The rise of the internet and personal computing once inspired utopian visions of how technology could improve society. These days, that kind optimism is sorely lacking from the conversation. The internet has gone from a sprawling web of thousands of websites and subcultures to an increasingly homogenized and monopolized space dominated financially and politically by a handful of billionaires, whose reach now extends into the federal government. In his new novel, Picks and Shovels, author Cory Doctorow brings his readers back in time to the 1980s, the pioneering days of PCs and the internet—and the egalitarian visions of technology’s role in the future that proliferated decades ago. In a special discussion hosted by Red Emma’s Bookstore in Baltimore, TRNN Editor-in-Chief Maximillian Alvarez and Doctorow dig into his new novel, and its place in the wider discussion on tech, inequality, and capitalism.
Production: Maximillian Alvarez
Post-Production: David Hebden
Transcript
The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. A proofread version will be made available as soon as possible.
Corey Doctorow:
Baltimore, thank you very much. What a pleasure. To be in an anarchist bookstore. I grew up in a Marxist bookstore, print shops, which are a little staid. They don’t have as many comic books. It’s very nice to be in a bookstore, radical bookstore where the ethos is if I can’t read a cracking fantasy or I don’t want to be part of your revolution.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Yeah. Well, and I want give you a chance to give us an overview of this book and talk about where it came from. But before we get there, a question I’ve been really wanting to ask you for a while, I couldn’t help but sort of be overwhelmed with emotion holding this book, thinking about what it means, thinking back to young Corey, the IT worker crawling around desks and in the early days of the internet, and how much writing meant to you throughout your entire life. And of course, as someone who interviews workers all day, it makes me think of all the great works of literature that are just unwritten and living in the tired brains and exploited bodies of working people all around us. And so it’s a real remarkable thing to be holding one of those works of literature in my hand. I wanted to ask just to start, as someone who’s written so many different kinds of works, nonfiction, fiction, science fiction, what fiction writing, what has it given you that other forms of writing?
Corey Doctorow:
Well, I think that there are all these issues that are sort of on the horizon. I’ve spent most of my life the last 23 years working with the Electronic Frontier Foundation on these issues of tech policy that are really long way off before they’re urgent. But you can see on the horizon that things are going to be very bad if we don’t act now and when they’re that far off, everything seems very abstract and cold and it’s kind of hard to get your head around why you should be worked up about it. There’s stuff in the here and now you got to pay attention to, and this is broadly the problem of activism in the 21st century. This is the problem of climate activism. Eventually everyone believes in climate change, but if you believe in climate change because your house is on fire, it’s kind of too late and upregulating the salience of things that are a long way away, very technical, very abstract.
It’s hard to do with just argument and you don’t want to wait until people are in the midst of it if for no other reason, then the difference between denialism and nihilism is paper thin. If we spend a decade arguing about whether anyone should be caring about the crashing population of rhinoceros, eventually there’s just going to be one of them left. And you’re definitely going to agree that this is now a problem. But at that point you might say, well, why don’t we find out what he tastes like? Right? Because there’s only one left. So getting people to care about this stuff early on, it’s very hard. And one of the things that science fiction is really good at is interrogating not just what a gadget might do, but who it might do it for and who it might do it to. The difference between a thing in your car that warns you if you’re drifting out of your lane and a thing in your car that rats you out to your insurance company because you’re drifted out of your lane is not the technology, right? It’s the social arrangements that go around it. And we are at the tail end of 40 years of technocratic neoliberalism that is really grounded in Margaret Thatcher’s idea that there is no alternative, which is really a way of saying don’t try and think of alternatives. That there’s only one way. This could be someone came down off a mount with two stone tablets and said, Larry Sergei thou shalt start mining thine log files for actionable market intelligence.
These are not decisions that had to be made in one way, and they’re not decisions that we can’t unmake and remake in new ways. And one of the things that fiction does is let you explore a kind of emotional fly through of a virtual rendering of a better world or a worse one, both of which can inspire you to do more or to take action now to upregulate the salience of things that are a long way away.
Maximillian Alvarez:
So you’re saying fiction is the shortest distance between the fuck around and find out stages of history?
Corey Doctorow:
Well, look, you need both. You don’t want to just build castles in the sky. You need a grounded theoretical basis. And the other thing about science fiction that I think is amazing is it’s the literature where we welcome exposition and exposition gets a bum rap. They’re like, oh, exposition is always bad show don’t tell. The reason we like showing and not telling is because it’s fiction. Writing on the easy level showing intrinsically is dramatic in a way that telling is not so it’s much harder to make it interesting. But you get 6,000 words of Neil Stevenson explaining how to eat a bowl of Captain Crunch cereal in Komi Con. I would read 20,000 words of that. I would tune into a weekly radio broadcast about it. So good at exposition. And so science fiction can integrate some of that theory, but you also need the theory part. This is a radical bookstore. It has an amazing comic book section. It’s also got a lot of theory.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Well, let’s talk about picks and shovels. Tell us a bit about where this book specifically a Martin Inch novel came from and give us I guess a
Corey Doctorow:
Quick
Maximillian Alvarez:
Overview
Corey Doctorow:
Of it. So I write, when I’m anxious, it makes the world go away. I sort of disappear into the world of the mind. And so I’ve been doing a lot of writing during lockdown. I wrote nine books. I live in Southern California, so I spent all of lockdown in a hammock in my backyard writing. And one of them was this book, red Team Blues and Red Team Blues had a very weird conceit. I somehow came up with the idea of writing the final volume in a long running series without the tedious business of the series. And I thought there’d be a kind of exciting energy that kind of last day of summer camp, final episode, mash kind of feeling of getting to the finale of a long running series without having to do all that other work. And I didn’t know if it would work or not, but I sent it to my editor who’s a really lovely fellow, but not the world’s most reliable email correspondent.
And I hunkered down to spend a couple months doing other stuff waiting to hear from him. But the next morning there was an email in my inbox, just three lines, that was a fucking ride. Whoa. And he bought two more, which is great, except that Red Team Blues is the final adventure of a 67-year-old forensic accountant who spent 40 years in Silicon Valley unwinding every weird, terrible finance scam that tech bros could think of over the whole period of the PC revolution and beyond. And he has earned his retirement by the end of Red Team Blues, he gets called out for a one last job and now it’s time for him to sail off into the sunset. And I didn’t want to bring him out of retirement. I mean, there is some precedent, right? Conan Doyle gave us back, Sherlock Holmes brought him back over Ricken Bch Falls.
But that was because Queen Victoria offered him a knighthood if he’d do it. And my editor at the time was a vice president of the McMillan company that carries a lot of power, but you don’t get to night people. So I decided I would tell the story out of order and that you don’t really lose any real dramatic tension if you know that there’s something that happens chronologically later, which means that the character must be alive. Broadly speaking, you know that about every mystery or crime thriller series that you read. But by telling it at a sequence, I get a bunch of plot stuff for free. I don’t have to worry about continuity because I’m not foreshadowing. I’m back shadowing, right? Anytime. Two things don’t line up, I can just interpose an intermediary event in which they’re resolved. It turns out that when you’re doing this, the more stuff you pull out of your ass and make up and then later on figure out how to work out the more of a premeditated motherfucker you seem to be and people get really impressed, it’s great.
It’s a great cheap writing trick. So this book Picks and Shovels, it’s Marty, he’s First Adventure. It starts with him as a classic MIT screw up. He’s in the computer science program in the early eighties and he is so busy programming computers that he’s flunking out of computer science. And so he ends up becoming a CPA, not because he’s particularly interested in accounting, but because the community college CPA program now has a lab full of Apple, two pluses, and he really wants to go play with those. So after getting his ticket, he and his genius hacker roommate moved to Silicon Valley at the height of the era of the weird PC because when PC started, they were weird. No one knew what they were for, who was supposed to sell ’em, who was supposed to buy ’em, how you were supposed to use them, what shape they were supposed to be.
I grew up in Ontario, as you heard, I’m a Canadian. We’re like serial killers. We’re everywhere. We look just like everyone else. And the Ministry of Education in Ontario had its own computer that booted three different operating systems, a logo prompt, and it was in a giant piece of injection molded plastic with a cassette drive and a huge track ball like a Centipede game at the arcade. It was a very weird pc. Marty Hench ends up working with some very weird PCs. There’s a weird PC company called Fidelity Computing. The setup sounds like a joke. It’s a Mormon bishop, a Catholic priest and an orthodox rabbi who started a computer company. But the joke is it’s a pyramid scheme and they use parishioners to predate upon one another, extract money from each other and hook them into these computers that are meant to drain their wallets over long timescales because they’ve been gimmick so you can’t get your data off of them.
The printers have been Reese Sprocketed, so they’ve got slightly wider tractor feeds, so you have to buy special paper that costs five times as much. They’ve done the same thing with the floppy drives. And this is making the millions and three women who work for them have become so disenchanted that they’ve decided to repent of their sins and rescue all of the parishioners. They have sucked into this pyramid scheme with a rival computing company. So these three women, a nun who’s left her order and become a Marxist involved with liberation theology, queer, Orthodox women whose family’s kicked her out, and a Mormon woman who’s left the faith overall position to the Equal Rights Amendment starts a company called Computing Freedom, whose goal is to make interoperable components floppy drives that work with their floppies floppies that work with their floppy drives, printers that work with their paper, paper that works with their printer printers that you can plug into their computers, computers that you can plug into their printers, all of the things you need to escape the lock-in of these devices and see in computers the liberatory potential that I think so many people saw as opposed to the control and extraction potential that unfortunately so many people also saw.
And as Marty falls in with them, they discover that the kind of people who are not above making millions of dollars stealing from people who trust them because they’re faith leaders are also not above spectacular acts of violence to keep the Griff going. And so what starts as a commercial dispute becomes a shooting war. And that’s the book.
Maximillian Alvarez:
So like you said, there’s like there’s a punchline kind of set up where a Mormon bishop, a Catholic priest and an orthodox rabbi walk into a bar and start a PC company. And I was thinking about that a lot when I was staring for a long while before I even got to the book at just the copyright page where it says this is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. And I wanted to ask in the context of that disclaimer, where the question of faith and the exploitation of faith in this era, what it’s speaking to that is either a creation of your mind or a real situation that you’re addressing fictitiously.
Corey Doctorow:
So remember that the early 1980s were a revolutionary moment or maybe a counter-revolutionary moment. It’s the moment in which all of the things that we’re worried about today started. So it’s the first election that evangelicals came into the electorate in large numbers because Reagan brokered a deal with Jerry Falwell to get evangelicals into the Republican coalition. So this is the beginning of political activism among religion. It is also the moment at which pyramid schemes are taking off, especially within religions. I tell the story in the book, but there’s a company called Amway. Amway is one of the most toxic of the pyramid schemes we’ve ever had. It was started by Rich DeVos, who’s Betsy and his partner Jay Van Andel, who ran the US Chamber of Commerce and was the most powerful business lobbyist in the world. And ironically, Richard Nixon had had enough of their shit and was getting ready to shut them down through the Federal Trade Commission when he got fenestrated.
And Jerry Ford, who’d been their congressman, came in and ordered the FTC to lay off on them. And the FTC crafted a rule, the Amway rule that basically says so long as your pyramid scheme operates like Amway did, it’s legal. So anyone from your high school class who’s found you on Facebook and tried to sell you essential oils or tights, they’re just doing Amway for tights or essential oils. The Amway has become the template and the reason that Amway was so successful, is it married pyramid selling to religion and religion, especially religions that are high demand or that have a high degree of a demand for fertility where you’re expected to have large families. These are institutions that require a lot of social capital for the parishioners to survive, right? If you’re in a religion where you’re expected to have 10 kids and you’re also supposed to tithe 10% of your income to the church, you are really reliant on other people to help take care of your family and vice versa.
And so they live on social capital and a pyramid scheme is a way for weaponizing social capital, extracting it, vaporizing it, turning it into a small amount of one-time cash, and then moving that up to the top of the pyramid and leaving nothing behind. I just heard a really good interview on the Know Your Enemy podcast where they talked about how pyramid selling, it’s like the bizarre world version of union organizing because pyramid selling is organized around finding the charismatic leaders within a community who other people rely on teaching them how to have a structured conversation that brings other people into what they’re doing, except this is where it goes off the rails because a union organizing conversation is about building solidarity, whereas a pyramid selling conversation is about vaporizing it. And so this crossover of technology, which is always a fertile ground for ripping people off because things people don’t understand are easy to bamboozle them with. People think a pile of shit sufficiently large always has a pony underneath it.
And it has this nexus with religion, the takeoff of pyramid schemes and this moment of Reagan omic kind of transformation of the country. And you put all those things together, you get a really rich soil that you can grow quite a story out of. And I didn’t know that it would be echoing this moment of counter-revolution that we’re in now that they would coincide so tightly. But really this is also a book about people living through things like the AIDS crisis where it’s an existential crisis because their government has decided that not only they don’t care whether they live or die, the government’s decided they want them dead.
Maximillian Alvarez:
I want to return in the end before we go to q and a to that, the echoes of our current moment thing. But before we get there, my wife Meg, who’s a worker owner here at Red, Emma’s is from Michigan, and so she has to hear me complain about this more than anybody. Every time we’re driving back to Michigan and we’re on the goddamn toll roads throughout Pennsylvania and Ohio, I get so irrationally angry at the existence and concept of toll roads every time we’re passing through. Like this is so stupid, not just the existence of ’em, but you see the sort of systems and behaviors that coalesce and harden around a stupid idea and become just our accepted reality. And in so many ways, that’s the relationship that we have to tech. And you are returning us to a time in this novel, like you said, the era of the weird pc, the 1980s where so much of what we accept now as kind of settled concrete fact was not settled at all. So why return to that time and what is the world that you explore in this novel?
Corey Doctorow:
Yeah, so it was a very contingent moment, right? Not only did no one know what the PC was for, there was a lot of argument about what the PC could be for notoriously, there’s this moment where Bill Gates publishes an open letter in all the computer hobbyist magazines called a Letter to the Computer Hobbyists in which he says, look, I know that since the dawn of the first computer hobbyists and computer science, as we understand it, the way that we wrote programs is the way we do science. You publish the program, other people improve it, they read it, they understand it, they modify it, they use it themselves. However, history stops. Now, I and my buddy have copied a program that was progress. We made our own basic compiler or basic interpreter for A-P-D-P-I think it was. So we copied someone else’s idea that was a legitimate act of copying.
You must not copy our program when you do that, that’s piracy. And from now on, nobody copies anyone. All the copying is done. And it’s this moment where you see this division in the two cultures between people who think of it as a scientific enterprise, which means that it has this degree of peer review, information sharing, building standing on the shoulders of others, and this idea of it being an extractive industry and one where it’s like we’ve planted all the corn we need, now we can eat the seed corn, right? We’ve got all the cool ideas that we needed to make by sharing ideas. Now it’s time to just have whoever was holding onto the idea when the music stopped, be the person in charge of that idea forever and ever. And we’re still living through that. We’re living through evermore extreme versions of it.
And actually one of the things I’m very interested in at this moment, and one of the echoes of the moment that this book is set in is that we are at a moment of great upheaval a crisis. And Milton Friedman said in times of crisis, ideas moved from the periphery to the center. He was a terrible person, but he was right about that. His weird ideas about dismantling the new deal and turning us all into forelock tugging plebs who attended our social betters and cleaned their toilets are finally bearing fruit now. And for decades, people thought those were terrible ideas, but he was like, when the oil crisis comes, when whatever crisis it is comes, we’ll be able to do this. Well right now, Trump is our oil crisis. He’s about to make everything in the world 25% more expensive or more with a series of tariffs.
And when those hit all the countries in the world that have signed up to not allow people to jailbreak, modify, copy, and improve the big tech products who signed up to make sure that every time a Canadian software author makes an app and sells it to a Canadian software user, the dollar the Canadian software user pays makes a round trip through Cupertino and comes back 30 cents lighter. All those things that other countries have signed up to do, we can throw them out the window because we signed up to do them on the condition that we get free trade. So we can be performatively angry at Elon Musk about the Nazi salutes. He kind of likes that he’s into the attention, but if it was legal everywhere in the world to jailbreak Teslas and get all the subscription content, all the stuff that you have to pay every month for free, and that took his absurd valuation to earnings ratio down to something much more realistic and prompted a margin call on all the debt that he’s floated to buy Twitter and so on, that’s going to really kick that guy in the dongle. So I really think that we are at this moment where some of the things we wanted to do back then that were kind of taken as red back then that we exterminated over 40 years, that they’ve never really gone away. They’ve been lurking in the background all along. And I think, I’m not saying Trump is good or that this is a good thing that Trump is in office, but I am saying when life gives you stars, you make sars Barilla, and this is our chance.
Maximillian Alvarez:
I’m thinking about what you said about the timeline of the narrative, and you sort of know how we’re all going to end if you zoom out long enough. And in so many ways, there’s that kind of tragic sense that you get reading this novel and feeling that unsettledness of the eighties knowing that the endpoint is Aaron Swartz and the state’s attack on him. The endpoint is people like Eric Lundgren, who was one of the first people I ever reported on for the Baffler who printed the very free discs that come with every PC to let you just reboot the system if it fails. He wanted to print those and give ’em to as many people as he could, so they knew how to do it. And Microsoft charged him with basically manufacturing new OS systems and he went to prisons. So there’s that tragic sense of fatalism knowing where that memo from Bill Gates, where it ended up. And so I guess I wanted to ask how we really got from this open weird potential to such a cold system of capture.
Corey Doctorow:
Yeah, the five giant websites filled with screenshots, the text from the other four. I think that there’s a revisionist history of that moment that says there were people who were really excited about computers, but hopelessly naive. They thought if we gave everyone a computer, everything would be fine. Those techno optimists are how we got here. I don’t think that’s true. I don’t recognize that account. When I think back to those moments and those people, for example, nobody founds or devotes their life to the Electronic Frontier Foundation, everything is going to be fine. You have to, on the one hand, be very alive to the liberatory potential of computing, but also very concerned about what happens if things go wrong. It’s both. It’s not just these can be misused, but these can be used as well. And I think that if there was something we missed, and I do think we missed it, it was that competition law antitrust was dying as the computer was taking off.
Literally, Reagan went on the campaign trail when the Apple two plus went on sale. And we had this decades of tech consolidation, not by making better things, but by buying companies that made better things, making those things worse, but also capturing regulators so that people can’t escape. Making it illegal to reverse engineer and modify things so that you can get away from them. So you look at a company like Google, right? 25 years ago, Google made a really amazing search engine. I don’t want to downplay that. It was magic. You could ask Js questions all day long and you’d never get an answer nearly as good as the answer you would get out of Google. But in the years since the quarter century, since when Google has grown to a $3 trillion market cap company, it has had, depending on how you count between zero and one commercial successes of things that it made on its own.
And everything that it does that’s successful is something it bought from someone else. It made a video service, it sucked Google video, it’s gone. They bought someone else’s video service, YouTube, they bought their mobile stack, they bought their ad tech stack server management docs, collaboration maps, GPS, everything except the Hotmail clone is something that they bought from someone else. They’re not Willy Wonka’s Idea Factory, right? They’re just like Rich Uncle Penny bags. They just go around. They buy everyone else’s ideas up and kind of wall them off and lock you in with them. And I think we missed that that was going on and we missed it because there was a kind of echo of the antitrust enforcement that kind of carried forward through those years. So like 1982, which is more or less where the action this story starts, Ronald Reagan decides that he is going to go ahead and break up at and t.
At and t had been under antitrust investigation for 69 years at that point. He led IBM off the hook. IBM had been through 12 years of antitrust investigation at that point. Every year they spent more on outside counsel to fight the US government than all the lawyers in the DOJ antitrust division cost the US government. They outspent America for 12 consecutive years. They called it Antitrusts, Vietnam. And in the end, they did get off the hook, right? Reagan dropped the case against them, but they were also like, well, obviously we don’t want to get in trouble again. So when we build the pc, we’re going to get someone else to make the operating system. That’s where we get Bill Gates. We we’re going to make it out of commodity components so anyone can make a pc. And Tom Jennings, who has a cameo in this book, he is, in addition to being a really important person in the history of computer science, is also a really important gay rights activist and published a seminal zine called Core.
And there’s a scene in the book where he’s quietly selling issues of core in the corner of a dead Kennedy show. Tom went into a clean room and reverse engineered the PC rom for Phoenix, and that’s where we got Dell Gateway Compact and so on. So you get this moment of incredible eff fluorescence where there’s BBSs everywhere because at t is not crushing modems. Everyone’s making a PC like digital equipment company, which is this titan of computing keels over and gets bought with money down the back of the sofa cushions by compact, which is a company that had barely existed 10 minutes before. Things are really dynamic back then. Everything is changing. And I think that’s what we missed was that actually we weren’t going to do the antitrust work that would keep things dynamic after that. That was the last time we were going to do it.
We try with Bill Gates, and it did get us somewhere, right? With the Microsoft antitrust investigation. Conviction went very well. And then GW Bush gets in and he drops the investigation, but it was, it was this amazing time and it let Google exist, right? Microsoft didn’t do to Google what they’d done to Netscape. And so we got this incredible new kind internet company. Things were really dynamic. And what we missed was that the dynamism was being sapped out of the system, that these companies were aspiring to become monopolists, and the people who would’ve stepped in to prevent them were no longer on the job that we were operating on. The presumption that monopolies are intrinsically efficient, that if you see a monopoly in the wild, it means it’s doing something good. And it would be incredibly ironic to use public money to destroy something that everybody loves.
And so that’s how we get to this moment, and it’s how we end up with widespread regulatory capture. Because a hundred companies in the sector, they can’t agree on what they want their regulators to do. They can’t even agree on where to have their annual meeting. This is how tech got its ass kicked by entertainment. During the Napster Wars, the Napster companies, the entertainment companies, they were much smaller than tech and aggregate, but there were seven of them. They were all like godparents to each other’s children. They played on the same little league. Kids played on the same little league team. They were executors of each other’s estates. They were in the same polys, and they were able to run a very tight game around 200 tech companies that made up the sector then who were a rabble and who could be divided and conquered.
And so when the sector concentrates like this, it gets its way. And that I think was the great blind spot that we had that we would end up in this moment. Now where monopolies are the norm, regulatory capture is the norm. Markets don’t discipline companies because they don’t really have competitors. Governments don’t discipline companies because they have captured their regulators. Workers no longer have power. I mean, tech workers had power for decades. They were in such short supply. And if your boss asked you to screw up the thing, you’d missed your mother’s funeral to ship on time, you’d say, fuck off and go get a job across the street with someone who paid more. But 260,000 tech layoffs in 2023, 150,000 in 20, 24 tens of thousands this year. Facebook just announced a 5% across the board headcount reduction. And they’re doubling executive bonuses. That’s a good one. Tech workers aren’t telling their bosses to fuck off anymore. And so all the things that stopped tech from turning into just another industry, that dynamism, that meant that if they made us angry at them, we could do something about it. We could switch, we could go somewhere else. All that stuff is vaporized by the collapse of anti-monopoly enforcement and it led the pack. But we now see that in every sector.
Maximillian Alvarez:
And I want to just tease that out a little more from the consumer side,
Corey Doctorow:
Right?
Maximillian Alvarez:
I mean, it felt like all of us have lived through the timeline where it felt like we could tell tech to fuck off and say, I’m going to go buy a Blackberry instead of this. They’re like, I’m going to go buy this MP three player instead of an iPod. Now it feels like we’re living in the period where tech’s telling us to fuck off and accept whatever they give us. And I think that speaks to the delayed reaction from us as consumers to what was happening, what you’ve just described. And our blindness to that was in part because it felt like as consumers tech was still giving us what we wanted. That dynamic period you talked about, and the companies and products and personalities that emerged from that all fed into this deep set, techno modernist, conceit that better technologies are going to win out in the market and become dominant in our lives because they are better, more efficient, the people making them are smarter, so on and so forth. So I wanted to ask, how has Silicon Valley as a real world entity become what it is because of that deep set cultural conceit that we have about it, but also how does its trajectory over the past 40 years reveal the falseness of that conceit?
Corey Doctorow:
Well, I mean, the reason that it seems so plausible is that it was true for a time, right? In the same way that if you show me a 10 foot wall, I’ll show you an 11 foot tall ladder. If you show me a printer where the ink costs 30% over margin, I’ll show you a company willing to sell you ink at 15% over margin. But the expansion of laws that made it illegal to do that, reverse engineering, that would break the digital lock that stopped you from using Third Party Inc. Or going to a third party mechanic or exporting your data, or when Facebook kicked off, it had a superior product to MySpace. It was like MySpace except they promised they would never spy on you. I don’t know if you remember this, and their pitch to people was Come to Facebook, we promise we’ll never spy on you.
But the problem was that everyone who was already using MySpace had a bunch of friends there. And you know what it’s like you love your friends. They’re great people, but they’re a giant pain in the ass. And you cannot get the six people in your group chat to agree on what board game you’re going to play this weekend. Much less get 200 people that you’re connected to on Facebook to agree to leave when some of them are there, because that’s where the people have the same rare disease as them are hanging out. And some of them are there because that’s where they plan the carpool for Little League and some of them there because that’s where their customers are or their performers, and that’s where their audience is. Or they’ve moved from another country and that’s how they stay in touch with their family. It’s really hard to get those people to go Facebook cut through that Gordy and Knot, they gave people a scraper, a bot.
You gave that bot your MySpace login and password. It would pretend to be you at MySpace several times a day, grab all the messages waiting for you, put them in your Facebook inbox, you could reply to them in and push ’em back out again. If you did that to Facebook today, they would nuke you until you glowed, right? You’d have violated Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. You’d be a tortious interferer with contract. You’d have violated their trademarks, their copyrights, their patents. I mean the rubble would be bouncing by the time the bomb stopped. And so this is how you end up in a situation where the same callow asshole Mark Zuckerberg can maltreat you much more without paying any penalty. And so he does. And printer ink is my favorite example of this because it’s just so visceral.
HP really invented this. And so it’s against the lottery fill a printer cartridge or to use a third party ink cartridge, not because those things have ever been prohibited by Congress, but because all the printers are designed to detect whether you’ve refilled your cartridge or used a third party cartridge and modifying the printer, bypassing the access control to modify the printer is illegal under Section 1201 of the DMCA $500,000 fine and a five-year prison sentence for trafficking and a device to remove that. And so HP has just been raising the price of ink along with other members of the cartel. Ink is now the most expensive fluid you can buy as a civilian without a special permit. It runs over $10,000 a gallon. You print your grocery lists with colored water that costs more than the semen of a Kentucky Derby winner.
This is how we get to this moment. These companies that are not run by more evil or wicked people, but are just less constrained, are able to act on the impulses that they have to exploit you, rip you off, do bad things because no one tells them no. I mean, we all know people who have gotten in a position of authority where no one could tell them no and abuse it. We are living through that politically right now. That is true all the way through movements, societies, and economies. When you take away the discipline and the responsibility and accountability to other people, then even benevolent people get crazy ideas and do bad things. And people who are malevolent, but we’re getting something done that we all enjoyed then can have their craziness fly mean, and it’s bad for them too, right? This is how you get Steve Jobs going. Well, I’m going to treat my cancer with juice cleanses, right? If no one can tell you no, you’re being an idiot, you have to do it differently. Everything goes wrong.
Maximillian Alvarez:
So we got about 10 minutes, and I want to make sure that we end before we go to q and a with the passage bringing us back to the book and reading a passage there. But while we’re on the subject of malevolent evil people and what they do when no one tells them no, I wanted to ask since we’ve got you here and we’re all freaking out for the same reasons how we interpret this, Elon Musk is doing to the federal government what he did to Twitter, and we were all laughing about a year ago with the same logic of laying off thousands of federal workers. I’ve interviewed some of them at The Real News, it’s heartbreaking. And talking about replacing ’em with ai. So how do we make sense of this and how do we make sure, where is this going to go if no one tells them no if we don’t stop them?
Corey Doctorow:
Well, the joke about the guy who goes to the therapist and he says, I’m really sad and I just can’t seem to shake it. And the therapist says, well, you’ve got good news. The great clown Pag Lichi is in town. You should go see him tonight. Everybody who sees Pachi comes away with a smile on his face and the patient says, but Doctor, I am pag. I sort of feel this way when people ask me about Elon Musk. I mean, look, I am in the same chaos and demoralizing stuff as you. And there is a saying from Eastern Canada, if you wanted to get there, I wouldn’t start from here. That saying gets more true every day. And as an activist, I try to focus on the places where I think we can get a lot of leverage and change stuff, not because I can see how we get from there to solving all of our problems, but I feel like the difference between optimism and pessimism or just the fatalistic belief that things will get better or worse irrespective of what we do that hope is this idea.
If we change things somewhat, if we ascend the gradient towards the world, we want to live in that. From that new vantage point, we’ll be able to see new ways to climb further and further up that gradient. And so that’s what I’m looking for. I’m looking for what we can do right now that improves the lie of the land so that maybe we can from there, see something else that we can do in something else. And right now, I think it’s going against the International Order of Trade. I really do think this is our moment for this. I especially think that this is the case because you can easily see how countries could be stampeded into it. So my friend Carolina Botero just wrote a couple of editorials in the big Columbian Daily about why Columbia should do this, should jettison all of its IP obligations under its trade agreements with the United States.
And I’ve been talking a lot to Canadians. I was just there giving a lecture and talking to policymakers in Canada when I told ’em this. They were like, oh, well, if Columbia does it first, we might not be able to make as much money as we would if we were the first ones off. The Mark Mexico’s in the same boat. Mexico’s facing the same 25% tariff as Canada. There are so many places that are deliberately allowing Americans to rip off their own people and holding back their own domestic tech sector that might make locally appropriate more resilient technology by adapting technology themselves that I really feel like this is our oil crisis. This is where we can get something done. I don’t know where it ends with Musk. I mean, one of the things that is crazy about this moment and for the last 10 years is that we live in a kind of actuarial nightmare of a political system because everyone is so old. We are just a couple of blood clots away from majorities flipping in both houses.
And it’s funny, but it’s totally true. It’s weird that a country that organizes a designated survivor in a bunker during the State of the Union, so there can be some continuity, can’t figure out how to have a talent pipeline that has anyone in it that’s not, doesn’t have a 13% chance of dying of natural causes in the next year. And so things are really unstable in lots of ways. And I could easily see Elon Musk just ODing on ketamine. We are just in this very weird moment where things could go very differently at any moment. And so what I’m bearing down on what I’m putting my chips on right now is figuring out how to get countries around the world to start thinking about what it would mean to raid the margins of large American companies as a retaliatory measure for tariffs instead of retaliatory tariffs, which just makes things more expensive in your own country, which if there’s one thing we learned from the last four years in every country around the world, if you are in office when things become more expensive, you will not be in office come the next election.
And so this is a moment where you can do something that will actually make everything cheaper for the people in your country. And here in America, I think this is going to bleed in. There’s no way to stop a Canadian company that makes a tool like a software tool that diagnoses cars that you plug into a laptop with a USB port that you plug into the car from selling that to American mechanics. So long as there’s payment processing and an internet connection, they’ll buy it. And the thing is that if you destroy the margins, if you globally zero out the margins of the most profitable companies in the s and p 500 in their most profitable lines of industry, and these are the firms that are really at the core of the corruption of our political process, I think this changes facts on the ground in America for the better as well.
And so this is where I’m not saying this is where everyone else should be, and I am freely admit that I’m a crank with one idea, and this is my idea and I’m going to work on it, but I am more excited about this than I’ve been in a long time because I really can see a way of doing this. I used to be a UN rep, right? I’ve been in treating negotiations. You ask how you carry on and persevere when it’s hopeless. It was hopeless then, right? We were just there because you couldn’t let this stuff happen without a fight. And every now and again, we won for weird reasons, which we just happened to be in the right place at the right time, and we could give things a push when they were already unstable, but mostly we lost. But after 25 years of doing it, I’m like, oh wait.
There’s a lot of groundwork we built in those years, and there’s a lot of constituencies that we know how to reach, and there’s a lot of people who are more worked up about this stuff than they were a long time ago. And maybe this is the moment where we can actually make a huge durable change. One of the things that I think is so about what Musk is doing is that it’s so hard to rebuild the institution after it’s gutted. But one of the things that I’m very excited about is that it will be so hard to rebuild these institutions if we can gut them. So I feel like Steve Bannon calling himself a Leninist. I’m a leftist Freedman Knight
Maximillian Alvarez:
As alumni of the University of Chicago. I don’t know what to do with that, but we love our crank, Corey. I know that much, and I really love and appreciate what you said earlier. I don’t know what’s going to happen in the next year, two years, four or five 50 either, but I know where we’re headed. If we do nothing, I don’t know what’s going to happen because that side of the story has not yet been authored by us. And I want to kind of return us to that question of authorship. I want to return us back to the question of this text and finish with the text, because I think one of the things that gave me was at least more of a understanding that things are not as settled as they seem. The fates of everything is not as assured as they want us to believe.
Corey Doctorow:
Actually, you know what? I summarized the bit that I was going to read, so I think I should yield my time for q and a. Cool. Let’s not do the reading.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Let’s just do that. We’ll yield, go read the book. It’s a really great book. Let’s give it up to Corey Docto, everybody. Thank you.
This content originally appeared on The Real News Network and was authored by Maximillian Alvarez.
This post was originally published on Radio Free.
