Cory Doctorow - Radicalized
Cory Doctorow is a science fiction author, internet and copyright activist, and one of the first bloggers.
His new book is called Radicalized. It’s a collection of four SF novellas connected by social, technological, and economic visions of today and what America could be in the near, near future.
Cory spoke about copyright legislation, disappearing messages, blockchain, science fiction, first mover disadvantage, monopolies, and the trouble with predicting the future.
AI Transcription
SUMMARY KEYWORDS
copyright, people, called, technology, blockchain, world, google, tech, network, disappearing, buying, problem, licence, civil liberties, internet, boing, write, monopolies, speculation, message
SPEAKERS
Cory Doctorow, Andrew Dubber
Andrew Dubber
Hi, I’m Dubber. I’m the director of Music Tech Fest. And thanks so much for listening to the MTF podcast, I first encountered Cory Doctorow, very early on in the 2000s. I dived into the world of blogging pretty early. And while I was hardly in the first wave, there still weren’t a whole lot of us doing it at the time. So the people who were really good at it and had established themselves as people to watch in that space. They came across your radar pretty readily. And so I’ve been following Cory’s work at a distance for the best part of 20 years. I finally had a chance to meet up with him in person when we were both at South by Southwest earlier this year, and so I grabbed him for a chat on the podcast. Cory is a science fiction writer, internet and copyright activist and co editor of Boing Boing, a blog that describes itself as a directory of mostly wonderful things. He’s an advisor to the EFF, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and he co founded the UK open rights group. his new book is called radicalised and it contains four science fiction novellas about the social, economic and technological dystopia of the very near future of America. This is Cory Doctorow. Cory Doctorow, thanks so much for joining us on at all. What brings you here,
Cory Doctorow
I came to do four talks. So, two, we’re about article 13, the this new copyright directive in Europe, which I think it’s a mistake to think of it as a copyright law. It’s really an internet law. And it’s a very sweeping one and not a very well put together one. And then I did a panel on science fiction and policy and how the stories we tell change the policy responses and how we think about how we regulate tech and whether we should and and and so on. Then there’s a mayor summit here, they had about 30 mayors plus CTOs from a bunch of cities across America, right. And I went and talked about municipal surveillance and municipal it and network neutrality and municipal networks.
Andrew Dubber
Are you a tech person who became interested in politics or political business? I’m interested in tech.
Cory Doctorow
So I was raised by a political computer scientist. So right that is like, you know,
Andrew Dubber
Tell me about your parents, because that’s interesting.
Cory Doctorow
my father’s a Soviet émigré. His parents were displaced people. They were they were living in a dp camp when he was born in in Asia and in Azerbaijan. And they were Red Army deserters, and, and he became a Trotskyist. And he was a mathematician, and so is a mathematician, he did a degree in something called applied mathematics, which is we now call computer science. And so I grew up with terminals in the house, and then early PCs, and so I was always into this stuff. And you know, Marxists are pretty science fiction. So, you know, there’s like this overlap with this kind of technical speculation, right? This is like, I think it’s at the core of Marxism, I think it’s one of the reasons you hear people talking about, like non market allocations and non market ways of conducting our lives now is that because this, this really was where a lot of that speculation came from, you know, there’s this famous debate in the 1920s. In Austria, the socialist calculation debate where like von Mises and von Hayek were the fathers of, you know, market, modern market doctrine that the Austrian School said, they proved that you could never do enough computation to allocate things in a big complicated society. And that you would need, you need markets to do efficient allocation. And now we have firms and institutions like the Pentagon, and Amazon and Walmart, that are on the same scale as like the Soviet Union at its peak, and internally allocate using computation, not markets, right. So anyway, that’s a long winded way of saying, that’s how I got into this stuff. And so I was gonna say, it’s really interesting that you put the Pentagon on Amazon in the same breath. Well, if you want it to the Pentagon is the world’s largest employer. Okay. And I think Walmart is the second I think the People’s Liberation Army is the third Chinese
Andrew Dubber
Indian train network was up there as well.
Cory Doctorow
Yeah, I maybe, I don’t know, I can’t do the numbers off the top of my head. But you know, in the top 10 Yeah, there’s that they’re, they’re, they’re big and weird, right. And because they’re labour intensive projects, as well, sure. But anyway, the point being that that, like, I was raised in a millia of technology and politics, I was involved in the anti nuclear proliferation movement as a young student in elementary school and secondary school. Oh, and was this in Toronto, okay. And then I dropped out of uni to be a software developer. And then I started a.com, during the.com bubble and I moved to San Francisco and then I fell in with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which is the leading civil liberties technology and civil liberties group in the world, and quit this startup to go work for them and then move to Europe to be their European director and lived in London for 13 years and on the way, sold now about 20. Some books, fiction nonfiction, kids fiction, essay collection, short story collections. On the way I also got involved with a project that guy named Mark Frauenfelder had started with his wife Carla Sinclair a zine called boing boing, that we turned into a blog. And it was one of the first blogs and we still have millions of readers every month. And we have about five or six of us who own it and write it every every day. And so for nearly 20 years now, I’ve written between five and 15 short articles about technology and politics that have crossed my transom, trying to both summarise them for third parties so that, you know, this is what caught my eye about it. And also trying to make sense of how they fit in the context of all the other things that had snagged my attention over the years. So now represents this giant searchable database of things that are kind of raw material for both speculation and political intervention,
Andrew Dubber
because boing boing is sort of taken on different meaning as times progressed, it used to be certainly this is where you find out where the interesting stuff is on the internet. It’s a way of discovery. And now it seems very much like I guess a magazine that’s about your identity that this is the kind of thing that I subscribe to this is, this is how I see myself and boingboing seems to be an external expression of people’s identity far more than it is just how they find interesting stuff on the internet.
Cory Doctorow
Well, I think it’s definitely true that finding interesting stuff on the internet has changed with the growth of social media. That’s that’s definitely the case. I still, I think that we’ve probably become more reflective over the years in terms of being less about being what we used to call a link log, you know, like, which there’s still some really good ones. You know, the O’Reilly the the tech publisher has a thing maintained by another Kiwi Nat Torkington called four short links. Yeah. And it’s just literally four links with one sentence and I love it. I read it every day. And or naked capitalism does a daily links roundup and you know, dark roasted blend does this thing called link latte once a month and so I like the I love those those link roundups. But I think we’ve one of the things that happens when you watch this stuff, go go back and forth for a long time as you start to have insights or speculation about it. And so you know, that just this morning, there was a piece on wired, written by one of their very good writers about off the off the record messaging self destructing message systems off the back of Mark Zuckerberg announcing that he was going to do an ephemeral message product for Facebook, and she was writing about the limits of this stuff. And you know, one of the limits is that if if you send someone a disappearing message, but they’re not trustworthy, they might just take a picture of it before it disappears, is having a Paul Manafort, right. I mean, it’s, it’s like this is this is a problem. And I used to be very much on the side that like, disappearing messages were stupid. And I have a friend who started a disappearing message company woman named Nico Sell, who also runs the DEF CON kids programming. It’s called Rootz with a Zed. And she started this company called Wickr that does a disappearing message product. She asked me to join her advisory board, and I was like, people are just gonna take pictures of this stuff, like, what good is this thing? Like? Are you gonna put DRM on people’s phones so that the camera doesn’t work? Like, you know, how is this gonna work? And she was like, No, no, you fail to understand if you and I trust each other, but I don’t trust you or me to be perfect in my memory of deleting things after I’m done with them. We use this tool. And like, if we and what that means is that we flip from the default of everything is preserved indefinitely, to only those things that you take an affirmative step to preserve, stay. So I use a variety of disappearing message tools now, thankfully, because a lot of them have now built it in so signal has a disappearing Message Protocol and so on. And I screenshot that stuff all the time. That’s how I save it, right? I folders full of stuff I’ve copied out of disappearing message protocols, not non consensually, right? Yeah, it’s it’s this is like, it’s important, right? This was the information I needed to save. And so you know, out it’s not the default now that that’s the default. And and like, one of the things that I’ve learned over the years of watching boing boing, covering information security, and covering breaches and so on, is that although you can’t use automation to improve trust, you can use automation to improve compliance with things that people want to do. So there’s a huge one actually, if like, on my tombstone, I hope they write something about adversarial computing, because this is like poorly understood discipline. That is like when a system is designed to treat the person who uses it as their enemy, a whole bunch of terrible things happen, and that there are non adversarial compliance systems like a thing that reminds you to take a pill you want to take is non adversarial, right? Your alarm clock is non adversarial.
Andrew Dubber
I’m not sure I’d agree with Well,
Cory Doctorow
I are good example here like Doug Rushkoff gave this. This wrote this article about going to a conference of investors. And there was a tract talking about the end of the world and they called it the event. And it was about how you would continue to incentivize your guards to guard you when money wasn’t worth anything when they could just shoot you and steal your food reserves? And the answer was that they were going to make combination biometric and password based food locker. So if your guards couldn’t keep you alive, they wouldn’t be able to open the locker and they’d starve. Right? So this is pretty just in my professional capacity as a dystopian science fiction writer, I can affirm that this is pretty dystopian stuff. But you know what I’ve gone on diets where it’s like, every 17 days, you get to eat, you know, some, some sweets. So I could see myself putting a lock on a cupboard that only opens every 17 Days full of sweets, literally the same technology. And the only difference is the locus of control. It’s whether the lock is adverse to my interest more in my interest. And so, you know, there are this is this, this theme that I actually chase down a lot on Boing Boing. And that this, this accretive or incremental way of looking at, like developing an idea is very well lent to, because all the news flows over your transom. And you’re like, that’s kind of an example of this thing that I’ve been writing about for a while you can pull it out, you can look at the links to the other stuff and embed them in it, and then you can synthesise it into a larger piece. Right,
Andrew Dubber
right. I with your EFF hat on Sure. The connection between copyright, civil liberties and music tech, which is where we come from, when those things sit together. Why is copyright so important?
Cory Doctorow
So I think that copyrights important, because it’s something I think of as the original sin of copyright in the internet, that I think creators, if they understood better would be more worried about copyright is first and foremost, it’s an industrial regulation for the entertainment industry. And industries need regulations that provide a framework for keeping all the players aligned, making sure that people aren’t ripping each other off, making sure that you know what you can and can’t licence what you can and can’t do. I’m all for regulation. And there are two ways to think about what a regulation is. One is who you apply it to, and one is what it says, We put a lot of emphasis on what copyright says, How long should it last? And does it what’s fair use and so on. But we take it for granted, that the thing that we’ve used to decide whether or not a copyright applies to you, is continues to be fit for purpose in the 21st century. That’s where I think the problem is because the test to see whether or not you are doing something that should be considered under copyright is are you making or handling works, copies of creative works. And this comes from a time when every record had a pressing plant and its history. And every you know, film had a film processing lab and every book had a printing press. And although it was an imperfect proxy, it was a not terrible proxy. There may have been some people who it over applied to and may have been some people who escaped around the edges. But 99% of the people who are making or handling copies of creative works, were actually in the entertainment industry. The internet works by copying, right everything you do on the internet involves making copies, you make 100 copies every time you click your mouse and frame buffers and network buffers and so on. There’s actually proposal Clinton’s copyright czar in 1996 Bruce Lehmann, this old Microsoft lawyer wrote a paper called the layman paper where he proposed that every one of those separate copies should have a different licence. So that there would be like 100 licences between a file arriving on your network boss and showing up on your computer. So this is like an idea only a lawyer could love. Right. So the problem with this is that either we make copyright fit for purpose. So you have people for example, use copyright to address being impersonated on Tinder. So that’s my picture. Right? So either we actually make it fit for purpose. So that and we stretch it to all the things people use copyright for regulating their health information, their education, their romance, their personal lives are so on. Or we carve copyright out of all the things that aren’t the entertainment industry. And we only apply to the entertainment industry and we make it fit for purpose there. And what we have now is and that’s neither fish nor fowl, so I live in Burbank. We have three giant movie studios within walking to my house who is Warner Disney and universal, and Warner licenced a package of rights to Universal to build a Harry Potter theme park which also walking distance from my house, super cool. used to work for Disney Imagineering. I like theme parks a lot. That is a great theme park. Copyright was clearly a fit vehicle for negotiating that copyright part of that deal. Yeah, I live on a block full of 12 year olds writing Harry Potter fan fiction. If we make copyrights simple enough for those 12 year olds to abide by, it will no longer be usable. Like it’ll be so simplified that those lawyers won’t be able to use it. Or if we continue to keep it so complex, that these lawyers can continue to use it. Then all the 12 year olds are criminals and Also are being taught that copyright is an incoherent nonsense that they shouldn’t pay attention to, and should seek to avoid. And so I think that, like, copyright is a great set of tools, or could be a great set of tools for regulating my relations with my publisher, I just don’t think it’s like a great set of tools for regulating my relations with my audience. And we keep seeing that over and over again, mixtapes and, you know, like this, the home taping is killing music, and all these things that are just not fit for purpose, they give creators the wrong intuition, they put us on the wrong side with their audiences. So that’s the artistic side, the civil liberties side, is that when we treat personal communications, as if it’s subject for copyright enforcement, then we put public discourse in the path of copyright enforcement. So in the European Union, they’re considering this copyright directive, maybe by this time this comes out, we’ll know whether or not they passed it there, it’s being voted March the 25th. And the directive has this thing called article 13. And it moves us from a posture of what’s called notice and takedown, which your listeners are probably familiar with. If someone posts your copyright, you write to the platform and say, that belongs to me, and they have to take it down. And I understand why notice and takedown isn’t, well favoured among rights holders, it’s a burden to have to go and take that down. And they say, Well, if you’re a cable operator, you have an affirmative duty to check the copyrights of everything that goes on your cable network. And you have to get this chain of errors and omissions insurance and they do their due diligence and so on. Why should Comcast have to do that for their Comcast channels, but not for their ISP business? Right. But the other side of that the speech side of this and speeches, one of the foundational civil liberties is if I walk into a cinema, I can’t point at the screen and say that infringes my copyright and expect the projector to take the movie off. Right, I have to go and get a court order. And so this is there is a bit of given take in notice and takedown. Right, we have eliminated the safeguards that make due process for limits on speech. And we have imposed a duty, we’ve shifted a duty from conduits to rightholders, to police speech, a little of this little that plenty room for abuse, right? What article 13 does is it shifts it so that now platforms have to affirmatively police everything that their users post, so you have hundreds of millions of tweets and Facebook updates and Instagram posts. And originally, what they said is you have to buy or build filters, like the one that YouTube uses Content ID and we know that content ID is full of problems for speech, you know, the king of Thailand uploads video of the police beating up protesters, and says this is my copyright If anyone tries to upload this blockhead, right. And so they you know, or police do this with police body cam footage, or you have trolls who do it who claim copyright before the artist uploads their work, they upload, the artists work and they monetize it. And then they trust in the fact that Google who are adjudicating millions of copyright claims every day will take so long to get around to the artists copyright, especially if it’s an indie artist who doesn’t have a label, who can call a lawyer at Google and has to rely on these frontline processes that they can just take the money and run. And so that was the original proposal, we pointed out that this would be a terrible idea, both because of speech. And because of competition. There’s five big US companies that can afford to build these filters. It’s about 100 million dollars that Google spend on content ID so far, right? If you impose that duty on European platforms, all the European companies disappear. And if we think that Google is greedy and hard to negotiate with when it has to compete with all these small guys around the periphery, given 10 years with no competition and see where we might end, right. So then they took filters out, they said you don’t have to use filters. In fact, if you can avoid it, don’t use filters. But what you do have to do is ascertain the copyright status in real time, have hundreds of billions of pieces of content uploaded by your users, right? Don’t have to use a filter, you could maybe figure out how to clone your copyright lawyers and make a billion of them. Right. That’s another thing you could do. But you know, honestly, if I tell you, you now have a legal obligation to procure a large African four legged land mammal with a trunk and a tail and tusks, you’re going to procure an elephant, right? Even if I say like, avoid elephants, if at all possible. So now we’re going to have a mechanism whereby anyone can lay claim to anything and make it disappear. And then these corporate kangaroo courts will decide whether or not that stuff is reinstated. And it can take months or years. This has an enormous Nexus with civil liberties. And it’s also not going to be great for artists.
Andrew Dubber
The the response you’ll get from some people will obviously be 11 blockchain solves everything.
Cory Doctorow
Well, I’m reminded of the fact that 90% of all conversations related to blockchain are non consensual. I don’t see how blockchain solves any of that stuff, right. blockchain has all those problems and then some because false claims of copyright are now on eradicable right. blockchain allows people allows you to permanently log what people say. But it’s back to adversarial non adversarial uses. It doesn’t help you adjudicate whether they’re telling the truth. Right. Leaving aside whether or not like the security economics of distributed ledgers and the 51% attacker, I think we should worry about, which is like, if one person has 51% of the computation, they can rewrite the ledger, which, you know, we tend to like you that through this very narrow lens of what there’s like X dollars worth of stuff in the blockchain, and it would cost x plus one dollars to own 51% of the computer. So no one rational would do it. But maybe you’re the Politburo in China and you want to head off blockchain transactions, because you’re worried that the future will hold 10 trillion, you know, dollars worth of exfiltrated Capital by corrupt officials. And so you blow up the blockchain now for $5 trillion, and you’ve saved $5 trillion, even if that’s more than the blockchain is worth at its current value. But leaving aside all the security economics problems, you know, if I falsely lay claim to your copyright, you now have to figure out how to correct this distributed on eradicable unalterable ledger. That’s, that doesn’t make life easier for you, you know, at least like if you sue Google to correct the record about who owns your copyrights. A court can order them to do that a court can order 51% of the computers calculating the blockchain to correct a record to
Andrew Dubber
show I have to ask this in technology, society, culture, what are you optimistic about?
Cory Doctorow
So I am a science fiction writer. And optimism is a form of prediction, right? Like do you think the future will be better or worse as pessimism? And the one thing I’m absolutely sure of is that science fiction writers have no business predicting the future, and probably no one does. But we’re like Texas marksman like we fire a shotgun into the side of the barn and then go draw the target around the place where the pellets went in. You know, science fiction has made a lot of predictions if if none of them come true, that would be really remarkable. But our track record underperforms random chance but like hedge fund managers don’t don’t believe anything we say. And moreover, as an activist, I think prediction is terrible, right? Because prediction implies that human action doesn’t change the future. You know, prediction implies that the future arrives, whether or not you you if something happens to you? Yeah. So I believe in hope, hope is the idea that if you materially improve your circumstances, that even though you can’t plot a course, from A to Zed now that having taken one step up the gradient towards a better future, you may find new terrain revealed that allows you to take yet another step higher. Right. And you know, in computer science, we call that hill climbing. It’s how we traverse complex terrain, computational terrain. And so I’m hopeful.
Andrew Dubber
Right, right. So my question then is, what are you hopeful about?
Cory Doctorow
So for me, the question is the same as what change could we make today that might let us make more change tomorrow? So I’m hopeful about the burgeoning sense that technology questions count beyond the narrow focus of whoever is raising them. You know, you have people who are like, the most salient thing about the computer is that it’s an entertainment medium, or other people who say, well, it’s that it distributes pornography, or that it recruits jihadi fighters to fight for ISIS. The reality is that the internet is the, you know, nervous system of our species, and its planetary scale, and it wires us together. And and when you distort it, or when you when you disrupt it, that decision redounds through every domain of human endeavour, and that gravitas, that caution is starting to appear in our public debates. It’s really, really hopeful. I’m also hopeful of the fact that competition has started to move into our discussion about this stuff. And moreover, the competition debate is not buying big tech’s self serving narrative about big tech. So one of the things that tech really wants you to believe is that it’s different. There are things about tech that are different. This universality is different. But you know, Google wants you to believe that someone came down off a mountain with tunes to stone tablets that said, Stop rotating your log files and start mining them for actionable intelligence, and that there’s like no way we could build a search engine that didn’t spy on you. Google made a conscious choice. Right. And there are other choices we could make. You know, I’m reading Shoshana Zuboff’s age of surveillance capitalism right now. And she’s very like, casual about monopolies. She says the problem isn’t monopolies. It’s that big tech has invented a mind control ray that they can use like AV testing and skin area and behaviour modification to make you do things without you knowing it. They’ve taken away our free will. And I’m like, I don’t know why we would distrust everything in big tech sales literature except for their marketing claims about how effective their technology is. Like I worked in marketing for a while I know that marketing people are really good at selling to one group of people, people who buy marketing, right. The actual conversion rate on marketing is really really low. You know, like if we want to know how Google shapes our behaviour, it’s by being the only search engine anyone uses and deciding what goes on the front page. But that’s not mind control. You know, that’s that’s just like that’s a very cheap trick. If it’s a mentalist act that’s like The Mentalist who have hidden cameras that watch, you know what, what people write down on the car on the card when they say, you know, think of a word and write it down on the card. You know, it’s a bit of technological virtuosity, but it’s not mind reading. Yeah, right. So I think that like big tech wants you to think the reason that they’re sectors concentrated is because first mover advantage in network effects and globalism are what are what count. And I think it’s that the apple two plus came at the year we elected Ronald Reagan, and he promptly dismantled antitrust enforcement, right? Like if it was first mover advantage and network effects, we’d all be searching AltaVista, with our Cray supercomputers, right, like, like one of the things that we know about tech is that you can accumulate a technology debt, right? Like if you are married to a certain approach in technology. When the technology changes, you have this this huge institutional crisis and convincing the people who work in your firm to stop making supercomputers and start making mini computers and start making mini computers start making PCs. These are like huge problems that firms wrestle with and being a first mover sucks, and network effects are great, but you live and die by the sword. If your network doubles in value, every time someone joins it, then it haves in value every time someone leaves it, which is how MySpace can be on top of the world one day and on the trash eat the next day with Rupert Murdoch sitting on top of it with his thumb up his ass. Is this the safety net for something like Facebook having all this power? Is it the fact that there’s a fragility built into these things? No, because this is where monopolies matter. Right? Right. So Facebook lost 17,000,012 to 34 year olds in 2017. up from 9 million I think in 2016. They are haemorrhaging users to Instagram.
Andrew Dubber
Right, which they own which they own
Cory Doctorow
right. And you know, one of the things that Reagan got away, did away with the idea that firms can can grow by buying their competitors, right, if we still had 1980s Telecom, antitrust enforcement, Instagram would be a separate company. All right, right. So tech is not different. Anti trust is different. And that’s why we have market concentration in tech and we have market concentration in petroleum and energy and shipping and water supply. And and and there was an article this morning in the LA Times about Lux Attica, Luxottica or something, they’re an Italian company. They own every eyewear brand you’ve ever heard of, and every high street optical store, and they started by buying sunglasses hot. And then they took every eyewear brand, that wouldn’t cut wholesale prices to them. And they stopped selling them in Sunglass Hut until the company’s lost so much share value that they could buy them. So this is how they acquired Oakley and a whole bunch of other brands. And then they bought lenscrafters. They did it to lenscrafters. Right, and and now they own lenscrafters. Then they bought the largest lab in the world. So they own the largest lab. And then they bought the largest insurer, I insure in the world optical insurer in the world. Yeah. Now they own them, too. And the markups relative to before they acquired this vertical and horizontal monopoly are 1,000%. Right? So like, you know, this is the exact same thing that’s happened with Facebook and Google,
Andrew Dubber
right, other than being a outrage and be overwhelmed by the extent to which this is happening. What can we do? Sure, at an individual level that that isn’t, I mean, there’s somebody like you who you are a crusader, you’re you’re, if I’m not that if I’m somebody who sits in a bedroom and makes electronic music, but this is important to me. And I understand it’s important to me, what can I do? So,
Cory Doctorow
you know, going from the least engaged to the most engaged. There are a number of nonprofits around the world, I work for one of them, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, they don’t pay me I get paid. I’m an MIT Media Lab affiliate, and now he’s my work there. So I don’t benefit if you give them money, but I really believe in them, and I’m a donor to them. And when I started working for EFF, 15 years ago, more than 15 years ago, we were almost the only one there three or four different groups like this. Today, there’s dozens of them, because this issue has grown in sales and technology touches us in so many ways. So if if that’s not your cup of tea, there’s the Free Software Foundation and FSF Europe. There’s also Creative Commons, there’s public knowledge, there’s the Internet Archive. There are you know, so many nonprofits that do this work, there’s the perkz, there’s Consumers Union, there’s which in the UK, there’s be UK, in the Netherlands, and or across Europe, rather, all these different groups and it’s politic in Germany, quadrature du net, France, digital rights Ireland and so on, and so on. You Just write them a check, right or, you know, send them, send them some money. Or you can just join the mailing list, which again, like who reads mailing lists, but what you can pay attention to is not the here’s what’s new in digital rights this week. But the like the blast that you get that says, hey, person who we know is in this Congress person’s constituency, or this country, your voice right now matters, because someone who depends on you for their vote really needs to hear from you. Right? So that’s, that’s like super low engagement, right? write a check, send the occasional email, make a phone call to your member of parliament or whatever. Do it twice a year, you’ve done something right? at a higher gradient. Have a conversation about this stuff with too techie people, you know, right? We have this there’s this like, stupid thing that people say where it’s like, well, my mom will never understand this, just like horrible about women in computing and moms, right? Because for one thing, like moms are the people that no one designs technology for and so every mom who’s using technology has overcome that baseline hurdle that they’ve had to figure out how to repurpose something that never figured out how they were going to use that and make it work. So they’re all friggin ninjas, right? Yeah, it’s like a technology so easy your boss can use it, maybe you know, but like, there’s so much low hanging fruit. There’s so many people who are really technical, and who have their head down. And as you say, they’re making EDM in their bedroom. They are the people who are primed to understand this stuff, have this conversation with them, get them thinking about it, ask them to join their mailing list, do it to two people, and then go back to them a week later and ask them if they’ve given it any thought. And if they say, yeah, this really matters to me, ask them to grab this conversation with two people. This is a normative change we’re going to make in the world. At the most intense end of engagement. We electronic frontiers Foundation, Frontier Foundation has started this thing called the electronic frontiers Alliance. And it’s a network they’re not of chapters, affinity groups, crypto party is one of them. There’s a whole tonne of different affinity groups all around the world that are working on this stuff. If you Google electronic frontiers Alliance, you can find out whether you have one already in your town or you can start one. And people are working on these very local issues that are related to a lot of street level surveillance stuff right now on this on this where you have people in small towns and big cities where they’re cops are buying automatic licence plate recognition cameras, facial recognition systems, stingrays and other forms of cell site simulators that track your location based on your phone and intercept your messages and log metadata. And they’re getting involved through local affinity groups, showing up at town meetings and just kicking ass, right. So that’s the maximum level, minimum level, join the mailing list, read a check medium level, talk to some friends, maximum level start a group.
Andrew Dubber
I know you’re on a short timeline, but one of us is gonna get in trouble from your publisher. If we don’t ask this question. Tell me about your new book.
Cory Doctorow
Yeah, the book out called radicalised. It’s four novellas about our relationship to technology and privilege and individual action and group action. You know, one is about the Internet of Things and the exploitation of refugees. One is about like entitled, wealthy people, you know, middle class people who watch their loved ones die of preventable illnesses that their insurance won’t cover. And when they turn to internet message boards for solace, they get radicalised to become suicide bombers who kill healthcare executives. You know, one’s a superhero story about the fatal beating of Eric Garner by the New York Police Department. And and it’s about Superman and the NSA. And one is about preppers, who end up shitting themselves to death in their bunker, while the actual heroes of the apocalypse who they fancy themselves to be, are back in the city getting the sanitation system working again. Some of its being turned into audio visual stuff already. There’s a movie deal for the IoT story. The audiobooks are great, Wil Wheaton reads one of them. He’s one of my best readers. He’s read a whole tonne of my fiction for audio. So, radicalised.
Andrew Dubber
congratulations, that sounds fantastic. Thank you, Cory Doctorow. It’s such a pleasure to have you on the show. Oh, it’s my
Cory Doctorow
pleasure. Thank you,
Andrew Dubber
author, activist and blogger Cory Doctorow. And that’s the MTF podcast. Like Cory said, one thing you can do is tell two people and while you’re doing that, maybe you could mention this podcast to them as well. Have a great week and we’ll talk soon. Cheers.
