Jesse Hirsh engages in a profound dialogue with Cory Doctorow, exploring the current socio-political landscape shaped by technology and governance. As they navigate the implications of AI nationalism and authoritarianism, Doctorow offers insights into how these trends echo historical patterns of control and resistance. The conversation delves into the mechanics of social media and the importance of interoperability among platforms like Blue Sky and Mastodon, emphasizing that the future of online communication hinges on user agency and freedom from corporate entrapment. Doctorow articulates a vision for a more decentralized digital ecosystem, where users can migrate seamlessly between platforms without losing their social connections. This dialogue is underscored by the urgency of responding to growing authoritarianism, and Doctorow’s reflections on the necessity of community and solidarity in the face of systemic oppression resonate deeply throughout the episode.
Takeaways:
Links referenced in this episode:
a:5:{s:22:"transcription_uploaded";s:4:"file";s:18:"transcription_html";s:91:"https://transcripts.captivate.fm/transcript/36ca06fd-18fa-44b5-8d74-0706a7cb689c/index.html";s:18:"transcription_file";s:95:"https://transcripts.captivate.fm/transcript/36ca06fd-18fa-44b5-8d74-0706a7cb689c/transcript.srt";s:18:"transcription_json";s:96:"https://transcripts.captivate.fm/transcript/36ca06fd-18fa-44b5-8d74-0706a7cb689c/transcript.json";s:18:"transcription_text";s:63451:"Jesse Hirsch 00:00:04
Hello, I'm Jesse Hirsch.
Jesse Hirsch 00:00:06
Welcome to Metaviews, recorded live in front of an automated audience.
Jesse Hirsch 00:00:15
And today we've got a real special show.
Jesse Hirsch 00:00:19
Cory Doctorow is helping me ring the alarm because, yes, these are some crazy times.
Jesse Hirsch 00:00:27
We're recording this on Sunday night.
Jesse Hirsch 00:00:30
I'm gonna release this on Monday morning in advance of Trump's inauguration.
Jesse Hirsch 00:00:36
Now, Corey, I have a format for each episode, and I sort of have two segments to start, which are kind of meant to be Icebreakers.
Jesse Hirsch 00:00:44
The first is sort of the tradition of all media, which is the news.
Jesse Hirsch 00:00:49
And this is partly because Metaviews, we publish a daily newsletter on Substack.
Jesse Hirsch 00:00:54
And today, actually, we were talking kind of a Hegelian dialectic of saying that we've entered this weird moment of synthesis where what used to be the thesis the neoliberal global order is kind of now being replaced by a new thesis that we're attentively calling AI Nationalism, but really it's authoritarian nationalism.
Jesse Hirsch 00:01:18
And so we're just playing with this dialectic.
Jesse Hirsch 00:01:20
But I sort of, again, say it as an icebreaker, because I like to keep our guests on the back of their feet.
Jesse Hirsch 00:01:28
So is there any news that you think our audience needs to know?
Jesse Hirsch 00:01:32
This could be personal news.
Jesse Hirsch 00:01:33
This could be world news, but fundamentally, it's a question of what are you paying attention to?
Jesse Hirsch 00:01:39
Corey, given the crazy news cycle we find ourselves in, is there anything you think that's not getting enough attention that you've kind of got an eye on, that you think more people should be paying attention to?
Cory Doctorow 00:01:52
Well, I try not to let things like the inauguration occupy too much mind space.
Cory Doctorow 00:01:59
It's going to happen whether or not I pay attention to it.
Cory Doctorow 00:02:02
There's a bunch of stuff that's going to happen afterwards, some of which has been announced that I think, you know, if I are in Chicago, I'd be organizing about the ice raids that they've announced.
Cory Doctorow 00:02:11
But most of it is just.
Cory Doctorow 00:02:12
We don't know how much of it is posturing and how much of it is real.
Cory Doctorow 00:02:15
And.
Cory Doctorow 00:02:15
And if you recall the last Trump administration, we spent a lot of time worrying about things that he promised to do and didn't do.
Cory Doctorow 00:02:21
And, you know, that is.
Cory Doctorow 00:02:23
It's a very effective tactic, right, to threaten to do something and then make your enemies organize and then just sort of change your mind, and they waste a lot of time.
Cory Doctorow 00:02:33
So I'm trying not to.
Cory Doctorow 00:02:34
Too much energy into it.
Cory Doctorow 00:02:35
Instead, I'm thinking about stuff that's sort of more in my immediate horizon.
Cory Doctorow 00:02:39
I.
Cory Doctorow 00:02:39
I've been very busy because I'VE got a book coming out and I've got another book that's in final edits and I've got a podcast series I'm writing for the national broadcaster in Canada.
Cory Doctorow 00:02:49
So that's what I've really had my head down on.
Cory Doctorow 00:02:52
But things that are not related to those that I paid attention to lately is this growing dispute around Blue sky and Mastodon, and particularly I wrote a.
Cory Doctorow 00:03:07
Wrote a long op ed I'm going to publish tomorrow about how it's a category error to think that the reason that things go wrong is that they are for profit.
Cory Doctorow 00:03:20
Not that there's like a good capitalism and a bad capitalism, but there are lots of different kinds of capitalism.
Cory Doctorow 00:03:26
And, you know, I think it is praxis to pay attention to the different factions who call themselves capitalist and where they diverge from each other.
Cory Doctorow 00:03:35
And a lot of capitalism is zero sum if one kind of cap, you know, if the crony capitalists win, the entrepreneurial capitalists lose, you know, that sort of thing.
Cory Doctorow 00:03:43
Trump's, Trump's brand of capitalism is going to be really bad for a lot of people who call themselves capitalists.
Cory Doctorow 00:03:48
And this shows you where the fracture lines are.
Cory Doctorow 00:03:50
It shows you how to shatter a coalition that has otherwise been very powerful.
Cory Doctorow 00:03:53
And it's got us, you know, running scared a lot of the time.
Cory Doctorow 00:03:57
And I think that when people say, okay, all for profit, social media is bad.
Cory Doctorow 00:04:04
All not for profit, social media is good.
Cory Doctorow 00:04:07
Social media that's born not for profit is good, social media, social media that's born for profit is bad.
Cory Doctorow 00:04:12
They're kind of missing the history of software freedom, which almost entirely related to products that were born proprietary and for profit and that we're liberated by force majeure, by hackers, right?
Cory Doctorow 00:04:26
Like we took SMB, the network protocol for Microsoft, and we cloned it and made Samba, which is now in every device you use.
Cory Doctorow 00:04:34
We took Unix operating system made by A monopolist called AT&T and we cloned it.
Cory Doctorow 00:04:39
Now it's called GNU Linux and it's in every device that you use, right?
Cory Doctorow 00:04:43
We took the Microsoft Office file formats and we standardized them and cloned them.
Cory Doctorow 00:04:47
And now they're in LibreOffice and every other kind of text editor that you use, they're all standardized on this.
Cory Doctorow 00:04:53
And the fact that Blue sky has got 20 million users and there's only one blue sky server.
Cory Doctorow 00:05:00
But the protocol is designed to let there be lots of Blue sky servers which would let people leave.
Cory Doctorow 00:05:04
If the management of Blue sky went wrong, if the fears about how a commercial operator will run.
Cory Doctorow 00:05:10
Blue sky went wrong, militates for, like, creating those other Blue sky servers on the one hand, because it gives people somewhere to go if things go wrong at Blue Sky.
Cory Doctorow 00:05:19
But on the other hand, you know, while venture capital firms like the ones that have backed Blue sky do pursue profit at all costs, they pursue profit at all costs, not unprofitable ventures at all costs.
Jesse Hirsch 00:05:31
Yeah.
Cory Doctorow 00:05:32
And if, if, if doing something that is insidificatory and makes the users unhappy and causes them to leave, costs the firm money, the VCs are far less likely to lean on the management to force them to do it.
Cory Doctorow 00:05:45
Right.
Cory Doctorow 00:05:45
And so it creates both a set of incentives that, you know, cut against the impulse to exploit and extract from users, and also gives users a way out.
Cory Doctorow 00:05:57
And I, I realize that the difference between me and some of the people I'm arguing with on Mastodon is while I like Mastodon, I am not a Mastodon partisan.
Cory Doctorow 00:06:09
I am an anti insidification partisan.
Cory Doctorow 00:06:11
Right.
Cory Doctorow 00:06:11
My mission is not the triumph of Mastodon.
Cory Doctorow 00:06:14
It is the end of insidification.
Jesse Hirsch 00:06:15
Well, and, and I think the whole point of portability is we don't want there to be one.
Jesse Hirsch 00:06:21
We want there to be a diverse ecosystem.
Jesse Hirsch 00:06:25
Can you comment briefly on the free Our Feeds initiative?
Cory Doctorow 00:06:28
Well, that's what I'm thinking of.
Cory Doctorow 00:06:29
Yeah.
Cory Doctorow 00:06:30
I put my name on it and a lot of people got angry and they're like, why are you helping these people raise $30 million when we could spend $30 million on the Fediverse?
Cory Doctorow 00:06:39
And I'm like, we should spend $30 million in the Fediverse.
Jesse Hirsch 00:06:41
And I don't see how it's mutually exclusive either.
Cory Doctorow 00:06:43
Yeah, I mean, I don't have $30 million and I don't have $60 million.
Cory Doctorow 00:06:47
So this is a largely academic question, as befits my own ability to fund projects.
Cory Doctorow 00:06:52
But there are a bunch of Mastodon features that I think would be better if they were Blue Skies version of them, like composable moderation.
Cory Doctorow 00:07:00
Some of the recommendation stuff is really good.
Cory Doctorow 00:07:03
The way that they handle usernames is really good, where your domain can be your username.
Cory Doctorow 00:07:07
It's really portable and exciting.
Cory Doctorow 00:07:09
But there's one feature Mastodon has that bluesky should have, which is federation, not portability.
Cory Doctorow 00:07:14
You said portability before.
Cory Doctorow 00:07:16
I don't know if you were speaking loosely or not, but portability is, broadly speaking, the ability to move your data from one service to another.
Cory Doctorow 00:07:24
I don't think it matters that much with social media.
Cory Doctorow 00:07:26
There's some people who use social media in a way where the data there really matters to them.
Cory Doctorow 00:07:30
But the thing that keeps people stuck to social media, the reason people don't leave Facebook when Facebook goes bad is not because they care about their old posts.
Cory Doctorow 00:07:37
It's because they care about their friends.
Cory Doctorow 00:07:38
And so that's why federation and interoperability are important, because then you could leave Facebook, you could go to Mastodon and you could continue talking to the people that you left behind on Facebook and yeah, maybe you wouldn't get your old posts.
Cory Doctorow 00:07:51
I, you know, that is not a thing.
Jesse Hirsch 00:07:54
Yeah.
Cory Doctorow 00:07:55
Is sticky.
Cory Doctorow 00:07:55
Yeah, it's not sticky.
Cory Doctorow 00:07:57
It's sticky for some things.
Cory Doctorow 00:07:58
It's probably sticky for photographers on Instagram, you know, but, but.
Cory Doctorow 00:08:04
Or photographers on Flickr, for sure.
Cory Doctorow 00:08:07
And if you look in the memos of the lawsuit against Facebook, the government antitrust case against Facebook, there's some internal memos where they were rolling out Facebook photos.
Cory Doctorow 00:08:16
And the program manager in charge of Facebook photos sends Zuck a memo that says, we're going to make this really good because we don't want people to go to Google, which was a concern for them at the time.
Cory Doctorow 00:08:28
If we can convince them to put all their family photos in Facebook photos and then make it so they'll have to lose them if they leave Facebook, then they'll stay on Facebook even if Google is better.
Cory Doctorow 00:08:38
Right.
Cory Doctorow 00:08:38
That's sort of what the substance of the memo is.
Cory Doctorow 00:08:41
And so there are some kinds of data where you want portability, but broadly, the reason people stay on social media, it's not the data, it's the people they love.
Cory Doctorow 00:08:49
Right.
Cory Doctorow 00:08:50
Like, that's the great, you know, crisis of social media is that you are being held hostage by the people you care about.
Cory Doctorow 00:08:58
And it is your care for those people that.
Cory Doctorow 00:09:01
That keeps you from leaving.
Cory Doctorow 00:09:02
And it is their care for you that keeps them from leaving.
Cory Doctorow 00:09:05
And it is exploiting our mutual impulse to care for one another that lets social media bosses, the bosses and the legacy platforms abuse us with impunity because they know we won't leave.
Cory Doctorow 00:09:16
Because we love our friends more than we hate Mark Zuckerberg.
Cory Doctorow 00:09:18
Zuckerberg.
Cory Doctorow 00:09:19
Or Elon Musk.
Jesse Hirsch 00:09:20
Although I think that trade off may be reaching a point where that hatred may be so great.
Jesse Hirsch 00:09:27
Now I want to hate more.
Jesse Hirsch 00:09:29
I'm conscious of our time, so I want to.
Cory Doctorow 00:09:31
Let me say one more thing about this.
Jesse Hirsch 00:09:33
Sure.
Jesse Hirsch 00:09:33
But let me, let me segment that into our what's the Future Feature, because I think you are talking now about the future, please.
Cory Doctorow 00:09:40
Sure.
Cory Doctorow 00:09:41
So everyone's seen that fantastic documentary Fiddler on the Roof.
Cory Doctorow 00:09:47
And in Fiddler on the roof, you have Jews living in the shtetl, and I think it's Belarus or Ukraine or something, and a tevka.
Cory Doctorow 00:09:54
And every 15 minutes, the czar's Cossacks ride through and kick six kinds of shit out of them.
Cory Doctorow 00:09:58
And in the end, they leave, right?
Cory Doctorow 00:10:01
The Tsar actually kicks all the Jews out of Russia.
Cory Doctorow 00:10:04
And that's the tragedy, right?
Cory Doctorow 00:10:06
They leave the place where they've been beaten up for the last two and a half hours.
Cory Doctorow 00:10:09
And the reason it's a tragedy is they have nothing except each other.
Cory Doctorow 00:10:12
And it's really clear in the last scene that they'll never see each other again, right?
Cory Doctorow 00:10:16
And so the Anatevka problem is the social media problem, right?
Cory Doctorow 00:10:20
Mark Zuckerberg or.
Cory Doctorow 00:10:21
Or Elon Musk can ride through our shtetl every 15 minutes and kick six kinds of out of us.
Cory Doctorow 00:10:27
And we'll stay put because we love each other.
Cory Doctorow 00:10:30
And eventually, maybe you would leave if things got bad enough.
Cory Doctorow 00:10:32
Certainly.
Cory Doctorow 00:10:33
Like, if you look at my family comes from a part of Eastern Europe that was periodically Belarus and periodically Poland.
Cory Doctorow 00:10:39
And, you know, there are people within my family who left before they had to leave, who left before World War II for various reasons, but they were outliers.
Cory Doctorow 00:10:50
And, you know, my grandmother is a Soviet refugee, and she was an outlier, right?
Cory Doctorow 00:10:54
She.
Cory Doctorow 00:10:54
She left Leningrad and never came back after this.
Cory Doctorow 00:10:58
She was a child soldier in the siege.
Cory Doctorow 00:10:59
She was evacuated, and she met my grandfather, and they.
Cory Doctorow 00:11:01
They ran off, but none of her family did.
Cory Doctorow 00:11:03
They all stayed.
Cory Doctorow 00:11:04
And they're all screwed now because, you know, St.
Cory Doctorow 00:11:06
Petersburg's not a good place to be right now.
Cory Doctorow 00:11:09
And, you know, it was because they were holding each other hostage.
Cory Doctorow 00:11:11
My grandmother, you know, between trauma and marriage and becoming a mother at 15, she just broken all of it.
Cory Doctorow 00:11:17
So what's the future?
Cory Doctorow 00:11:18
Well, you know, if you live in Berlin and if you lived in Berlin in 1950 and you wanted to try moving to Paris, if you lived in East Berlin, you would have to risk everything, go over the Wall, never see your family again, and lose every possession you have.
Cory Doctorow 00:11:35
If you live in Berlin now and you want to try living in Paris, you just get on a train and maybe you come back again, right?
Cory Doctorow 00:11:41
And you can make all kinds of choices.
Cory Doctorow 00:11:44
And I think the future is that we make it that easy to leave social media, that we create some mix of mandates.
Cory Doctorow 00:11:52
So the European Union has the Digital Markets act, and we'll see how that's enforced, because they just fired the commissioner who is responsible for it, Vishtagar, and they replaced her With a big tech friendly person that, you know, Nick Clegg's last act was, was getting this person in.
Cory Doctorow 00:12:08
So they are going to mandate certain kinds of interoperability, starting with, with messaging.
Cory Doctorow 00:12:13
So you'll be able to go from like imessage to, well, imessage for some reason is excluded, but you'll go from like WhatsApp to Google messenger as easily as you can switch from T Mobile to, you know, Google Fi or whatever, right?
Cory Doctorow 00:12:27
Where you can just change numbers, no one knows you've changed, they continue to message you at the old place, you reach them and so on.
Cory Doctorow 00:12:33
So that's, that's.
Cory Doctorow 00:12:35
We could bring that to social media with a mandate.
Cory Doctorow 00:12:36
We just have a law.
Cory Doctorow 00:12:38
We could also remove the IP protections that firms use to block people who just do this by force majeure, right.
Cory Doctorow 00:12:45
Who reverse engineer and modify the way these programs work without the cooperation or the consent of the people who made the programs.
Cory Doctorow 00:12:54
And you know, there's a whole suite, it's like a thicket of, of IP laws, anti circumvention, tortious interference, trademark, patent, copyright contract, all this nonsense.
Cory Doctorow 00:13:04
And we could just clear that away.
Cory Doctorow 00:13:07
And when you ask about the future, one thing I'm really interested in, I am a Canadian, we're like serial killers.
Cory Doctorow 00:13:11
We're everywhere we look, just like everyone else.
Cory Doctorow 00:13:13
And Canada has a bunch of these IP laws because it was part of NAFTA and then part of the sequel to nafta, the usmca.
Cory Doctorow 00:13:22
And basically we were promised access to American markets if we would make it a crime to reverse engineer a car so an independent mechanic could fix it, to reverse engineer a printer so that you could put anyone's ink in it, to reverse engineer a social media network so that you could hop from one to the other to reverse engineer a pacemaker so that you could, could add your own security patches if it was not secure and up to date.
Cory Doctorow 00:13:42
Right?
Cory Doctorow 00:13:42
All of these things that we've given up that are a gift to large American firms in exchange for tariff free access to US markets.
Cory Doctorow 00:13:51
Trump has said that he's going to impose a 25 tariff in 48 hours as we speak.
Cory Doctorow 00:13:56
Right?
Cory Doctorow 00:13:57
So if he imposes a 25 tariff on Canadian goods, Canada could retaliate with its own tariffs, which would make everything in Canada more expensive.
Cory Doctorow 00:14:03
That would be very stupid.
Cory Doctorow 00:14:04
Or we could say, actually we're going to have the same engineers who built Research in Motion and sold you the BlackBerry and built Nortel and sold you your switches.
Cory Doctorow 00:14:13
We're going to have that same engineering talent trained in the same institutions start reverse engineering American products and making add ons that anyone in the world can buy.
Cory Doctorow 00:14:21
A Canadian app store for iOS that charges you a 5% commission.
Jesse Hirsch 00:14:26
Could we do that?
Jesse Hirsch 00:14:27
Could we do that to Chinese tech too?
Jesse Hirsch 00:14:29
Yeah, like instead of saying get out Huawei, the opposite, say come on, give us your tech so we can reverse.
Cory Doctorow 00:14:35
Engineer, engineer it and we'll, we'll write alternative firmware for it and so on.
Cory Doctorow 00:14:40
Yeah, absolutely.
Cory Doctorow 00:14:41
I mean and, and honestly, China could do that to the United States.
Cory Doctorow 00:14:45
There's no re.
Cory Doctorow 00:14:46
Like, like the Politburo would benefit significantly from having 10 cent run an app store for iOS.
Cory Doctorow 00:14:52
Right.
Cory Doctorow 00:14:53
It would just give them like lots of, of, you know, levers of control that they currently wish they had where they've met.
Jesse Hirsch 00:15:01
I'm curious, have you been following the red note kind of quote unquote protest?
Jesse Hirsch 00:15:05
What are your thoughts there both in terms of where we started this with the social relations that keep us bonded under the apps.
Jesse Hirsch 00:15:12
Yeah, but, but this very symbolic moment amongst, you know, young Americans who are kind of telling the government to fuck off.
Cory Doctorow 00:15:19
Well, look, anytime young Americans tell the government to fuck off is a good day.
Cory Doctorow 00:15:22
Right.
Cory Doctorow 00:15:23
But you know, there's a lot of protests that's just not very effective.
Cory Doctorow 00:15:26
And I think as a protest method, like it's, it's a spectacle.
Cory Doctorow 00:15:31
It's not much of a spectacle.
Cory Doctorow 00:15:33
Right.
Cory Doctorow 00:15:33
Like as a parent, the fact that my 16 year old is ignoring me with her face in her phone looking at RedNote is completely indistinguishable from my child ignoring me with their face.
Cory Doctorow 00:15:44
So you know, as a spectacle, it's a very subtle one.
Cory Doctorow 00:15:48
Right.
Cory Doctorow 00:15:48
You have to rely on kind of self reported usage.
Cory Doctorow 00:15:51
I've been interested.
Cory Doctorow 00:15:53
You know the thing that I found most interesting are screen grabs of Chinese users reacting to the influx of American kids and talking about the kind of mutual understanding they're seeking, which is very interesting.
Cory Doctorow 00:16:07
I mean international youth movements that are anti authoritarian have done some pretty remarkable things in the past summer.
Cory Doctorow 00:16:13
68 being a good example.
Cory Doctorow 00:16:15
Right.
Cory Doctorow 00:16:16
And you know, Greta Thunberg and the, the sit in strikes.
Cory Doctorow 00:16:20
And honestly, China's got a problem with its young people.
Cory Doctorow 00:16:23
For one thing, it keeps teaching them about Marxism and then they're like, wait a second, we'd like to do some Marxism now.
Cory Doctorow 00:16:30
And the Politburo is like, no, fuck off, you can't support those wildcat strikes.
Cory Doctorow 00:16:34
Right.
Cory Doctorow 00:16:34
Like you are.
Cory Doctorow 00:16:35
Your job is to support communism with Chinese characteristics.
Cory Doctorow 00:16:38
I know we made you read Lenin.
Cory Doctorow 00:16:40
Please stop thinking about what Lenin said.
Jesse Hirsch 00:16:43
Well, and this Seems to be the paradox of kind of narrative control in our world.
Jesse Hirsch 00:16:47
And I wanted to talk to you about your novel in particular and about kind of your role as a storyteller, because you do seem to be one of the lone kind of radical voices that is part of the creative aspect.
Jesse Hirsch 00:17:02
Like there's radical voices in academia, there's radical voices in terms of some of the critics and protests, but there aren't a lot of radical voices who are both in fiction and in the real world, in current affairs.
Jesse Hirsch 00:17:16
And I'm kind of.
Jesse Hirsch 00:17:19
Right, right.
Jesse Hirsch 00:17:20
But I'm curious, especially with this novel, you kind of used history.
Jesse Hirsch 00:17:27
You did this at the start of our discussion today when you were talking about the history of hacking.
Cory Doctorow 00:17:31
Right.
Jesse Hirsch 00:17:31
And the history of modding and of people making things better.
Jesse Hirsch 00:17:35
What is it about this moment that outside of just the way in which you talked about your relationship with your publisher and how this book kind of evolved.
Jesse Hirsch 00:17:44
But why do you think the start of the early days of insidification, the early days of the computer revolution, why is that a good time for us to be thinking about the now, Especially given the authoritarianism that's rising?
Cory Doctorow 00:18:00
Well, so I'll hold up the book here and do the promo thing.
Cory Doctorow 00:18:03
Picks and Shovels is a book about Martin Hench.
Cory Doctorow 00:18:06
He's my two fisted crime fighting forensic accountant who is in two other novels, these two here, Red Team Blues and the Bezel that have come out over the last two years.
Cory Doctorow 00:18:19
So I wrote a lot of books during lockdown, wrote nine books during lockdown.
Cory Doctorow 00:18:23
And in the first book we meet him and he's 67 years old and retiring and it's his last job.
Cory Doctorow 00:18:28
And my agent and my editor like this well enough that they, he, he bought two more of them.
Cory Doctorow 00:18:34
And I was like, but he's retired now.
Cory Doctorow 00:18:36
And then I realized I could tell them out of order.
Jesse Hirsch 00:18:38
Yeah.
Cory Doctorow 00:18:39
And that like I wasn't foreshadowing anymore.
Cory Doctorow 00:18:41
I was like back shadowing and like the more detail I put in, the easier it got.
Cory Doctorow 00:18:45
And I would look really premeditated even though I was just like winging it.
Cory Doctorow 00:18:48
So it's been like a really effective kind of writing process.
Cory Doctorow 00:18:51
And Picks and Shovels is his first adventure.
Cory Doctorow 00:18:54
It's set in the early 80s during the weird era of the PC.
Cory Doctorow 00:18:57
And he's in San Francisco and he's got his first job and it's working for a company run by a Mormon bishop, a Catholic priest and an orthodox rabbi.
Cory Doctorow 00:19:06
Sounds like the set up for a joke, but the joke is that it's a predatory Ponzi scheme that preys on faith groups and does pyramid selling within face groups of these PCs that are booby trapped so that you have to buy all of your consumables from them.
Cory Doctorow 00:19:21
Like the printer sprockets are a little further apart than a standard printer sprocket so you have to buy paper from them that costs 10x what normal paper costs, right?
Cory Doctorow 00:19:29
Their floppy drives are, are likewise given to, you have to buy their blank floppy dust and so on.
Cory Doctorow 00:19:33
Marty realizes he's working for the bad guys and he goes to work for a rival that he's been hired initially to destroy.
Cory Doctorow 00:19:40
This company started by three young women who used to work for them and who've made it their mission to liberate everyone they helped to entrap.
Cory Doctorow 00:19:47
They're an orthodox woman who's been kicked out of her family because she came out as queer, a Mormon woman who's left the faith because she is upset at the LDS's opposition to the Equal Rights Amendment and a nun who's become a Marxist liberation theologist, you know, working on helping people in the dirty wars in Central America.
Cory Doctorow 00:20:08
And they're all computer virtuosos and they're all disin shittifying right, unfucking these computers that the three wise men that the Reverend Sirs have and sold to their co religionists and Marty helps them.
Cory Doctorow 00:20:22
And you know, the point of this is that there was always an element within computing who saw the opportunity of computers as an opportunity to put people in bondage, to control, spy on people.
Cory Doctorow 00:20:35
If you go back to the 70s, you have Bill Gates and his open letter to computer hobbyists where he says, look, I know the way that we make software is everybody's building their own hardware, everyone is writing code for it, we're all sharing the code and making it better.
Cory Doctorow 00:20:50
It's like a scientific enterprise where you publish your work and then other people peer review it and improve on it and so on.
Cory Doctorow 00:20:56
But I have cloned some software from the Digital Equipment Co Op Cooperate Corporation, right from deck.
Cory Doctorow 00:21:02
I've, I've cloned their basic interpreter and the cloning part was not a ripoff.
Cory Doctorow 00:21:08
But when you copy it, that is, when I do it, it's, it's, it's progress.
Cory Doctorow 00:21:12
When you do it, it's piracy and I insist that no one copy any software ever again without permission, right?
Cory Doctorow 00:21:18
I, I, I stand athwart history shouting stop, right?
Cory Doctorow 00:21:22
I, I'm King Canoodie, right?
Cory Doctorow 00:21:24
Except he succeeded, right?
Cory Doctorow 00:21:25
And he, he set in motion a world where computer users and computer makers were adverse to one another.
Cory Doctorow 00:21:33
And for the next 40 years, we have had an arms race of computer makers trying to figure out how to use computers to disobey the people who own them and do things that are adverse to those people's interests, to hide how they work, and to work against the interests of the people who own them.
Cory Doctorow 00:21:48
So, you know, your.
Cory Doctorow 00:21:49
Your iPhone can run apps that are written by anyone, whether or not they're sold from the App Store.
Cory Doctorow 00:21:54
They just want.
Cory Doctorow 00:21:55
It just won't.
Cory Doctorow 00:21:56
It can.
Cory Doctorow 00:21:57
It won't.
Cory Doctorow 00:21:58
Your printer can use anyone's ink.
Cory Doctorow 00:22:00
It just won't.
Cory Doctorow 00:22:01
And over the years, what.
Cory Doctorow 00:22:03
What started as an arms race that was usually lost by the companies, right?
Cory Doctorow 00:22:08
Because it was a fair fight.
Cory Doctorow 00:22:09
And in a fair fight, even though the companies had more resources, they had a harder position because they were the defenders.
Cory Doctorow 00:22:15
They had to make no mistakes in their copy protection or their ink lockout or whatever.
Cory Doctorow 00:22:20
And then to defeat them, I only had to find one mistake that they'd made.
Cory Doctorow 00:22:24
We call that the attacker's advantage.
Cory Doctorow 00:22:26
And it's considered unbeatable, right?
Cory Doctorow 00:22:29
You never want to be the defender in asymmetric warfare.
Cory Doctorow 00:22:32
You always want to be the attacker.
Cory Doctorow 00:22:33
And so they decided.
Cory Doctorow 00:22:34
They decided since they couldn't win a fair fight, they'd make it unfair.
Cory Doctorow 00:22:38
So by 1998, they gotten this law, the Digital Millennium Copyright act, passed, that just made it a felony to do this.
Cory Doctorow 00:22:44
So instead of making it technically impossible for you to change your computer so it does what it's supposed to do, what you want it to do, they just made it a felony to do it.
Cory Doctorow 00:22:53
And indeed, you know, since then, for the most part, they've made the technology less robust.
Cory Doctorow 00:22:58
Why bother making the technology robust against user modification when you can just put users in jail for modifying it?
Cory Doctorow 00:23:06
And so this is how we end up in a world where our printer ink, right, black water, costs $10,000 a gallon, and you print your shopping lists with a fluid that costs more than the semen of a Kentucky Derby winner.
Jesse Hirsch 00:23:20
A great analogy.
Cory Doctorow 00:23:22
Place to have arrived, right?
Cory Doctorow 00:23:24
And so, you know, the.
Cory Doctorow 00:23:27
The point of.
Cory Doctorow 00:23:28
Of going back to the early 80s is to say that this tension existed from the year dot.
Cory Doctorow 00:23:33
There are always people who saw this and said, how can I screw other people?
Cory Doctorow 00:23:37
And there are always people who saw this and said, how can I set people free?
Cory Doctorow 00:23:40
Back to Mastodon and Blue sky, right?
Cory Doctorow 00:23:43
And there were people who wanted to build a demimond on the periphery of homebrew computers and homebrew operating systems and so on that you could use if to both demonstrate and Maintain your ideological purity.
Cory Doctorow 00:23:54
And there were people who wanted to storm the gates and smash them open and set everyone stuck inside free.
Cory Doctorow 00:24:01
Not chide them for being too, you know, soft headed or to lacking the foresight to stay the hell away from anything Mark Zuckerberg or Bill Gates made, but to, like, set them free, even though they made a decision that, you know, you warn them not to make and that you wish they hadn't because you love them more than you hate Bill Gates, too.
Cory Doctorow 00:24:20
Only that means not that you have to stay locked up with them, but that you have to break them out.
Jesse Hirsch 00:24:25
Well, and I think that philosophy may be required as we head towards this insidification society, because for me, some of the symbolism, especially of Trump's embrace of crypto, right?
Jesse Hirsch 00:24:37
And this meme coin that he sort of launched the day before, it kind of feels like they're taking the culture that you've described that existed within software design, that existed within social media design, and now they're saying, let's apply it to America, let's apply it to, you know, the world in terms of foreign relations.
Cory Doctorow 00:24:57
Yeah.
Cory Doctorow 00:24:58
Do you see that crypto is a very good analogy for Trump ism?
Cory Doctorow 00:25:02
Because the whole point of crypto is caveat emptor, right?
Cory Doctorow 00:25:06
And you remember Trump in the, the Clinton debate, you know, and Clinton accused him of never paying taxes, and he tacitly admitted it.
Cory Doctorow 00:25:12
And he said, that makes me smart, right?
Cory Doctorow 00:25:14
If I can get away with breaking the rules, that makes me smart.
Cory Doctorow 00:25:16
If I can, like, figure out how to misclassify a worker as a contractor, or if I can and deny them benefits, or if I can steal money out of your pay packet in a way that you can't force me to cough up and disgorge, that makes me smart, right?
Cory Doctorow 00:25:30
And crypto is that right?
Cory Doctorow 00:25:32
Whenever someone has their money stolen in crypto, the people who are true believers in crypto will say something like, not your keys, not your wallet, right?
Cory Doctorow 00:25:40
Like you, you made the mistake of keeping your fake money in a web based online service.
Cory Doctorow 00:25:46
We told you not to do it.
Cory Doctorow 00:25:48
Caveat emptor, right?
Cory Doctorow 00:25:50
And caveat empter is like no way to run a society, right?
Cory Doctorow 00:25:53
Because the endpoint of caveat empter is if I can trick you, sucks to be you.
Cory Doctorow 00:25:59
Yeah, right?
Cory Doctorow 00:26:00
If I can, if, if.
Cory Doctorow 00:26:01
And if that maims you, if that ruins you, if you lose everything, sucks to be you.
Cory Doctorow 00:26:07
And that's the Trump Society, right?
Cory Doctorow 00:26:11
Sucks to be you.
Cory Doctorow 00:26:12
Did you vote for me on the promise of me bringing your jobs back?
Cory Doctorow 00:26:14
And then I sent More of your jobs overseas.
Cory Doctorow 00:26:17
Sucks to be you.
Cory Doctorow 00:26:18
Are you the leader of the Teamsters who came and spoke at my conference and then I screwed union workers?
Cory Doctorow 00:26:24
Sucks to be you.
Cory Doctorow 00:26:26
Right?
Cory Doctorow 00:26:27
And you know, that is the.
Cory Doctorow 00:26:29
That is the crypto.
Cory Doctorow 00:26:30
That is Trump.
Cory Doctorow 00:26:31
That is Musk, right?
Cory Doctorow 00:26:32
Did you believe me when I told you there'd be full self driving in 2014 and buy a Tesla in 2015?
Cory Doctorow 00:26:37
Did you believe me when I said it in 2015 and bought one in 2016?
Cory Doctorow 00:26:40
Did you believe it in any of the years since when?
Cory Doctorow 00:26:42
I've announced it as being within 12 months every year since 2014.
Cory Doctorow 00:26:46
Sucks to be you.
Cory Doctorow 00:26:48
No, that's not fraud.
Cory Doctorow 00:26:49
That makes.
Cory Doctorow 00:26:50
That makes me smart.
Jesse Hirsch 00:26:51
You said something else that I want to tease out.
Jesse Hirsch 00:26:53
Only because it gives us an opportunity to talk about your Kickstarter, which there's this paradox.
Jesse Hirsch 00:26:59
On the one hand, these guys are saying freedom of speech, no Internet regulation.
Jesse Hirsch 00:27:04
They've gotten the platforms to bend to them in advance of this new regime.
Jesse Hirsch 00:27:10
But as you alluded, the ultimate regulation of the Internet is copyright.
Jesse Hirsch 00:27:15
Every platform, almost every piece of technology, almost in a very strict, stupid, heavy handed manner.
Jesse Hirsch 00:27:22
Copyright, that is the enforcement of private property, tends to be the basis upon which this regulation happens.
Jesse Hirsch 00:27:31
And that's why you're using Kickstarter and you're taking a much different approach to market your book.
Jesse Hirsch 00:27:37
Explain that, especially the politics of why you're doing that.
Cory Doctorow 00:27:41
So I mentioned the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.
Cory Doctorow 00:27:44
This law passed in 1998 and brought into Canada by Tony Clement and James Moore in 2012, Bill C11.
Cory Doctorow 00:27:52
And under this law, removing a digital lock is illegal, even if you own the thing that's behind the lock.
Cory Doctorow 00:28:00
And what that means, practically speaking, is if you want to sell an audiobook on audible, which controls 90% of the audiobook market, they're a monopolist that was acquired in a predatory, illegal acquisition by Amazon in 2008.
Cory Doctorow 00:28:13
You have to allow them to lock up your book with their digital rights management, their encryption.
Cory Doctorow 00:28:19
And that means that your listeners, your readers, can never take those books out of the Audible app and put them in an app that's not blessed by Audible, which means that you can never leave Audible, because if you leave Audible, your readers have to give up all their books.
Cory Doctorow 00:28:32
And so this has been used to screw readers.
Cory Doctorow 00:28:35
You know, Audible was experimenting last year with ads and audiobooks, and it's been used to screw writers.
Cory Doctorow 00:28:41
So Audible got caught through something called Audible Gate, using an accounting trick to steal $100 million, at least from audiobook creators.
Cory Doctorow 00:28:49
And so you Know both they get you coming and they get you going.
Cory Doctorow 00:28:53
So I don't allow any of this, these digital locks to be used on any of my books.
Cory Doctorow 00:28:57
And as a result none of my audiobooks are carried by Audible.
Cory Doctorow 00:29:01
And so my, my publisher is macmillan.
Cory Doctorow 00:29:03
They're you know, one of the big five publishers and they to their credit really acknowledge that this is a good fight to be fighting.
Cory Doctorow 00:29:10
But they don't want my audio rights if they can't sell the audiobooks on Audible because nobody shops for audiobooks anywhere else.
Cory Doctorow 00:29:15
It's 90% of the market.
Cory Doctorow 00:29:17
So I keep those rights and I, I pay unionized talent, right.
Cory Doctorow 00:29:22
This case will Wheaton SAG AFTRA member to record my audiobooks.
Cory Doctorow 00:29:28
I pay into the SAG AFTRA fund.
Cory Doctorow 00:29:30
I pay professional director and studio and sound engineer and I pay them the going rates.
Cory Doctorow 00:29:35
I don't go on fiverr.
Cory Doctorow 00:29:36
I don't go overseas for cheap labor costs.
Cory Doctorow 00:29:39
A lot of money.
Cory Doctorow 00:29:40
It's kind of a mid five figures expense.
Cory Doctorow 00:29:42
It's very hard to recoup that if you only sell the audiobooks in these stores that are great and I'll name some of them in case you're thinking of getting shot of Audible and finding your way to a more free audiobook world.
Cory Doctorow 00:29:54
Libro fm.
Cory Doctorow 00:29:56
And Libro FM lets you nominate a local bookstore on the grounds that you're probably going in there and browsing the books and then buying the audiobooks at Libro.
Cory Doctorow 00:30:04
And Libro splits the profits with whoever your local bookstore is, which is smart.
Cory Doctorow 00:30:08
Yeah, there's downpour.com but even Google Play is DRM like allows publishers to decide whether they want DRM.
Cory Doctorow 00:30:16
It's not DRM free entirely, but, but you know, they'll let someone sell without DRM like me.
Cory Doctorow 00:30:21
So with no one shopping on those stores, to a first approximation, right.
Cory Doctorow 00:30:25
90% of the market in Audible, I had to do something else.
Cory Doctorow 00:30:28
And so I do these Kickstarters because Kickstarters raise a lot of buzz and they raise a lot of money.
Cory Doctorow 00:30:32
They pre sell a lot of books and, and so I've done seven of them now and they recoup the cost and then some.
Cory Doctorow 00:30:38
And because I also pre sell the hardcover and the paperbacks, the previous two books and the E books and so on.
Cory Doctorow 00:30:44
They also generate a bunch of sales for day one of the book, which is great.
Cory Doctorow 00:30:49
And they give me a way to talk to people who care about my work directly, you know, in a way that gets more reliably delivered than say posting something to a social media account.
Cory Doctorow 00:31:00
And so when I go out on tour.
Cory Doctorow 00:31:02
I'm going to about 12 cities, and starting on February 13th, 14th, I'm going to be in Boston then.
Cory Doctorow 00:31:09
And then I'm going all around the US And Canada.
Cory Doctorow 00:31:12
You know, that, that it gets me, it helps me get people out to the tour events too.
Cory Doctorow 00:31:17
So it's a great way to do things.
Cory Doctorow 00:31:19
It's been very positive.
Cory Doctorow 00:31:21
The audiobooks and ebooks that I sell through the, the Kickstarter, and then I have my own Electronic Store, craphound.com Shop where you can buy my ebooks and audiobooks.
Cory Doctorow 00:31:31
They're not just DRM free.
Cory Doctorow 00:31:32
They also have no license agreement.
Cory Doctorow 00:31:34
So you don't have to click something saying that you won't sell them or loan them or give them away.
Cory Doctorow 00:31:37
You get all the rights that you have under copyright as a user of copyrighted works.
Cory Doctorow 00:31:41
But I wanted to say, you know, apropos, like copyrights, fitness to regulate the Internet.
Cory Doctorow 00:31:46
So first of all, I don't think it's wrong that there is a supply chain regulation for the entertainment industry, right?
Cory Doctorow 00:31:52
As someone in the entertainment industry, I want a regulation for the industry that I'm in.
Cory Doctorow 00:31:58
Copyright's not a very good one.
Cory Doctorow 00:32:00
Maybe it could be, but the one thing that's really important is I don't know why we apply this to people who aren't in our supply chain.
Cory Doctorow 00:32:06
Like the, the test that we use to figure out whether or not you are an entertainment industry supply chain member is whether you're handling or making copies of works.
Cory Doctorow 00:32:16
And so that used to be a pretty good proxy, right?
Cory Doctorow 00:32:19
Like, because it meant you had a printing press or a record factory or a film lab.
Cory Doctorow 00:32:23
Now it just means you have a mouse, right?
Cory Doctorow 00:32:25
And so everyone is suddenly subject to copyright, and it's really not fit for purpose.
Cory Doctorow 00:32:30
No one can figure out what it means.
Cory Doctorow 00:32:31
If we stretch it to cover everything, it ceases to mean anything, you know, and this has been a problem since day one.
Cory Doctorow 00:32:37
Like, I, early on, I was impersonated on a dating site by someone who was luring people out on dates and then not showing up, which was weird.
Cory Doctorow 00:32:46
But I was like, what if this person does show up and kill someone, right?
Cory Doctorow 00:32:50
So I, I actually found the dating site's phone number, because back in those days, if you knew how the Internet worked, you could find phone numbers.
Cory Doctorow 00:32:56
And I called them up and they said, we have no means to report impersonation, but you can report a copyright violation of your photo in the profile and we'll take that down.
Cory Doctorow 00:33:07
And I'm like, this is like uniquely unsuited to it, because first of all, that's a Creative Commons license photo.
Cory Doctorow 00:33:14
It's my author photo.
Cory Doctorow 00:33:15
I don't hold a copyright to it.
Cory Doctorow 00:33:16
But second of all, there are lots of photos of me that I don't hold the copyright to that have nothing to do with Creative Commons.
Jesse Hirsch 00:33:21
If they're really determined, I don't hold.
Cory Doctorow 00:33:24
The copyright to it.
Cory Doctorow 00:33:25
So does this mean that you only can shut down impersonation when they use a photo you took and not when a photo.
Cory Doctorow 00:33:31
Not when they use a photo someone else took whom you can't necessarily find?
Cory Doctorow 00:33:35
So it's just not suited for purpose.
Cory Doctorow 00:33:38
It makes for very bad labor regulation, as we're seeing with AI.
Cory Doctorow 00:33:41
So there's a bunch of people who are like, well, we'll use copyright to shut down AI Scraping so that we can prevent wage erosion by AI.
Cory Doctorow 00:33:50
And wage erosion by AI is something we should be worried about, not because AI is good, but because AI Pitchman can convince your boss to fire you and replace you with bad AI.
Cory Doctorow 00:33:58
And, you know, the writer strike showed us how you deal with it.
Cory Doctorow 00:34:00
You just say to your boss, you're not allowed to use AI, or if you do, you can't pay me less or have fewer writers in the writing room, right?
Cory Doctorow 00:34:07
And then your boss is like, well, I guess we're not paying for AI then, right?
Cory Doctorow 00:34:09
Because the only reason we want it is we want to fire you, right?
Cory Doctorow 00:34:12
If we can't fire you, fuck the AI, Right?
Cory Doctorow 00:34:14
Like, we don't.
Cory Doctorow 00:34:15
We don't like it because we think it has good output or because it's fun to play with with.
Cory Doctorow 00:34:18
We like it because we're horny for firing you.
Cory Doctorow 00:34:21
But, you know, if.
Cory Doctorow 00:34:22
If we don't do that, if we just say, okay, well, you have the unambiguous right to decide who can train an AI with your work.
Cory Doctorow 00:34:28
First of all, you just get rid of everything beneficial that people do with scraping and machine learning, right?
Cory Doctorow 00:34:33
So, like, say goodbye to Innocence Project New Orleans that uses LLMs as the top of a pipeline to find the correlates and arrest reports of false arrests and uses those to help get people out of prison.
Cory Doctorow 00:34:44
But, you know, if you're a photographer trying to sell into Getty, which is just about to merge with its largest competitor, you have one company to sell to, and they're just going to say, if you want to sell to Getty, you're going to have to give us your AI training rights.
Cory Doctorow 00:34:58
Getty wants to stop buying things from you and start using an LLM to copy your shit.
Jesse Hirsch 00:35:04
Although you're, your point about supply chains comes back to unions, Right.
Jesse Hirsch 00:35:09
That those types of supply chains, and especially in the creative industries, they're articulated because of union representation.
Jesse Hirsch 00:35:16
Right, sure.
Jesse Hirsch 00:35:17
And that's where a lot of this stuff starts to break down.
Cory Doctorow 00:35:20
But unions don't need copyright.
Cory Doctorow 00:35:22
Unions need labor.
Cory Doctorow 00:35:24
Yeah, right.
Cory Doctorow 00:35:25
So like Getty can, can acquire the rights to all of its photographers training, read all of its photographers photos and the right to train on them, then fire all those photographers and use an image generator to replace them.
Cory Doctorow 00:35:36
Right.
Cory Doctorow 00:35:36
That's what Getty wants to do.
Cory Doctorow 00:35:38
Getting the copyright has nothing to do with whether Getty then demands to get the copyright from you.
Cory Doctorow 00:35:44
This is like giving a bullied school kid extra lunch money.
Cory Doctorow 00:35:47
There is not an amount of lunch money that the bullies won't take.
Cory Doctorow 00:35:50
Right.
Cory Doctorow 00:35:50
Like the, you cannot get your kid fed by just handing them more money.
Cory Doctorow 00:35:54
You just give the bullies so much money that they like bribe the principal to look the other way.
Cory Doctorow 00:35:58
What you have to do is structurally change it, which is what labor rights do.
Cory Doctorow 00:36:02
So you have this copyright thing that like on the one hand, you know, we just, we just had the anniversary of poor Aaron Swartz death and he was a hacker who scraped a whole bunch of scientific articles.
Cory Doctorow 00:36:12
No one really knows why but, but.
Jesse Hirsch 00:36:14
I'd go further, I'd call him a martyr to, to the corrupt intellectual property regime that you're sort of articulating.
Cory Doctorow 00:36:22
Aaron was very skeptical.
Cory Doctorow 00:36:23
He was a pal of mine and he was very skeptical of, of IP rights and he wanted to, he scraped all these, these files that he was allowed to access.
Cory Doctorow 00:36:32
Like he, he had visiting privileges at MIT and he was allowed to access academic articles from this repository called jstor.
Cory Doctorow 00:36:40
But the terms of service said that you had to access them by hand and not write a program to do it.
Cory Doctorow 00:36:44
And because he wrote a little script that downloaded them, they charged him with 13 felonies.
Cory Doctorow 00:36:48
He was facing 35 years in prison.
Cory Doctorow 00:36:50
They, he had been one of the founders of Reddit and he had made a bunch of money.
Cory Doctorow 00:36:54
They took all of it fight, you know, dragging him through court, dragging the process out.
Cory Doctorow 00:36:58
And once he was broke, he killed himself.
Cory Doctorow 00:37:01
And Aaron was a graduate of Y Combinator in the class of Sam Altman.
Cory Doctorow 00:37:07
And Sam Altman also scraped a bunch of stuff from the Internet in order to get rich.
Cory Doctorow 00:37:13
And Sam Altman gets to write the laws.
Cory Doctorow 00:37:17
Yeah.
Cory Doctorow 00:37:17
And make up his own policies and grift with every hour that God sends.
Cory Doctorow 00:37:23
And they broke poor Aaron on Iraq.
Cory Doctorow 00:37:25
So I, I got a, I just want to finish and say, that's what copyright does.
Cory Doctorow 00:37:31
Right?
Cory Doctorow 00:37:31
Copyright is not a labor right.
Cory Doctorow 00:37:33
Copyright is a system for magnifying power.
Cory Doctorow 00:37:36
And because creative workers don't have power, giving creative workers, copyright does not manufacture the power.
Cory Doctorow 00:37:42
It just transfers the power to industrial entities whom we bargain with and makes it harder for us to bargain against them 100%.
Jesse Hirsch 00:37:51
I've always seen copyright as something, quite frankly, we need to abolish that.
Jesse Hirsch 00:37:55
The things it serves can be done via other policies, to your point.
Jesse Hirsch 00:38:01
But it is fundamentally about empowering the wealthy.
Jesse Hirsch 00:38:06
I do.
Jesse Hirsch 00:38:06
You know, we're kind of almost out of time.
Jesse Hirsch 00:38:08
And I keep.
Jesse Hirsch 00:38:09
I put this sound effect in which I'm not sure you could hear that it may not be coming through.
Jesse Hirsch 00:38:16
It's tenorsaw ring the alarm because I saw this fantastic tribute you paid to the few Snickens who I also had their album back in the day.
Jesse Hirsch 00:38:29
And I'm not sure you're aware of this.
Jesse Hirsch 00:38:32
I wanted to bring to your attention.
Jesse Hirsch 00:38:33
There's this documentary called Drop the Needle about play to record.
Jesse Hirsch 00:38:38
Yes.
Jesse Hirsch 00:38:39
Yeah, unfortunately, it's on prime, at least here in Canada, but I'm sure it's on the, you know, interwebs, torrents.
Jesse Hirsch 00:38:48
Yes, it is an absolutely dope documentary.
Cory Doctorow 00:38:54
Well, I loved that store.
Cory Doctorow 00:38:55
I mean, I used to, like.
Cory Doctorow 00:38:57
I would get off the young subway probably, I think at like Wellesley, and I'd walk down and there are a few shops I'd stop in, including that one.
Cory Doctorow 00:39:04
And then there was a roti place next door.
Cory Doctorow 00:39:05
I'd get a big roti and then I'd eat that while I listen to my new music on my walk.
Cory Doctorow 00:39:10
And then walk down Queen street to Baka Books and the Silver Snail and get my comics and my science fiction novels for the week.
Cory Doctorow 00:39:16
And that was.
Cory Doctorow 00:39:17
That was a perfect Saturday.
Cory Doctorow 00:39:18
And then I go see Rocky Horror at the Roxy that night.
Cory Doctorow 00:39:21
You know, that was like.
Cory Doctorow 00:39:22
It didn't get any better than that right on there.
Jesse Hirsch 00:39:26
In theory.
Jesse Hirsch 00:39:26
You heard it that time.
Jesse Hirsch 00:39:27
I got it through your channel.
Jesse Hirsch 00:39:29
Now, I like to end every episode here of Meta Views with shout outs.
Jesse Hirsch 00:39:34
And the point of shout outs is both to again, like the news kind of.
Jesse Hirsch 00:39:39
Is there anyone that you're reading, anyone you're thinking about that you kind of want our audience to know?
Jesse Hirsch 00:39:46
And I'm gonna give a shout out to two people, Judy Merrill and Emily Paul Weary.
Jesse Hirsch 00:39:53
Only because without the two of them, I would never have met you or really had a chance to really understand the nature of the work you do.
Jesse Hirsch 00:40:04
So is there anyone you want to shout out or Send in.
Cory Doctorow 00:40:06
I'm looking up the title of this book here in another window.
Cory Doctorow 00:40:09
Bear with me one second.
Cory Doctorow 00:40:10
Second.
Cory Doctorow 00:40:13
Because I'm reading a great book and I'm blanking on the title.
Cory Doctorow 00:40:16
Oh, that's it.
Cory Doctorow 00:40:17
So Pat Murphy, great feminist writer, early cyberpunk.
Cory Doctorow 00:40:23
She has a new book coming out from Tachyon called the Adventures of Mary Darling.
Cory Doctorow 00:40:28
And it is part of a tradition of books that she's done where she's retold classic tales from the perspective of minor, usually female characters who are either missing or get short shrift.
Cory Doctorow 00:40:43
She retold all of the Hobbit, but completely gender swapped because the only women in the hobbit are.
Cory Doctorow 00:40:51
Is this one elf and then the giant flaming vagina that they throw the.
Cory Doctorow 00:40:55
The ring in.
Cory Doctorow 00:40:56
Yeah, right.
Cory Doctorow 00:40:57
And that.
Cory Doctorow 00:40:57
That the total.
Cory Doctorow 00:40:58
Some total representation of femininity and total.
Cory Doctorow 00:41:01
Tolkien and Christopher Tolkien to his absolute discredit forced tour books to withdraw that book from publication on thread of a lawsuit.
Cory Doctorow 00:41:10
Boo.
Cory Doctorow 00:41:11
It's very good.
Cory Doctorow 00:41:12
It's called There and Back Again and I strongly recommend it if you can find it.
Cory Doctorow 00:41:15
I bet the Merrill Collection has it.
Cory Doctorow 00:41:17
But this is a retelling of Peter Pan and it's a feminist retelling of Peter Pan from the perspective.
Cory Doctorow 00:41:23
Do you remember when Wendy Darling and the boys get home from Neverland, there is this coda where you learn that Peter Pan had taken her mother away too and that this is a family tradition.
Cory Doctorow 00:41:39
The mother had also been in Neverland.
Cory Doctorow 00:41:42
This retells it from the perspective of the mother who is horrified that her children have been kidnapped by the monster who took her to Neverland when she was.
Cory Doctorow 00:41:51
And Sherlock Holmes is in it as this like dickhead chauvinist who makes a wonderful foil for Mary Darling.
Cory Doctorow 00:42:02
And Mary Darling is like this.
Cory Doctorow 00:42:05
She's a sword fighting, swashbuckling heroine, you know, because she was on Neverland and then she escaped on a pirate ship and she learned to fight while.
Cory Doctorow 00:42:12
While pretending to be Marty Darling.
Cory Doctorow 00:42:15
And it is very funny.
Cory Doctorow 00:42:18
It's very smart.
Cory Doctorow 00:42:20
It's extremely well plotted.
Cory Doctorow 00:42:22
Like it's really.
Cory Doctorow 00:42:22
It's got a really nice kind of groove.
Cory Doctorow 00:42:25
And then a lot of it takes place on the island in Madagascar where David Graeber did his doctorate.
Cory Doctorow 00:42:30
The island that was made up of anarchist pirates.
Cory Doctorow 00:42:35
Yeah, Lineal women.
Cory Doctorow 00:42:38
That is chronicled in pirate utopia.
Cory Doctorow 00:42:40
The.
Cory Doctorow 00:42:40
His nominally his last book.
Cory Doctorow 00:42:42
I think there will be more books from David.
Cory Doctorow 00:42:44
I'm in touch with his widow and boy did he leave a lot of stuff behind.
Cory Doctorow 00:42:48
So I think there'll be more Graeber books in the years to come.
Cory Doctorow 00:42:51
But.
Cory Doctorow 00:42:51
But his technically, his last book is this Pirate Utopia book.
Cory Doctorow 00:42:55
It's set on this island.
Cory Doctorow 00:42:56
It's set on this pirate utopia island, which is an island where.
Jesse Hirsch 00:42:59
Can you repeat the name?
Jesse Hirsch 00:43:00
And the author of the book?
Cory Doctorow 00:43:02
Yeah, so it's Pat Murphy.
Cory Doctorow 00:43:03
And the title of the book is the Adventures of Mary Darling.
Cory Doctorow 00:43:07
And it's not out yet.
Cory Doctorow 00:43:08
I'm reading it for a blurb.
Cory Doctorow 00:43:10
It'll be out from Tachyon.
Jesse Hirsch 00:43:12
Very cool.
Cory Doctorow 00:43:12
It's a small press.
Cory Doctorow 00:43:13
They're very good.
Cory Doctorow 00:43:13
They did my essay collections.
Cory Doctorow 00:43:16
I.
Cory Doctorow 00:43:17
I'm extremely fond of Tachyon.
Cory Doctorow 00:43:19
So yeah, it's.
Cory Doctorow 00:43:20
It's great.
Cory Doctorow 00:43:21
I mean it really is great.
Cory Doctorow 00:43:23
And this island is amazing.
Cory Doctorow 00:43:24
So like the pirates who lived on this island pretended.
Cory Doctorow 00:43:28
Whenever credulous British merchants would come through, they would pretend to be pirate kings.
Cory Doctorow 00:43:35
And so they would like.
Cory Doctorow 00:43:37
One of them would be nominated the pirate king.
Cory Doctorow 00:43:39
The rest would give him all their loot and he would build like a treasure room and he would sit at the end of it and the rest of the pirates would pretend to be his court.
Cory Doctorow 00:43:45
And all the Malagasy women who were matrilineal and like tough as hell would pretend to be like the harem and they would put on the show for these credulous British merchant sailors who would then go home and say there are these pirate kings in the South Seas.
Cory Doctorow 00:44:00
And Robert Louis Stevenson heard one of these stories and wrote Treasure island because he was taken in by this system systematic decades long hoax by the pirates and their.
Cory Doctorow 00:44:14
Their anarchist, matrilineal, matriarchal female consorts.
Cory Doctorow 00:44:20
And there's like they are distinct ethnic groups still on this island.
Cory Doctorow 00:44:24
The descendants of pirates and matrilineal Malagasy.
Cory Doctorow 00:44:28
And do they still have the matriarchal Malagasy women?
Cory Doctorow 00:44:32
They're a distinct ethnic group.
Cory Doctorow 00:44:33
They have a different dialect and whatever.
Cory Doctorow 00:44:35
That's what David did his doctorate on.
Cory Doctorow 00:44:37
It was an ethnography.
Jesse Hirsch 00:44:38
Do they have any of the politics or culture still?
Cory Doctorow 00:44:41
Yeah, yeah, a ton of it.
Cory Doctorow 00:44:43
Yeah, they're like crazy anarchists.
Jesse Hirsch 00:44:45
Far out.
Cory Doctorow 00:44:46
Yeah, it's great.
Cory Doctorow 00:44:46
They're still matriarchal and they're still anarchists.
Jesse Hirsch 00:44:49
Right on.
Jesse Hirsch 00:44:50
Right on.
Jesse Hirsch 00:44:51
Well, thank you Corey.
Jesse Hirsch 00:44:52
This has been fantastic.
Jesse Hirsch 00:44:55
I suspect the Kickstarter is going well.
Cory Doctorow 00:44:59
It is.
Cory Doctorow 00:45:00
I think we're about to.
Cory Doctorow 00:45:01
When I.
Cory Doctorow 00:45:02
When I left it was just about to break 98, 000.
Cory Doctorow 00:45:05
Yeah, it's with $97,990 right now.
Jesse Hirsch 00:45:09
Right on.
Cory Doctorow 00:45:10
Which is pretty good.
Cory Doctorow 00:45:11
But a lot of that is things that, you know, things like hardcovers, where I don't get all of the money.
Cory Doctorow 00:45:16
I get a small fraction of the money.
Cory Doctorow 00:45:18
But I am 250 copies away just in audiobook sales from breaking even on this audiobook.
Cory Doctorow 00:45:25
And if I do that, then every dime I make off the audiobook for the rest of time is profit.
Jesse Hirsch 00:45:29
Right on.
Jesse Hirsch 00:45:30
And for people to find you on Social, I see you're still on X, other Mastodon, other platforms that you are.
Cory Doctorow 00:45:37
Yeah, if you go to pluralistic.net across the top, that's my daily newsletter across the top.
Cory Doctorow 00:45:43
You've got my RSS feed, Mastodon, medium Tumblr and Twitter.
Jesse Hirsch 00:45:49
Right.
Cory Doctorow 00:45:50
And then there's a podcast feed as well, so you get all of that stuff.
Jesse Hirsch 00:45:54
And I love on X Twitter, your non consensual blue check.
Jesse Hirsch 00:45:58
You're like, I ain't paying for this shit.
Cory Doctorow 00:46:00
Yeah, that's right.
Cory Doctorow 00:46:01
That's right.
Jesse Hirsch 00:46:02
Yeah.
Cory Doctorow 00:46:02
It's a scam.
Cory Doctorow 00:46:03
You know, he's giving blue checks to people who have a lot of followers to make those followers think that someone they find reputable thinks blue checks are worth paying for.
Cory Doctorow 00:46:13
It's just.
Cory Doctorow 00:46:14
It's just as they would say in Section 5 of the Federal Trade Commission act, it is an unfair and deceptive business practice.
Jesse Hirsch 00:46:20
Yeah.
Cory Doctorow 00:46:21
Makes it technically actionable.
Cory Doctorow 00:46:23
Although I don't think the new FTC is going to do anything about it.
Jesse Hirsch 00:46:26
Or as you said, the sucks for you society.
Cory Doctorow 00:46:29
Yeah.
Cory Doctorow 00:46:30
Sucks to be you.
Jesse Hirsch 00:46:31
Suck to be you.
Jesse Hirsch 00:46:32
Although not your case, Corey.
Jesse Hirsch 00:46:34
It's pretty cool to be you.
Jesse Hirsch 00:46:35
Yes.
Cory Doctorow 00:46:36
Non consensual blue tick.
Cory Doctorow 00:46:37
You too, Jesse.
Cory Doctorow 00:46:38
Cool to be you too.
Jesse Hirsch 00:46:39
Thank you very much, Corey, for those listening.
Jesse Hirsch 00:46:42
Thanks again for listening.
Jesse Hirsch 00:46:44
We've met a views everywhere.
Jesse Hirsch 00:46:46
You can find us on Social and we'll be back soon.
Jesse Hirsch 00:46:49
All right, take care.
";}