← Podcast – Cory Doctorow's craphound.com
Podcast – Cory Doctorow's craphound.com
Comrade Trump
This week on my podcast, I read Comrade Trump, a recent column from my Pluralistic newsletter, which will be syndicated in The Nerve. All of which means that my experience of the Trump years is decidedly weird. On the one hand, I exist in a near-perpetual state of anxious misery, as Trump and his chud... more
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Well, hello and welcome back to the Cory Doctorow Podcast. I find myself at my desk in London for the first time in quite some time and so I'm gonna record you a podcast. As I mentioned, I have been on the road a lot and I'm gonna be on the road a lot. I'll be in Guelph, Ontario on May 8 for the Musajidis Festival where I'm giving a keynote. I'll be in Barcelona on May 13 for the global Digital Rights Forum. I'm doing a virtual event with the Electronic Frontier foundation and Wendy Liu on May 14 that you can tune into from anywhere. I'll be in Berlin from May 18th through 20th. You can catch me at the Republika Festival and also at other Land Books. I'll be in Hay on Wye from May 22nd through 25th for the how the Light Gets In Festival and I'll be in London for South by southwest London on June 2. I'll be in Kansas City at the Main Library on June 9, and then I'll be out for a little mini tour with my new book, the Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI. I'll be at Skylight Books in Los Angeles on the 20th of June. I'll be in Menlo park on the 21st of June and in Toronto on the 23rd of June. Those events are still yet to be announced, but you can mark your calendars now. One event that is announced is in New York, where I'll be at the Strand Bookstore with Jonathan Coulton on June 24th and in Philadelphia on June 25th. I'll be in Chicago at the Exile and Bookville Bookstore with rick Perlstein on June 27th. And I'll be back in London for the idler Festival on July 11th. I'll be at the Edinburgh International Book Festival on August 17th for an event with Jimmy Wales. And I'll be in Australia at the end of August. I'll be in Sydney for the Dangerous Ideas Festival on August 22nd and I believe they're also booking me at Melbourne and also I think Brisbane somewhere around there still to be announced. The other thing that's on my immediate horizon and the thing I'm going to be spending most of today working on, is that next week I'm going to be launching the Kickstarter for my next book, the Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI to pre sell it and the audiobook and the ebook. The audiobook is all in the can and we finished edits this week so it's a risk free event as it were, but I do have to get that pre sale Kickstarter up and running and so that's going to be a lot of my day today. The piece I'm going to be reading to you today is called Comrade Trump. It's from Pluralistic, my newsletter, and the reason I chose it is that it's also going to be syndicated, I think next week on the Nerve, which is a newish British news outlet that was founded by Carol Cadwallader and a few of her friends after the sale of the observer to the Tortoise Media Group, who are kind of a mixed bag. I'm very happy that Carol and co have decided to start syndicating my work and that it's going to reach their audience as well, and I'm quite happy with how this piece turned out. And so with no further ado from the April 20 edition of Pluralistic, this is Comrade Trump. There aren't a lot of things I agree with Mark Carney about, but there's one area where he and I are in total accord. The old US dominated, rules based international order was total bullshit. Unlike Carney, I never pretended to like that old order, and indeed I spent my entire life fighting against it, literally all the way back to childhood, organizing other children to march against Canada's participation in America's nuclear weapons programs. All of which means that my experience of the Trump years is decidedly weird. On the one hand, I exist in a near perpetual state of anxious misery as Trump and his CHUD army of Christian nationalists and degenerate gamblers pursue a program of gleeful genocide. But at the same time, I am living in a world in which Trump is inadvertently dismantling many of the worst aspects of the old order in favor of something decidedly better. Take Trump's tariff policy. Back during Trump 1, he decided that Americans couldn't buy Chinese solar anymore, which had the double benefit of allowing him to pursue the twin goals of throwing red meat to sinophobic Cold War 2 freaks and delivering a giant gift to the planet, wrecking oil companies that helped him buy his way into office. This was really bad for America, of course, but those solar panels had to go somewhere. Mostly they ended up in Pakistan, dumped there at such a massive discount that the country solarized virtually overnight. Pakistani solar installers learned their trade from TikTok videos set to Tamil film soundtracks and unwired the country so thoroughly that today the national power company is in danger of going bust because no one buys their electricity from the grid anymore. Pakistani bridal Dowries now routinely include four panels, an inverter and a battery. This is an inversion of the normal order of things, in which rich countries get all the good stuff first and poor countries like Pakistan get scraps after we've gorged ourselves. Think of vaccine apartheid, in which monsters like Howard Dean insisted that we had to prevent countries in the global south from making their own Covid vaccines because poor brown people are too stupid and primitive to run a pharma manufacturing operation. But thanks to Comrade Trump, Pakistan was first in line to become the world's solar capital. The country's LNG terminal, built with Chinese belt and road money, is now a stranded asset because no one there needs gas. That's gas whose supply has been choked off in the Strait of Epstein. Which brings me to Trump's foreign policy and its impact on the global energy shift. Transitory energy shortages have small effects. When your energy bill goes up for a while because of extreme weather, say it makes you angry and sad and might result in an electoral loss for whatever politician presided over the price hike. But when you get genuine prolonged shortages, the sort that are accompanied by rationing, you make permanent changes. Rationing is so psychologically scarring that it induces people to make long delayed investments that result in permanent changes to their consumption habits. Maybe you've known for a long time that an induction top would be better for your indoor air quality and your cooking than the gas range you have now. But you don't want to buy a whole new appliance and pay for an electrician to run a high wattage line, an expensive conduit from your breaker panel to your kitchen. But if you're an Indian restaurateur who can no longer get any cooking gas because it's being rationed for household use, then you are going out to buy whatever induction top you can lay hands on. Maybe it's a cheap low powered single burner, one that plugs into your existing electrics. Or maybe you're splashing out and swapping out your whole gas appliance. Whichever it is, you are no longer interested in your chef's insistence that real cooking gets done over gas. If your chef can't cook on an induction top, your chef will need to find employment elsewhere. This is going on all over the world right now as people buy EVs and pay to have chargers installed at home. Maybe getting a twofer on their conduit runs with two high power lines run through the same conduit infrastructure in Australia, where the last shipment of gas for the foreseeable came into port last week. People are calling their local EV dealers and offering to buy whatever car is on the lot, sight unseen. Meanwhile, in Ethiopia, a series of dollar related crises caused the country to ban imports of internal combustion engines altogether. Oil and gas are denominated in dollars, which means that you can only get oil if you first sell stuff to Americans or others who will pay in dollars. The country's fleet of noisy, dirty motorbikes is swiftly being replaced by E bikes that get eight miles to the penny. E bikes are insanely great technology. Cheap, rugged and reliable, they're basically bicycles that abolish hills. Once you've gotten accustomed to an E bike, maybe you've invested in a folding helmet and a raincoat. You'll never go back. The advantages of an E bike commute over a car commute are legion, but my favorite little pleasure is the ability to easily make a stop at a nice coffee shop halfway between home and work, rather than being stuck buying shitty chain coffee near the office. Four years ago, another mad emperor, Vladimir Putin, invaded Ukraine and in so doing catapulted Europe's energy transition into the Greta scene with unimaginable defeats for the fossil fuel lobby. Not just subsidies for the clean energy transition, but also policy shifts in areas that had been deadlocked for a decade, like approvals for balcony solar, which is transforming the continent. Even the uk, one of the oil industry's most reliable vassal states, is now green lighting balcony solar. This may not sound like much, but the UK is a country whose politics is composed of 50% hatred of migrants and trans people and 50% incredibly stupid planning battles. Great Britain is a magical land where your neighbors can ask the government to prevent you from installing double glazing on the grounds that it will change the historic character of their neighborhood of terraced Victorian homes. I once lost a fight to get permission to put a little glass greenhouse on my balcony on the grounds that it would alter the facade of the undistinguished low rise 1960s industrial building. I live on top of. The fact that His Majesty's government is going to tell your facade obsessed neighbors to fuck off all the way into the sun so that you can hang solar panels off your balcony is nothing short of a miracle. Comrade Putin's contribution to oil soaked Britain's energy transition to can't be overstated thanks to free market policies that sent energy prices soaring. After the Ukraine invasion, Brits installed so much solar despite the existing impediments to solarization that now the government is begging us to use more energy. This summer because the grid can't absorb all those lovely free electrons. The UK is on a glide path to adopting the the Australian plan. Australia also benefited from Trump 1's solar embargo, receiving a ton of cheap solar that would otherwise have ended up in America. Now Australia has so much solar that they're giving away electricity with three free hours of unlimited energy every day. Stick your dishwasher, clothes dryer and EV charger on a timer, invest in a battery or two and fill your boots. Maybe at this point you're thinking dark thoughts about critical minerals and such. That's not the problem you think it is, and it's getting better every day. To take just one example, lithium batteries are about to be replaced with sodium batteries. Sodium is the world's sixth most abundant element. The Strait of Epstein crisis is going to do more to accelerate permanent unidirectional migration away from fossil fuels to clean tech than decades of environmental activism. Clean tech is so much better than fossil fuels, cheaper, more reliable, cleaner that anyone who tries it becomes an instant convert. That's why the fossil fuel industry has been so insistent that no one get to try it. To take just one example here, Texas ranchers have been solarizing thanks to the state's bizarre free market energy system that sees energy prices spiking so high during cold snaps that you literally have to choose between freezing to death and going bankrupt. Solar is great for agriculture, especially in climate ravaged Texas, where it provides crucial shade for crops and livestock while substantially reducing soil evaporation, resulting in substantial irrigation savings. When the oil captured, Texas legislature introduced a bill to force electric companies to to add 1 watt of fossil power for every watt of solar that their customers installed. Furious ranchers from blood red Republican rural districts flooded their town hall meetings decrying the plan as DEI for fossil fuels. The bill died. This is the template for the long foreseeable future. Thanks to Trump's stupid, bloody, unforgivable war of choice in the Gulf. The war is going to install unimaginable amounts of clean tech. They are going to throw away their water heaters, motorbikes, furnaces and cars and replace them with all electric versions. They're going to cover their roofs and balconies with panels. The battery industry will experience a sustained boom. The fortunes that fossil fuel companies are reaping from the current shortage is their last windfall. The writing is on the wall. Trump opened Alaska for drilling and the oil companies noped out because they couldn't find a bank that would loan them the money to get started. Then it happened Again, in Venezuela, this defossilizing was already the direction of travel. The only question was the pace at which the transition would proceed. And Comrade Trump has just stomped all over the liquid natural gas. Pedal energy is just one realm where Trump is doing praxis. One of the most exciting developments that trumpismo's incontinent belligerence has induced is the global technology transition. For decades, the only people pointing out the dangers of using America's cash grabbing, privacy invading defective tech exports were digital rights hippies like me. And our victories were modest and far between. Despite the Snowden revelations, despite the tech industry's prolific snootcocking at EU privacy regulators and Canadian lawmakers, we all just carried on using these incredibly dangerous, steadily and shittifying big tech products. We even run our governments and structurally important companies off big tech. We let us tech companies update, that is downgrade the software on our cars and tractors, our pacemakers and ventilators, our power plants and telephone switches. There's lots of reasons for this. For one thing, ripping out and replacing all that software and firmware is a prodigious challenge, as is building the data centers to host it for every digitally sovereign country. Add to that the complexity of successfully migrating data edit histories, archives and identities, and you're looking at a very big lift. So long as American tech bosses kept their enshidificatory gambits to a measured, slow flow, they could keep the pain beneath the threshold where it was worth us boiling frogs leaping out of their pot. But the most important force defending American Internet hegemony was free trade. Specifically, the US Forced all its trading partners to adopt anti circumvention laws that make it illegal to modify US Tech exports. That means that you can't go into business selling your neighbors the tools to use generic ink or an independent app store, much less make a fortune exporting those tools to the rest of the world. Enter comrade Trump. When Trump started weaponizing US Tech platforms to take away the working files, email accounts and cloud calendars of judges who pissed him off by sentencing Bolsonaro to prison and by swearing out a genocide warrant for Netanyahu, he put the whole world on notice that he could shut down their governments, judiciaries, or companies at the click of a mouse. And of course, he's whacked the whole world with tariffs that violate the trade agreements that impose the anti circumvention obligations that protect America's defective tech exports. Now, there's no longer any reason to keep those laws on the books. Happy Liberation Day everyone. The post American Internet is at hand, but Trump has even more praxis up his spray tan stained sleeves. Trump is succeeding where Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren and AOC failed. He's making the case for Democrats to defenestrate their useless sellout Epstein poisoned leaders all across the country. Radical Dems and avowed socialists are sweeping primaries and elections as voters realize that blue no matter who will doom them to eternal torment. In the mansion cinematic universe, fury over Trumpismo is pushing even the most useless Democratic leaders to sign up for billionaire taxes. Thanks to Comrade Trump, the median Democratic voter will no longer be satisfied with kente cloth, photo ops and little ping pong paddles stenciled with down with this sort of thing. Thanks to Trump, we might see criminal prosecutions and a primary challenge for any Dem that gets in the way of a serious Nuremberg style reckoning with Trumpismo and its gangsters. Look, all things being equal, I would have preferred that Trump had keeled over from a mid burger stroke on the campaign trail in 2016. But when life gives you SARS, you make SARS gorilla. This is a deeply shitty timeline, but Comrade Trump keeps tripping over his red tie. Let's take the wins. Well, I hope that's given you some hope. Let me look at my calendar and see the next time I'm going to be in front of this mic on a Sunday. Maybe the 16th? Yeah, maybe the 16th. I'll. Yeah. In fact I will be because I'll have the new Kickstarter. So yes, I'll talk to you then. Yeah, have a great week. Bye. That was the Cory Doctorow Podcast. Licensed Creative Commons Attribution Non commercial share alike 4.0 or as woody Guthrie put it in another context, this song is copyrighted in the US under seal of copyright 154085 for a period of 28 years. And anyone caught singing it without our permission will be a mighty good friend of ourn because we don't give a dern. Publish it, write it, sing it, swing to it, yodel it. We wrote it and that's all we wanted to do. Many thanks to John Taylor Williams of Rynek Studio. That's wry n an eck for Engineering and mastering. John Taylor Williams is a broadcast technology specialist, an audio engineer, and a musician. In his spare time, he likes to carve useful objects out of wood, antler and steel.