manufacturer of eyewear that also owns all the eye wear
stores and the eyewear ensure. You know that Duff Beer
thing from the early Simpsons, where there's like Duff Beer,
(39:20):
Rispberry Thing, Dulci, Gabana, Oliver, People's Bauschan, Loam, Versaci. Every
eyewear brand you've ever heard of is one company coach
all of them. And they also own Sunglass Hut and
uh Target Optical and Sears Optical, and lens Crafters and
(39:41):
Spec Savers and every other eyewear story you've ever heard of.
And they bought all the labs that make the lenses,
so more than half the lenses in the world come
from them. A division called and they bought Imed, which
is the company that bought all the insurance companies that
ensure I wear and so they're also the company that's
ensuring glasses your your eyes one company, and I Wear
(40:04):
costs a thousand percent more than it did a decade ago.
They stole our fucking eyes. Right, So people who care
about that have common cause with people who care about
wrestlers and people who care about beer and big tech
and the fact that there's four shipping companies and they
have no competitive pressure and so they just keep building
bigger ships that gets stuck in the fucking Suez canal Right,
(40:25):
we're all on the same side. Yeah, And I I
like the idea that I like. I like hoping that
that kind of inherent solidarity, if you can point it
out to people, is potentially an antidote to, or at
least a partial antidote to the level of the layer
of politicization that's fallen down over everything, um that stops
(40:46):
people from actually considering matters but instead considering like, I
don't know, is this owning the libs? Right? Like if
you if they if if you can get them to
see that, like, yeah, their favorite wrestler is like dying
because he couldn't afford insulin, and that that that's t
i'd to the issue of like the reason his dad
can't get tractor parts this year or whatever, um, and
that that's tied to other issues that are maybe championed
(41:07):
by people he would reflexively dismiss. But like, yeah, I
I I find that really inspiring. It's still a significant
there's a significant challenge for people who are trying to
make those connections, for folks who are who are trying
to like inform them of that state. I mean, yeah,
that's true. And you know, like Steve Bannon will tell
(41:28):
you that the reason to do cultural world culture culture
war bullshit is because politics are down downstream from culture,
and there's probably an element of truth to that. But
I also think the reason that people find culture war
bullshits so attractive is because they got nothing else. Yeah,
I think we we talked about that a lot within
the context of conservative for politics. I grew up very conservative,
(41:50):
and I do remember how the tenor of things I
was hearing through the bush ears changed from advocation of
policies to just all culture war, all the time, all
all striking the dims all the time. And it was
the kind of um it. And that's not the only
place that's happen. You see it on the left to
absolutely like it's it's endemic now it's it's a poison
(42:12):
and kind of the discourse. But I think that there's
a lot that needs to be I think there's a
lot to be discovered still for like how to break
people out of that. I'm kind of bullish when we
(42:32):
talk about these issues like you were bringing up with
sort of the monopolization of these industries you wouldn't expect
to be monopolized. I'm hopeful about the future that stuff
like three D printing presents for that. We have an
organization in Portland that does kind of three D printing glasses,
frames and stuff and is helping people with that sort
of stuff. And I'm in conversations with like the Four
(42:54):
Thieves Vinegar Collective. I think it's called UM. Yeah. Some
of the folks doing like ing to do working on
pharmaceutical hacking making at the moment like lower cost UH
kind of home scratch brood versions of like different AIDS medications,
and the Holy Grail is doing that with um insulin
effectively UM and I think it is. And I do
(43:17):
think one of the things that's exciting about that is
because the way in which the way in which collaboration
on three D printing works in the way in which
actually spreading, like the ability to do stuff works. I
think it synergizes nicely with the ability of people to
kind of reach other folks through writing or other forms
of content, because they can both spread through the same
You can have a video or a story, and you
(43:38):
can have like kind of embedded guides on how to
do that. Um I I I don't know that I've
I've runned into a lot of your writings on kind
of the potential of three D printing in this space,
But I'm interested, like to what do you do? Are
you looking at that as kind of an area of
hope or do you see that still is kind of
too too niche and labor focus to really actually take
(44:00):
off in the way that it would need to to
crack some of these nuts. This is where I do
my my Woody Allen. You know nothing of my work
stick because I had this novel Maker Makers in two thousand.
It's it's why uh Bree Pettis went out and founded
Maker bought uh and it's you know, credited with like
(44:22):
kickstarting the homebrew three D printed revolution. Blah blah blah blah,
blah and um, and it was a very bullish novel
about three D printing. I Um, you know, the reality
hasn't lived up to the hype yet. It may just
be that we're in the long trough of despair, as
the Gardner hype cycle model has it. Uh. But you know,
I think the problem with UM three D printing was
(44:44):
that the patents had been concentrated into the hands of
two large firms that had bought all their competitors, including
Maker Bought and UM. When those patents finally expired, the
big one was the laser centering of of powder patent expired.
It just wasn't a big bang. And I think it's
because the supply chain for it still had a lot
(45:05):
of proprietary elements, and so producing the powder and producing
the components that allowed for that powder printing remained a
very high bar, and so we just didn't see the
kind of new industry emerged that we would have hoped for.
And you know, it's like seven years since those patents expired.
Five years since those patent expired. Now we're seeing a
(45:26):
few more of those powder printers. You get a lot
more like you've cured epoxy printers because those came off
patent earlier and they have a less complicated supply chain. Um.
But still, I mean mostly when we talk about printers,
we're talking about filament, and just filaments just not a
great technology. It's been pushed in ways that you wouldn't
(45:47):
even believe, and people have figured out how to do
absolutely incredible things with it. But it's not It's not
something that you would make aerospace components for, you know,
It's it's something that you make um novelty dungeons and
dragons dice out, Yeah, which is an important industry to disrupt.
Don't get me wrong, but I'm with you. I can
(46:10):
remember paying thirty bucks for a set of dice as
a kid and thinking, somebody's gotta fix this scam. I
can produce something for Christmas, Robert, thank you, Garrison. And
you know now I I own a I bought a
comic con a couple of years ago. I bought a
tiny little D twenty made out of meteoric or I
have a sky metal D twenty. Oh now that's yeah,
that's that's classy. Um. I'm curious. We've got a little
(46:34):
bit of time left and I wanted to ask in
your your novel Attack Surface. I know it was released
right October, if I'm not mistaken. UM. And obviously a
lot of that deals with again these kind of like
corporations that have been contractors for the D O D
doing like fucked up surveillance shit in Iraq and Afghanistan
bringing that technology to crack down on like US, uh,
(46:57):
sort of dissident left wing political movements. Him's out the
year that we have a nationwide kind of uprising. UM
that a lot of fucked up surveillance ship that had
been kind of demoed state side around it, like standing
Rock and whatnot, gets gets really put into its own
How much of that was written before ship went down?
(47:18):
And I and I'm assuming, like, I don't know exactly
how your process works, but I'm wondering, like, I assume
you started the project before everything went the way it
did last summer. How much did kind of what happened
last summer affect the way you imagined that technology in
those tactics functioning in that book. Yeah, the the timeline
goes the other direction. I wrote that book before the
(47:41):
summer uprising, UM, long long, long long before that, And
I wrote it about things like UM, the surveillance technology
we saw in Belarus and chev and also at Occupy
and Standing Rock and at other Black Lives Matter demonstrations
and uprisings in Americus, Assimila, and if you you know,
(48:02):
also the monotonic expansion of surveillance leagues right where you know,
first we learned about MC catchers, and then we learned
about dirt boxes, which are MC catchers on airplanes, and
you know, like we just all of that stuff leaked
like crazy because you know, these surveillance giants are are
not good at what they do, right, which isn't a
(48:25):
reason we should be hopeful. A company that's bad at
what it's it does is in some ways even worse
because one of the ways that they're incompetence expresses itself
is that they often gather a bunch of data on
innocent people and then leak it right, not maliciously, just
through incompetence. Um. And so you know, the this expansion
(48:48):
of surveillance has like been on my mind for a
long time, and I've been writing about it, well at
least since Little Brother, right, so two thousand and six,
I wrote that novel, and I've had my finger in
that Yeah, So I've had my finger in that for
all that time, and and working with the f F,
it's impossible to miss. Sure. Was there a degree to which, um,
(49:09):
I don't know. I guess we're you surprised by anything
that happened last him? Or did it just kind of
comprehensively feel like these are everything slotting into place that
I knew was heading in this direction? Because yeah, I mean,
you're right, I did, like there was like everything was
kind of presaged um years before. Yeah, I'm wondering if
if there was anything that kind of surprised you, um
(49:31):
or was it? Was it all just sort of what
you've been braced for. Yeah, I don't feel like there
were any kind of surveillance surprises. I mean the reverse
the use of reverse warrants. I think we all kind
of assumed was going on. There had been hints of
it in Google's warrant canarias beforehand. But you know those
(49:51):
geofense warrants, which again, if you're like sitting there going oh,
geofense warrants are awesome because they're catching the one six rioters, Like, dude,
you are going to be so disappointed, Holy sh it,
that's not where they're going to keep using this. Yeah. UM,
so you know, learning more about those reverse warrants I
think was was interesting. UM, but I don't feel like,
(50:14):
I don't well off the top of my head, I
can't say that there was any new technical stuff that emerged,
you know. I I, um kick started the audio book
for Attack Surface UH, and I offered as like the
top tier you could commission short stories in the Little
Brother universe, and there were three of those and I
just finished the first of them, and it's about um
future pipeline protests and uh. You know, I spent a
(50:38):
lot of time in my research looking at the surveillance
that was done on the pipeline protests, and a lot
of it was provocateurs and undercovers who were just terrible
at their jobs, right, like the intercepts, long publication of
of uh, you know, long documents about how those operators worked.
We just like showed up in military haircuts and combat
(50:59):
boots and then we're like, Hey, I'm from Portland and
I'm here because we're gonna funk up some bad guys.
Let's go do it. Let's go do violence and save
Indian country. And like everyone was like you, like, does
anyone want to buy drugs and and the actual protesters
were like you're a provocateur, like go away, you know,
(51:19):
like they could tell I mean, I guess you know,
there are a lot more effective in the UK and
infiltrating the climate movement. You know, they impregnated several protesters,
so you know, and had long term relationships with them
and raised kids with them. So there is no here stories.
Yeah here, it was not that we did just didn't
see that incredible efficacy. Yeah, And I do think that
(51:41):
that's I think kind of the message I took out
of it because I I was I started reporting on
like dirt boxes back during Standing Rock, just having them,
like it explained to me by people who were on
the ground when I showed up that like, yeah there's
this your like phones don't work the same out here,
and like we're trying to figure out what's going on,
but like everything is is in it's not just that
we're out in the sticks or anything. And I think
(52:03):
the only surprise, the big surprise for me last year
was how I think how little the technology accomplished for
them and how much it just it just wound up
back down to violence. Was like that was kind of
the for all of the toys they had, the toys
that actually made the most difference was gassing and beating
people and violence and like old fashioned informants that was
(52:24):
that was the stuff, and just having a dude there. Yeah,
they were really relied on. And the fact that you
that that you, Corey, weren't super surprised, but anything last year,
I think kind of just more shows kind of the
strength of your work in terms of how you're very
good at seeing the trends that are already happening but
taking them to their next logical place. Um. And it's
(52:45):
a really great way to kind of get a sense
of what is something, what what will something maybe look
like in the next decade or so, because it's it's
all based on already existing stuff, just in different kind
of original ways. So that's why I think it's it's
so useful to look at your books as as an activist,
specifically around like surveillance and stuff, because it's it's just
(53:07):
really it's it's really good for kind of keeping keeping
an eye on keeping your head, yeah, and keeping an
eye on what's keeping an eye on you, um, and
all that kind of stuff. This was a really lovely
conversation was a lovely last thing to do in my
home office in because I leave tomorrow and won't be
back until the next year, and then I'm actually gonna
(53:28):
be offline for a month after a joint replacement, so
it was it was really lovely to meet you all
on to chat with you. Thanks so much for chatting
with us today. Glory My pleasure. It Could Happen Here
is a production of cool Zone Media. For more podcast
on the cool Zone Media, visit our website cool zone
media dot com, or check us out on the I
(53:49):
Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts.
You can find sources for It Could Happen Here, updated
monthly at cool zone Media dot com slash sources. Thanks
for listening.
It Could Happen Here News
Host
Robert Evans
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