Tech Rights & The Future of Privacy with Cory Doctorow - Synthetic Minds Podcast EP09

Welcome to another engaging episode of Synthetic Mind, the podcast where the boundaries between science fiction and technological reality blur, offering insights that help organizations navigate the future. Here we delve into imaginative and insightful visions from science fiction authors, revealing how their explorations of future technologies and societal shifts can inform and guide us in future the the present. As your host, Dr. Mark Van Remenam, accompanied by my digital twin, I invite you to explore with us the intricate dance between the natural and the artificial, to question what it means to be human in a world brimming with technological marvels. Our discussions aim to harness the power of future thinking, a crucial skill set in these rapidly changing times, drawing lessons from those who dare to dream about what lies ahead. Today we are honored to welcome Cory Doctorow, a pivotal figure in the world of speculative fiction and digital rights activism. Cory's work as a best selling author, journalist and advocate challenges us to reconsider our relationship with technology and privacy. His influential books such as Little Brother and Radicalized are lauded for their insightful critique of surveillance and authoritarianism. His latest book, the Bezel, explores the intricate web of financial corruption, corruption and technological exploitation, providing a seething rebuke of the privatized prison system and delving into the arcane financial chicanery involved in the 2008 financial crash. Don't forget to like and subscribe to be notified when future episodes become available.

Hello Corey, Great to have you on the show.

Oh, it's my pleasure. Thank you for having me on.

Perfect. Can you share a little bit before we dive in into how science fiction writers can help organizations? Can you share a little bit about your background and one or two of the two books that you've written that you're most proud of?

Sure. Well, I am a science fiction novelist and activist. I've spent the past quarter of a century working with a nonprofit called the Electronic Frontier Foundation. We work on digital human rights issues. I have been a UN delegate. I've worked in many standards development organizations, lobbied the Parliament in Westminster and in the Brussels and here in D.C. as well. I was the European Director for some years. I have written dozens of books. I'm many times New York Times bestseller. My works have been translated into many languages and been bestsellers abroad. I also am one of the early pioneering bloggers. I co owned and co founded a website called Boing Boing that was and remains one of the most widely read blogs. I wrote that almost daily for 20 years. I wrote about 60,000 posts. I left in 2020 and these days I have a newsletter called pluralistic@pluralistic.net that sort of synthesizes a lot of the things that really that blog was taking notes on for all those years.

Great. Fantastic. And so if you've written dozens of books, are there one or two that you're most proud of?

Yeah, it's like choosing which of your kids you like the best. You know, the last couple of books I had out, one is a book called the Bezel, which is a novel starring a recurring character of mine, Martin Hench, who's a forensic accountant who unwinds Silicon Valley finance scams. His books are set in all different time periods, from the 1980s to the 2000s. And in the Bezel, he's mostly. It's set during the. The period where Yahoo was buying Every promising Web 2.0 company and then destroying it with internal politics and bad management and, you know, before they moved on to Or. Or before their. Sorry, before their financier Masayoshi Son, who's the principal behind SoftBank, took the money that he'd been funneling to them to. To do all these acquisitions, which came from the Saudi royal family and. And started funneling it to even worse grifters like the people who started Uber and WeWork and so on. Basically, Yahoo prefigured a lot of the finance scams that are characteristic of tech today. And it's a novel about prison tech. It's a novel about the increasing use of technology in prisons to replace letters and visits, phone calls, parcels, and where the companies that provide these services use their literal captive audience to price gouge some of the poorest and most vulnerable people on earth. And the story is a revenge thriller. It's about Martin Hench's good friend ending up serving a life sentence in a California penitentiary and then being subjected to this and making it his business to unwind it, even as lethal violence ensues. The other book that I had out recently came from Versor, and it's called the Internet how to Seize the Means of Computation. I call it a big Tech Disassembly Manual. It's a book that talks about the technological characteristics that led to the monopolization of the Internet and the policy choices that supported those technological characteristics. And it charts a course for systemic changes that can give us back a kind of competitive, open, dynamic Internet. Not one that looks like what Tom Eastman calls five giant websites filled with screenshots of text from the other four. Both of those books are part of a collection of books I wrote during lockdown. So I cope with anxiety and stress by working. And so during lockdown, I wrote nine books. Five of them are out as we record this, four more out in the coming years. And I've just taken a contract to write a 10th book that I just hit the 10,000 word mark on and I should be done with by late autumn.

Wow, that's truly impressive. I've written five books, so there's nowhere near what you have done. And writing a book is hard work, so could have to you.

Well, it's apparently less hard work than looking too hard at what's going on in the world around you when things are really terrible. So it's quite a. Quite a good distraction. When life gives you sars, you make sarsaparilla.

I can't imagine. So if I understand it correctly, so you mentioned already in your background, digital human rights is important to you. Looking at big tech and how they are using technology to sort of, you know, control. Control societies is a big topic. Can you share a bit more? You know, you know, in the bezel you talk about the AI, Panopticon, sort of surveillance technology. Is everything related into. Into big technologies or is it more focused on also how we can use technology to do good or is it more to focus on how technology can do harm to society?

So maybe this is shading over into the role of science fiction and thinking about the future. So I'm very skeptical of people who claim that they have insights into the future. I know I don' any insights into the future, except to the extent that if you understand the present, you have some inkling because the present is sort of the standing wave where the past is becoming the future. So altering the characteristics of the present alters those characteristics of the future as well, changes the landscape. I'm much more interested in changing the future than I am in predicting or anticipating the future. If we can anticipate the future, there's no reason to get out of bed because what we do doesn't matter. So I'm far more interested in affecting the future. It's a very activist posture and I look at science fiction as being a foundationally. I'm going to use this term which may shock you, but I'll explain a foundationally Luddite literature. So the Luddites get a very bad rap, right? We think of Luddite as being a synonym for like a technophobe, someone who doesn't understand and fears technology irrationally. But the actual Luddites, you know, the textile workers of the Industrial Revolution, they were the most skilled technical workers in the world at the time to be a textile worker. At the time of the invention of the steam looms and other much more automated machine driven textile machines, you needed a seven year apprenticeship, right? This was like getting a master's degree in engineering at mit, Right? So these people were not afraid of technology. What they were upset about was not what the technology did, but who it was doing for and who it was doing it to. If you go back to the sales literature of the Industrial revolution, which is often a good way to find out not what was going on, but what people claimed was going on. Just as, you know today when you look at the sales literature for OpenAI, there's a lot of stuff that OpenAI can't do, but it like tells you an awful lot about why people are excited about it. So if you look at the sales literature, one of the phrases that will leap out at you is they were really interested in machines that were so easy a child could use them. And the reason that they wanted machines that were so easy that children could use them is because the orphanages of London were filled with Napoleonic war orphans who could be kidnapped to the industrial towns of the north and signed up for a decade of indenture where they would be beaten, starved, and then often maimed by these machines in order to produce textiles that were significantly lower quality than the textiles that had been made beforehand. There was a kind of vogue for a while of best selling books based on memoirs of survivors of the mills. One of them, a guy called Robert Blinko, wrote what was at the time, I think, the best selling book in English history, his own life story. Charles Dickens was so moved by it that he wrote Oliver Twist. Oliver Twist is fanfic about Luddites. And so the Luddites, they were like, we understand how these machines work. They kind of suck. And the reason you're bringing them in is not because they make better textiles, but because they let you fire us and replace us with work workers who can command us a lower share of the total income derived from their production. Right. And I think that there's some, like, very strong parallels to what's going on right now.

I can see them.

You know, you look at AI and the claims about AI being able to do your job, AI can't do our jobs, Right. Like you remember, there was this, there was this thing a few years ago where everyone was talking about, hey, how AI was coming for truck drivers. And truck drivers were the most common job in America. And so the most common form of labor in America was going to be replaced by AI and every single part of every single part of the story is wrong, right? So truck drivers, for one thing, that the Bureau of Labor Statistics category, the number for truck driver is just anyone who drives a commercial heavy goods vehicle, right? It's like the UPS person who delivers your parcels and it's the people who drive white fans and do your gardening and also people who drive long haul big rigs. And really what they were talking about was big rigs. Now the big rig, the share of the cost of operating a big rig that is represented by labor is extremely low. Quite notoriously, big rig drivers are among the most exploited workers in America. They have an incredibly high rate of suicide. You know, to a first approximation, like none of the cost of the goods that you have delivered by big rig are labor costs, right? They're just, they're just like a rounding errors against the other costs. So the savings will be quite minimal. But then here's the kicker, right? When people said, oh, they could automate big rigs, what they meant was we could create a dedicated lane on the highway for big rigs. We could have big rigs do a following algorithm where one follows the other in this dedicated lane and they maintain a constant distance all along. So what they meant is that they figured out a way to make a shitty, expensive train, right? This is not a labor crisis, but it was used as the basis to bootstrap enormous investment for the sector, which is also characteristic of the Luddites. And it led to what we have now, where you have things like studio bosses refusing to budge on using AI to write screenplays. Now, if you've read AI screenplays or if you looked at any of the startups that are making AI based video, first of all, most of it is a scam because they're actually having humans edited after the fact. These are not AI written screenplays. But second of all, they suck, right? In the same way that the stocking frame produced a stocking that would fall apart, that was not fit for purpose in any way, but that was much cheaper than the stuff that was produced by craft laborers in the guilds. The screenplays written by people you know, by robots are terrible and don't make anything anyone really wants. And what they're betting on is that if they have enough market power because the business is large enough, that they can use that market power to force you to buy a lower quality good. Just like Google is betting that they can draw down the quality of search. You know, last year they did 12,000 layoffs at the same time as they did an $80 billion stock buyback that would have paid those workers wages for 27 years. And the quality of Google search has just been in freefall. And they're like, well, what are you going to do? We're the search engine. Where are you going to go? Why do we have to make it good, right? We're too big to care, right? So this is, let me just conclude here about what a science fiction writer's job is. So the science fiction writer's job is, is to say that all of these things that industry presents as pre feast menus, right? If you want cheaper textiles, you got to admit that they're going to be worse and produced by child slaves. If you want search, you got to admit, you got to accept that that's going to involve commercial surveillance, right? If you want, you know, a robust entertainment industry, you have to accept that the screenplays are going to be garbage and that you're going to watch it because there's like literally nothing else, right? And really these are pre feast, these pre feast menus are a la carte menus. They're just claiming that they're pre feasts, right? That there's no way to change them. And so what the science fiction writer can do is they can go and they can say, imagine a different social arrangement for this technology, right? That's the most profound form of technological speculation. Not what if the gadget did something different, but what if the gadget did it to someone different, did it for someone different. And to take this inevitableist narrative whose real message is like, just don't even try to imagine anything different and to say actually like, we could not do it, we could do it differently, we could do it later. You know, like all of those are possibilities, right? We're not riding on rails. The future is up for grabs. So that's my view about science fiction future and technology.

But I think that that's the power of science fiction writers to sort of imagine the unimaginable because it's very difficult to imagine the future. Because we are linear thinkers, we not meant to think, we're not made to think exponentially. And I think as a science fiction writer, you have that capacity to imagine the unimaginable, the impossible. What can non science fiction writers learn from how you do that? How they can also imagine the impossible or unimaginable? Because I think it's very useful for individuals, for organizations, for societies to have that capacity and to be able to think more broadly and imagine a different future, one that is potentially, hopefully Better for humanity as a whole instead of just for a small group.

Well, I think that one of the characteristics of good, satisfying science fictional speculation is that it imagines a dynamic set of forces. So it's not that just one thing changes when the one thing changes, other things change in response. And, you know, we're kind of accustomed to this in finance. For example, you know, when people say, well, why didn't Elon Musk just sell off enough Tesla stock to buy Twitter? Why did he borrow all this money and create this overhang that he now has to like service his debt coupon every year? Well, it's because if you like sell $40 billion worth of Tesla stock, the liquidity of the stock goes way up and the share price goes way down, right? We know that these are dynamic systems, right? When we look at things like the material bill for electrification, right? So we go like, okay, we know how many cars we're going to need more or less. We know what the material bill is for an ev. We multiply one by the other and then check to see whether we have enough copper or, you know, lithium or whatever in the world. And we go, we don't. So something's going to give. And yeah, something will give me. We'll do transit, we'll do something different. But like, here's another thing. The second rev of the Rivian has over a mile less copper wire in it than the first rev. Because you know, when you are at the start of a technology cycle, there's a lot of room for optimization. One of the reasons that it's really interesting to watch renewables chase fossil fuels is that the incremental gains to be eked out by making efficiency improvements in fossil fuels have mostly been realized, right? It's like totally true that like a coal plant today is a lot more efficient than it was, you know, 100 years ago. But a hundred years from now, if we still have coal plants, Jesus Christ, let's hope we don't. But if we did, they'd be effectively the same. We're not going to get all the, all the low hanging fruit has been plucked and eaten, whereas like every year we're like halving the price of solar every seven years and it's getting faster, you know.

But is it then that also then going back to your previous comment, that with technology improving exponentially, which I believe is the case at the moment, that all those technologies that currently are not going to impact, are not impacting our jobs, like the video generators such as Sora or Cling whatsoever they Won't have an impact today, but they will have an impact tomorrow.

So this assumes some linear or even sublinear relationship between improvements in the efficiency of the predicting the next word and improvements in the quality of the screenplay. Right? So that's a. That cites a fact not in evidence. Right. But getting better predicting the next word does not make the screenplay better or, you know, create a general intelligence. That's like saying, you know, we've been, like, realizing these incredible gains in breeding horses to run faster and faster. In fact, this is the origin of Stanford. Leland Stanford founded Stanford to breed racehorses. And he applied scientific breeding, which later became an obsession with eugenics, which is a little unfortunate, but he applied scientific breeding to get, like, much faster racehorses. And it's like the idea that says, like, oh, look at the gains we've had in making the races racehorses faster. It's only a matter of time till one of these mares gives birth to a locomotive, right? The fact that we're getting incredible gains from AI doesn't mean that those incredible gains will pencil out to.

No, that I agree.

Some outcome.

Just like in 2017 we had the paper. Attention is all you need. Sort of really lifting up the field of AI it's very well possible that we're getting another massive breakthrough in the next five years that will lift up again, and then those screenplays might become much better, a lot better.

But again, but they're not related phenomena, right? So there's, like. There's nothing about stochastic parrots that. That says that they're an unskilled. It's not that they're an unskilled latent screenplay writer who, with additional skills will become good at being a screenplay writer. They are not screenplay writers. That's the thing, right? Making them better, not screenplay writers will not make them good screenplay writers, right? So. So these are. These are. You know, same with jokes. There's, like, a lot of stuff about how humor works where it involves surprises. And AI is about, like, statistical. Like the normal thing, right? The predictable thing. This is why AI jokes are really dumb. You know, they make. They make dad jokes look good. I say this as a dad, you know, like they're there. There's. There's real, you know, the. And if you look at the history of AI Winters, what you're describing is true, right? You have a. A thing, you know, Markov chains or something, right? And those things. That thing, first of all involves more compute power than is readily available to anyone but researchers at highly specialized institutions. And so it is not a thing that investors or the public can try on their own, right? And still, as computing gets cheaper, which it does, Moore's Law, right? More and more people can do it. Any component of the system that was compute constrained, that constraint falls away. So it seems to be getting better, right? It feels like what you're doing is making a major theoretical breakthrough. What you're actually doing is having the compute catch up with the theory. In general, when people come up with a cool thing to do with a computer, it's going to be at the leading edge of what the computer can do, because we've found most of the cool things that the computer can do given its current capacity. And so what feels like a series of theoretical breakthroughs is one theoretical breakthrough and a lot more compute power, right? And so what you then get is widespread access to the compute, right? Investors, end users, whatever can use it. They use it, and they're like, actually, this is not as like. Like, from a theoretical perspective, it's super interesting, right? If you're a practitioner, if you're like at the AI lab at MIT and you've been working on these problems for a long time and you get a breakthrough, it's really exciting. But, like, if you're a industrial user trying to go like, oh, yeah, I'm gonna fire some call center staff and replace them with Markov chains after the third lawsuit for having your Markov chain give someone terrible advice, and then you have to make good on it, it's like, well, this is no good. And then you get another AI winter, right? And like, the. One of the leading indicators of an AI winter is that actual people who call themselves AI researchers and did it before the stock bubble start describing what they do as not AI, right? They're like, oh, I'm not working on AI anymore. I'm working on this other thing, you know, convoluted deep learning or whatever. Like, I'm not doing AI because they don't want to be tainted with association with yet another imploding stock bubble. So, yeah, maybe you say five years. What is your basis for five years? Like, is there. You know, maybe it's 25 years. We've had AI winters that lasted 25 years. And is the next breakthrough, like, say we do. I mean, we will. We will have other theoretical breakthroughs in machine learning and automate decision automation, decision support, you know, scene recognition, whatever, right? All inference, all these things that we call AI. Well, more breakthroughs. We don't know what the next one's going to be or what it's going to be useful for. Maybe we'll get a thing that like. Yeah, maybe we get a thing that's like just way better at solving very specific kinds of statistical problems that have extremely limited applications, but is wildly better at it. Right. So some, some, you know, some, some aspect of decision support just gets way better. And like that'll have a profound impact on someone. Probably not you. Right. If it's really esoteric, it's probably not going to be you or me. Like statistically esoteric things affect small numbers of people.

So are you generally positive or negative about the future and the role that technology will play in it?

So you said positive. I'm going to read that as optimistic. And I'm going to answer the question I wish you'd asked, which is, are you optimistic? I don't believe in optimism. I think optimism and pessimism are both variations on fatalism, which is the belief that things will get worse or better no matter what we do. And I'm a great believer in hope, which is for me a kind of synonym for agency. You know, in computer science we sometimes, and I should say I am, I'm a fake computer scientist. I have an honorary doctorate in computer science from the Open University and I'm a visiting professor of cs. There's. And in computer science we often have these information landscapes that are too complicated for us to fully enumerate. Often they're dynamic, so the landscape is changing all the time and sometimes they're adversarial. Someone else doesn't want us to get where we're going. And so we do a thing called hill climbing. And the analogy in hill climbing is imagine that you're an ant at the base of a hill or in a landscape with hills, and you want to attain high ground. You have all these different legs and you pull your legs and you say, which of my legs is standing on the highest ground? And you take a step that way. And now you're standing, you're newly situated and you say again, which of my legs is standing on the highest ground? You take a step that way. So you never enumerate the terrain. You just have a heuristic that you do whatever you can to take you most steeply up the gradient towards the endpoint that you're trying to reach or the character of the endpoint that you're trying to reach. The endpoint I want to reach is one in which we have technological self determination and in which we can use that to make collective decisions that among other things, saves us from the climate emergency. That's the end point I want to reach. And so I look at the terrain we're in and I say, like, what in our technological terrain helps us do that and what stands in our way? And what can I do to build momentum for the things that are helping and to break the momentum of things that are hindering us. So for example, I think surveillance is really bad for helping us resolve this, to have technological self determination. And I think that group forming is really good for technological self determination. One of the things the Internet's really good at is finding other people who feel the same way as you. Deliberating and then taking action in the real world. You know, contrary to colleagues of mine in politics who, who fret about clicktivism and they say that, oh, you know, you, you click a petition on the Internet and you forget about going to a protest march or talking to your MP or your congressman or whatever. I think that's totally the wrong way of thinking about it. I think that clicktivism is the top of a giant funnel, right, where we just have lots of people who can take action without inconveniencing themselves or putting themselves to risk. And that we can seize that moment of self identification where they're saying like, we are, we are prepared maybe to do more and we can break off a section of those people and guide them into more engaged forms of, of activism. And if we fail at doing that, that's our fault, not their fault. It's not because they're lazy. It's because we had this like for the first time in history, this huge self identified group of people to organize and we fail to organize them. So, you know, don't blame them, don't blame the technology. So I think that's great, but I think surveillance cuts against it because I think surveillance stops you from being your true self. Right? You're worried that if you describe how you're really feeling that you might face social sanction and get in trouble for it. You might end up on a list. And so, you know, you hear people say this like, oh, my algorithm so screwed now. I was researching whatever. Writers do this all the time. You know, I go to a lot of science fiction conferences and appear on panels and people are like, oh, when I was researching that murder mystery, God, my algorithm was so screwed. All I got was like, how to, how to hide a body, right? I hope the cops never show up. People, people really worry about it and, and in much more meaningful ways, they worry about, about surveillance kind of against it. So what do we do? Well, like the Internet, or rather, the US Government has not passed a new federal privacy law since 1988. The last federal privacy law we got in the United States is something called the Video Privacy Protection act, and it prohibits video store clerks from telling newspapers what VHS cassettes you took home. Right. That is the last time we updated privacy law. But right now, there is a huge coalition of people who might brief for privacy law, but they don't know it. They think they're angry about something else. So if someone's angry because they think their Grandpa became a QAnon because of Facebook, someone else is angry because they think their kid became anorexic because of Instagram or. Or that millennials are quoting Osama bin laden because of TikTok. Or they're angry that Black Lives Matter demonstrators are being rounded up with Google location data, or that it's happening to January six rioters, or kids who cross state lines to go to abortion clinics. Or they're worried that people of color are being discriminated against in job interviews or rental applications or financial products because of surveillance dossiers that have been built on them. Or they're worried about defect porn. They all think they're worried about different stuff, racial discrimination or abortion rights or whatever. And they are. Right. But what they're also worried about and what could go a long way to resolving many of the concerns they have is a federal privacy law. So, you know, in the 1970s, before we had the term ecology, because it came into wide use in the 70s, right before it was in wide use, people didn't know they were on the same side. Some people thought they cared about owls, and some people thought they cared about the ozone layer. They didn't know they cared about the same thing because, like, charismatic nocturnal avians and the gaseous composition of the upper atmosphere are not the same thing, but ecology makes them one thing. And so, you know, as an activist, I look at technology and I'm like, how can we make technology better? Well, one thing we can do is start reframing the narrative around privacy as a narrative around deepfake porn, QAnon recruitment, radicalization, abortion rights, the right to protest. Anonymous. Like all these other things that people are worried about and say, like, you all need to get behind a new federal privacy law. And in Europe, adequate enforcement of privacy law. This is actually finally caught up with the Digital Markets act in Europe, where they've moved GDPR enforcement out of Ireland, which is a. It's a crime haven. Right, because tax havens Are crime havens. If, if, like, if a company is footloose enough to pretend to be Irish this week, they could pretend to be Luxembourgian next week. And so Ireland can't do anything to enforce the law against companies or they'll become Cypriot or, you know, whatever. Dutch.

I agree with what you're saying, but what role does science fiction writers have in sort of achieving that technology self determination that you find so important? Which I agree with. What role can science fiction writers play? And you know, what's the power that you have to drive real world change?

Well, I mean, you know, the obvious first order effect of science fiction is creating like these cautionary tales, minatory narratives. You know, you write about how bad things could get, that has some effect, although oftentimes especially tech leaders seem to get it wrong. You know, there's this old joke that's not really a joke, which is cyberpunk was a warning, not a suggestion. And you have like Mark Zuckerberg taking this quarter century old satirical dystopian novel Snow Crash and taking its central conceit, the Metaverse, and making it the project of his company. Like this is, this is, you know, there's the new meme about this. Don't, you know, don't create the torment nexus. This is real torment nexus stuff. Same with the space travel ambitions of tech barons and so on. You know, there's just, or smart city ambitions. All of these things are ripped out of cautionary tales that were misread as manuals. But you know, I, I think in terms of inspiring a better technological vision, the first thing that science fiction can do is create a habit of mind that challenges the inevitableist narrative that, that challenges the idea that there's only one way to configure a technology socially. Right. That like if you invent a steam loom, it has to involve child slavery. Right. There are lots of ways of imagining it. Right. You don't, doesn't have to be this. And so, you know, if you, if you cultivate that habit in, in your mind, it becomes a reflex and I think it becomes a vaccine against the reality distortion fields of tech boosters who want you to assume not just that what they're doing is exciting, but also inevitable. Lets you kind of push back.

Should all science fiction books come with a warning saying this is not an instruction manual? Maybe that helps.

Maybe, you know, certainly more science fiction writers could say it in public, that might be useful. So, you know, that's one, one thing that science fiction can do and the other thing that it can do is it can actually. So I have this theory called the point of peak indifference. So in a world where you have a real problem and you don't do anything about it, eventually people will care. You don't have to actually convince anyone to care. If the problem is real, eventually they're going to care. Right? I don't have to convince you that smoking is bad for you. I can just wait till you have stage four lung cancer. Right. The problem is it's now too late. Right? And the difference between denial and nihilism, it's like paper thin. And so it's very easy to go from these cigarettes aren't going to hurt me to now that I have stage 4 lung cancer, why should I quit? Right? Or like, you know, rhino populations are fine to oh well, there's only one rhino left, we might as well find out what he tastes like, right? And so we are, we're as writers, what we can do is we can take the point at which people self radicalize about an issue which they are able to vividly imagine what will happen if there is no intervention, so vividly that they take action before the point of no return when we can still do something about it.

So from that perspective then how can businesses and organizations, and not necessarily big tech, because I think that's sort of a separate category, how can they benefit from science fiction writers? How can they benefit? Should they have science fiction writers on the board or to require reading of these books on a monthly basis just to have them see the different perspectives and potentially this topic, but also maybe the optimistic scenarios that fiction writers such as yourself can come up with.

Well, look, as someone who's got a kid going off to university next year or anything that gets people to buy my books is great. So yeah, you should totally have a science fiction book club and pay writers to come in once a month and speak to your company meeting or whatever. Fine. I do actually think that workplace book clubs are quite cool and not just science fiction. I think there's plenty of stuff that you can read that's kind of on point with what you're doing ethically, historically, imaginatively. And that's always great. I think that cultivating the habit of mind that things don't have to be one way is very good for commercial thinking. You know, there's a, there's a guy, I'm sure you've heard of him, Brian Eno, he's a music producer and musician. And Brian Eno has this thing, he's got a deck of cards he calls the Oblique Strategies deck. I actually have it here. Hang on. I recently tidied up my office and I found it again. So the Oblique Strategies deck is this deck of cards that has all these, like, koans. Like, what's this one say? Sorry, I should have read it before holding it up to the camera. Make it more sensual, right? And these are just these, like, these weird koans. Discipline, self indulgence. And when, when Talking Heads was recording Remain in Light, which is, I think, the greatest album ever produced, Brian Eno was producing it. And whenever they got stuck in these sessions, he would just pull out a card and make them do what was ever. What was on it. And one of those cards, this is a long way of getting to this, but one of those cards says, be the first person to not do something that no one else has ever thought of not doing before. And I love this piece of advice. So people had tried to do crowdfunding for years and years and years. And the thing was that they all assumed that the only way you could do crowdfunding is if you could guarantee that people wouldn't be ripped off. And the only way to do that is to escrow the funds until delivery. But here's the problem. If I go out and raise $50,000 to do a short manufacturing run of something, but you won't give me the $50,000 until the. Until I've done the run, how do I do the run? So Kickstarter was like, actually, we're going to accept a certain proportion of fraud and flaking out and loss, right? We're going to tell our users as clearly as we can that that's what they're signing up for. Not every user got it, especially not at first. But they left out a step that everyone had assumed was essential that you just could not, that this was the Jenga block you could never pull out. And I think that what science fiction can do that's, that's quite exciting is it can make you think about what Jenga blocks you can pull out. Like, what's what. What is it that you've always done this way that, you know, you've, you, you has. Have never thought about reconsidering. What technological thing have you never considered leaving out or putting in or replacing or whatever and really, really think through how that might be successful? And a lot of our great commercial successes, right, that like the PC, right, The PC is like, what if we did mini computers, but far less powerful and only intended for a single user? And people were like, that's nuts. Why would we do that. And it, you know, to be fair, the Apple one and even the Apple, the early Apple ii, not very useful. I say this as someone who spent his like the age of 9 to the age of 11 with an Apple II plus like locked in a death battle with it, doing nothing else with every hour that God sends. What it was useful for was turning that 11 year old into me. But it wasn't useful for doing anything in the world.

Right.

At least not until Lotus came along. And so, you know, this is a remarkable exercise and it's a remarkable habit of mine to be in. So yeah, sure, why not put a science fiction writer on your board?

But how can organizations embrace that way of thinking? Because as a science fiction writer, it's sort of, it's in your DNA to think broad and to think the unimaginable. But how can organizations do that? Well, do you have any tips or tricks for them that they could leverage?

I'm not a corporate consultant. I don't know. I mean.

Oh. But from your own perspective, I think.

The more you do it, the more you do it, the better, the more habitual it becomes, right. If, if you're, you know, one of the. So, so science fiction sometimes gets a bad rap from people who don't read it and who try, right. And who find themselves bouncing off of it because they find it confusing. They say, oh, it's full of jargon. And there is a certain amount of self indulgent jargon insight in, in science fiction. But the real, the real way to understand what's going on here is that the, there's a motif or attacked a tactic of science fiction that the writer. Joe. Oh God, I just blanked her surname. Joe Walsh. Joe Walsh calls. Yes, Joe Walsh calls incluing where rather than opening up with like a 10 page excerpt from the Encyclopedia Galactica explaining what's going on in the world, you drop the person like mise en scene, like right into the middle of the action and you then drop in all these little clues that make it like a puzzle to solve. And what you're trying to figure out as the reader is like, what is this milieu? What are its characteristics? What are its boundaries? Do we have the same physics as we have here? Is there magic? Are these reliable narrators? Are we on earth? Are these people immortal? You know, like, like, because with science fiction everything is up for grabs, right? Is it a simulation, whatever, Right. You're in some way like, like reading a mystery where you're trying to figure out who done it. With science Fiction, you're trying to figure out who is it? And it requires that you habitually confront scenarios by asking yourself what are all the possible explanations for what we're seeing? Not just the ones that are grounded in my own direct experience, but like what else could hang together and explain what's going on here? And I think that that is like the science fiction reader's habit of mind when people say, oh, I'm bouncing off the science fiction because there's too much jargon. What is often the case is they don't have enough familiarity with a genre convention and they're not, they haven't yet developed the instinct for how to play this game, which is actually quite fun. Right. It's quite fun to figure out where the writer is going. And you and the writer are in some ways engaged in co creation of this imaginative world. Right. And, and so yeah, by all means, read, read lots of great science fiction. We're in quite a good age for it. There's lots of amazing stuff being written right now. It's not just like me writing nine books in my hammock over lockdown, you know, and, and, and I'll put in a plug here. There's a magazine called locus, that's a 50 year old trade magazine for the science fiction field that has always been a non profit, you know, like Oregon. And it's got the best reviews in the field. It's quite cheap to subscribe to online. You can also read it for free, but you can get it as like a PDF and stuff. I've been a columnist for them for 15 years. I do it for, you know, 10% of what I normally charge for columns because I really like, I really like these folks. And if you want to just learn about what's new in science fiction, you could do a lot worse than like subscribing to Locus. It's probably better than any substack you're going to give someone money for and then find out that vaccines, I'll put.

It in the, in the speaker deck, whatever.

Yeah, yeah.

So at the start of our conversation you mentioned that you focused on digital rights and you have a bit of an activism mindset when you write your books. And when you think about technologies, how do you explore the ethical implications of those technologies in your work? And what can we learn from that?

Well, you know, there's a kind of bad odor for didactic fiction. People are like, oh, it's too preachy. And look, I, I don't want to be pretentious here, but I think like Novels are an art form. And so if you write novels, you're an artist. So, you know, without, like just formally, I think you can describe what I do as being an artist. I'm a working artist. And like, the point of art is to take something big, numinous and irreducible out of the writer's head, some big, complicated, chewy emotion, and kind of shove it into an intermediary medium, might be like choreography or a painting or song or novel, in the hopes that when an audience member consumes that intermediary medium, that some facsimile of the big irreducible emotion will re emerge in their brains. And an enormous amount of my big irreducible, complicated emotions are about my fears and hopes for technology. And so my work often wraps in the things that could go wrong, the joy of them going right, the power of technology to alter people's lives, and the destiny of groups, especially marginalized or subaltern groups who use technology to come together. Sometimes groups that like, I don't like because this is a double edged sword, right? It's the Internet is a really great way to get a bunch of people to show up on the street and chant Black Lives Matter. It's also a great way to get every Civil War cosplayer in the country to show up in Charlottesville with tiki torches and chance. Jews will not replace us. Right? And so every, every, all of those fears, all those aspirations I have, they are front and center in my books. But not because merely that I think that my books are a way to preach to you, but because this big, chewy, irreducible emotion, which to me is like quite consuming, is something that I'm trying to stick into my art.

Yeah, well, I certainly agree that, you know, writing science fiction is a work of art because of everything that comes that's important to when you write a book that is, I think, art in itself. So, final question. Looking beyond your nine books, you mentioned at the start that tenth book is coming. What are some new themes or new technologies that you are exploring in your new book? Can you share something about that?

Yeah. My next novel is another one of these Martin Hench novels and it's set in the early 1980s. It's about PCs and it's his first adventure. It tells the story of how Martin Hench enrolls in an electrical engineering CS program at MIT in the early 1980s and like so many people, is so interested in computers that he can't pass his computer science course because he's playing with computers all the time. And so he ends up flunking out and he becomes a CPA and he goes out to San Francisco where he gets his first job, which is working for one of the characteristically very weird PC companies of the age. Only this one turns out to be a scam. It's run by a Mormon bishop, a Catholic priest and an orthodox rabbi. And they're doing faith selling, they're pyramid selling through faith groups, which is a real thing. This is why, you know, Mormons keep getting suckered into multi level marketing scams and so on. And there's some of that in the orthodox community as well. And, and he realizes working for the bad guys and he changes sides. So that was really fun writing about those early days of the PC and about the, the transition in legibility for skilled practitioners. So obviously you know, the Altera was not legible to someone who didn't have a CS background. This was the first PC, really. It was a kit based PC and you programmed it setting by sweating, setting switches on the face to make bytes. And if you weren't a skilled practitioner, you know, this was, this was completely illegible to you. But if you were, you literally knew how every byte in the computer was constructed right from the, from the bootloader up to through the operating system, the application layer. You literally were toggling these things by hand. And so you had the German word is fingerspitzingeful, which is like the fingertip feeling like having a ball balanced on your fingers and knowing exactly where its center of gravity is. You had this for the computer. And the transition from there to more complicated integrated circuits and pre made computers that weren't kit based was the beginning of the end of legibility and it was the beginning of the opportunity for mischief. Right. Where manufacturers, because they knew that their customers didn't have that bottom up understanding, could hide things in the computer that was detrimental to their interests. Right. And but good for their shareholders. We see this today where they hide, you know, booby traps in your printer that stop it from accepting third party ink. But all this stuff starts right at that moment and there's this incredible tension right there. So this is the technological question I'm exploring in that book and now I'm writing a book as well about inshidification.

Nice. Well, I'm sure that will be interesting.

And this is just a term I coined to describe platform decay. It's fun to say because it's got a swear word in it, but really it's about how this kind of disease has struck this blight has struck our platforms where they all seem to go through the same characteristic, right? Where they are good to their end users, then they make things worse for the end users to be good to their business customers, then they're bad to those business customers, and then eventually they turn into a pile of shit, but we can't stop using them somehow. And the book explains, you're talking about.

All the big tech social media platforms, right?

All of them, all at once. Yeah. And not just social media like Amazon and Uber too. Right. Double the price for an Uber, half the. Half the cost to the. Or half the wages to the drivers. Like this is. It's bad for everyone, right, except for Uber shareholders. And so, you know, this is a book that describes not just what's happening, but what the business processes are that allow it to happen, how digitization is specifically amenable to it, because you can change the business rules from moment to moment. How much people get paid, how much things cost, how things are ranked, what the defaults are. They can change on a per user and per transaction basis. So it's very easy to shift value from different constituencies to shareholders or from users to business customers. So the business customers flock in and then back to the users. So you keep them stuck to it and then back to the business customers, back and forth until everyone's really stuck, and then you can withdraw for shareholders. And it also describes why it's happening now, right? The. The collapse of the constraints, the consequences on firms. I don't think that the firms got worse. I think that the consequences for being bad got weaker. They don't have as much competition. They capture their regulators. IP law lets them stop people from.

Well, they've become too big fixing them. And that's why that happened.

Yeah, Too big to care, big enough to capture their regulators, big enough to discipline their own workforce. You know, for. For most of tech's history, tech workers were scarce enough that they actually had a lot of power over their bosses because they couldn't be readily replaced. And so they would often, like, stand athwart the path to initiatification and demand that their bosses not make things worse. Because they cared about what they'd done. They saw themselves as craftspeople and on a mission. And, you know, just like. Just like one of the things that motivated the Luddites was not just their own wages, but an outrage that we would take the textiles that they really cared about that were of high quality and replace them with things that were a theft on the consumer. Right. You know, you would buy these Stockings for, you know, 80% of the price, but they'd only last 10, 10%.

As long as the identification is nothing new. It's been since the beginning of the probably industrial revolution.

The difference is that it's happening all at once. And the other difference is that the companies aren't disappearing. So historically MySpace, when it just became too predatory of its business, customers, its end users, it was supplanted. These firms are actually shambling on, they're kind of zombies. And there are many reasons for that. One is that they're so there's so much tolerance for predatory acquisition where firms that might grow to be challengers to them are instead acquired. There's also a lot of tolerance for predatory pricing. So these are very closely related, right. If regulators were tolerate a dominant firm selling goods below cost to bankrupt a new market entrant, then they make it easier for a dominant firm to acquire that new market entrant. So you think about Amazon when they were like becoming an e commerce titan, you know, the, the world back then, you know, they were like dominating books, but they weren't dominating their other verticals. And what they were doing was not, they weren't conquering those verticals. They were just buying the firms that had come to dominate those verticals, right? And so they went to diapers.com and they said, we're going to buy you next. And Diapers.com said, We're not for sale. So they tapped the capital markets and got $100 million and they lit it on fire. They sold diapers below cost for about a quarter, significantly below cost, to the tune of $100 million. They put Diapers.com out of business. They bought them for pennies and then they shut them down. And now nobody starts a business that competes with Amazon. And if Amazon tries to buy you, you sell, right? And so, you know, mergers, predatory mergers and predatory pricing are two sides of the same coin. So they're not disciplined by competition in the same way. And some of the ready entrees to competition that are built on the flexibility of digital tools where every time you make the ink more expensive, someone else can make a third party cartridge. And then eventually they can use the fact that they've now acquired your relationship with your consumer to start selling them printers as well. Right? And so like that's that, you know, back when IBM owned Lexmark, they sued a company called Static Controls for making refillable toner cartridges for their laser printers. And they lost that suit because IP law was a lot less, a lot less expansive. Back then. And now static controls owns Lexmark, right? Lexmark is now a division of that company. This is how we could bootstrap into new domains. All of the big Japanese companies like Fujitsu got their start as what used to be called the Seven Dwarves. They made what were called plug compatible peripherals for IBM mainframes. So IBM with its 360 and so they're really valuable mainframes would sell you the mainframe at a discount and then sell you the printer, the hard drive, the keyboard and the screen at a huge markup. So these seven companies, the seven dwarves, started selling compatible, plug compatible. Literally you plug them into your mainframe accessories. And then they grew up to be like mini computing companies and mainframe companies and PC companies and compete head to head with IBM. So that's been choked off. IP law today makes that impossible. You just be destroyed for, you know, reverse engineering and contract interference and all these other legal theories that are quite novel, at least in their application to this kind of thing. And so, you know, these firms are just like, yeah, the companies like were always tempted to make things worse for their customers and sometimes they yielded to that temptation. What they did, they faced consequences. They don't face consequences anymore. Shareholders are seeing larger returns in stock buybacks and dividends from the worst tech companies, right. From Google. Google is, Google is pissing hundreds of millions of hundreds of billions of dollars up against a wall in buybacks and dividends, right.

It's crazy that that's, you know, that the buybacks for tens or hundreds of billions of dollars, it sort of has become the norm. While we could use that money to build better products, take better care of our employees, take better care of our citizens. But is that we just, it's all short term shareholder value that matters.

But here's the thing. Shareholders wanted returns just as much 20 years ago as they wanted them now. They had the same capacity to elect board members as they did now. In fact, arguably they have more capacity now because a significant share of all of The S&P 500 is now held by index funds. And index funds are the ultimate passive investor. They don't vote. Right. Index funds do not propose shareholder initiatives and they don't vote on shareholder initiatives. All they do is sit and hold. Right? So you're actually like the shares that you hold as a shareholder are less dilute, right. They're more concentrated because some of the equity pool is being held by money managers who don't care. Now there's some special cases in tech where you have two share classes where the majority of voting shares are held by founders. But even so, the pressure on those founders to make returns to shareholders was the same then as it was now. The difference is that then everybody understood that if you wrecked the product, the company would crash.

Yeah. And that's not always the case.

Yeah, they just believe that you can make the product shitty and that you can continue to make these giant, giant margins. So why wouldn't you wreck the product?

Oh, well, history hasn't decided whether these companies might fall down eventually, so who knows?

I actually think that's it. That's also a reason to intervene though, because if we are stuck to these firms for years and years, long after they've ceased to be valuable to us, we are now living in the blast zone when they go under. Right. If the way that you communicate with your customers is on Facebook and then Facebook faces sudden collapse, then you and your customers are atomized. So this is like more and more people live in the urban wildlife interfaces as well. I think you said you lived in Australia. I live in Southern California. We have a lot of places that burn. And the problem isn't just that these places burn, it's that people live there and more people move there every year. And you know, yeah, we need to do something about the climate emergency. Yes, we probably need to restore controlled burns, but we also just need to get those people out of there. Right. We need to evacuate the burn zone. And the longer these platforms persist, the more people will have to lose when the fire comes for them. We have to evacuate these platforms.

Well, I think that's, that's a great way to end this, this conversation, Corey. I'm very much enjoyed to enjoy that conversation. I think your, your next book on the certification will be. Will be fascinating. I'm looking forward to reading it.

All right, well, it was my pleasure talking with you, Marc.

Thank you very much.

In this episode, Cory Doctorow shared profound insights into the intersection of future technologies and soc societal values. We discussed the themes of his latest book, the Bezel, and explored the implications of technological advancements on privacy, surveillance, and digital rights. Corey's perspective on the role of science fiction in imagining alternative futures and challenging the status quo provides a powerful framework for understanding and navigating the rapidly evolving digital landscape. As we wrap up, I encourage our listeners to reflect on the critical lessons shared by Corey. The ability to envision different social arrangements for technology and to challenge the inevitability narrative is essential for organizations seeking to stay ahead in an ever changing world. By adopting a futures thinking approach, businesses can prepare for the complexities of tomorrow and ensure that technological advancements align with ethical considerations and societal values. Thank you for joining us on this enlightening journey. Don't forget to subscribe to Synthetic Minds on your favorite podcast platform, and stay tuned for more discussions that bridge the gap between science fiction and science reality, helping you navigate the future with confidence and insight.