← Podcast – Cory Doctorow's craphound.com
Podcast – Cory Doctorow's craphound.com
Not Normal
This week on my podcast, I read Not Normal, my latest Locus Magazine column, about the surreal and terrible world we’ve been eased into thanks to anti-circumvention laws. If you were paying attention in 1998, you could see what was coming. Computers were getting much cheaper, and much smaller. From cars to toasters, from speakers... more
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Well, hey there and welcome back to a long overdue Cory Doctor podcast. I find myself for change at my desk in London. But that is about to change because I will be in Toronto on April 8th and I will be delivering lecture for the Humber Polytechnic President's Lecture Series. And then I'll be in Montreal on April 10 for a panel with Astra Taylor for the Bronfman Lecture Series that night. Also April 10, also in Montreal, you can catch me at the Drawn and Quarterly Bookstore. I'll be back in Toronto on April 16 for Democracy Exchange. And then I will be in San Francisco on April 23rd keynoting the 2026 Berkeley Spring Forum on M and A, the boardroom. And that will actually be in San Francisco, not Berkeley. Back in London for April 25 to speak at Resisting Big Tech Empires and in New York on April 29th at Commonweal Ventures to talk about inshittification. And then on April 30th a panel at the Strand Bookstore for Penworld Voices series called Techademic with the wonderful Sarah Jiang, the wonderful Tochi Onyebuchi, and Aliyah Dastiger, whose work I'm not as familiar with but I'm sure is wonderful. And then I will be in Berlin and I'm going to be giving a couple of talks at Repubblika May 18th through 20th, and on May 18th and May 19th I will be speaking at Other Land books in Kreuzberg May 22nd through 25th, albeit hey on Wye for the how the Light Gets in festival. And then I'll be back in London on June 2 to give a talk at south by Southwest London. So that's all the talks I've got coming up. As I say, I'm back in London, bouncing around between London and LA these days as our family has become a two continent household. It's a little weird, but starting to get the hang of it. Maybe had a couple of very good days in London and this afternoon we're planning to go down to the new market at King's Cross. It's not that new, but it's new since we used to live here. So I always like a Sunday market. I've been doing a lot of writing despite all the traveling, so I now have the Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life after AI, my AI criticism book in the can I think it is from fully delivered and that'll be out in June. And I am working on the third draft of the Post American Internet, the book that I've got coming out the following winter. So sometime next winter, either late 2026 or early 2027. Also late 2026, early 2027, the graphic novel of Inshidification and the graphic novel of Unauthorized Bread. So lots of writing projects underway and today I'm going to be reading to you from another writing project. This is my latest column from LOC from the April edition of Locus magazine, and it's a column that I wrote while I was developing one of the themes for my upcoming book, the Post American Internet. And so from the April 2026 edition of Locus magazine. This is not Normal. Norms change. That's a foundation of science fictional thinking all laws are local, and no law knows how local it is. It's not unusual for the bedrock ethos of your childhood to be overturned by your dotage. As Douglas Adams put it. 1. Anything that is in the world when you're born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works. 2. Anything that is invented between when you're 15 and 35 is new and exciting and revolutionary, and you can probably get a career in it. 3. Anything invented after you're 35 is against the natural order of things. So I'm keenly aware that when a 54 year old man like me rails against some modern commonplace, it is very likely that he I is am wrong and that the infernal innovation is good actually, and he I is am simply out of touch on balance of probabilities, then I am probably wrong about the subject of this article, but I don't think I AM. Back in 1998, Bill Clinton signed a very abnormal law, the Digital Millennium Copyright act, or DMCA. Under Section 1201 of the DMCA, it's a felony to modify your own property. So it works in ways the manufacturer disapproves of, irrespective of whether the stuff you want to do is Otherwise legal. In 1998, it was possible to pretend that this was only a little abnormal. DMCA 1201 kicks in only when someone modifies a digital product or service, and only when that digital doodad has an access control that attempts to prevent modification. In the late 1990s, this rule touched only a few products, like DVD players. DVDs are digital. The digital files on a DVD are scrambled. They require a key to descramble them. That is they have an access control. So a DVD is digital and it has an access control. There are lots of things you can legally do with a dvd. For example, you can rip it to your computer Just like you do with an audio CD. Audio CDs are digital, but they're not scrambled. So DMCA 1201 doesn't apply to them. But the movie studios didn't want you to do this. This was the home taping is killing music crowd. The you wouldn't steal a car people. They couldn't get Congress to pass a law banning you from ripping your discs, but they didn't need to. DMCA 1201 means that once they add an access control to their product, it's illegal to do any anything they don't like with it. Not just a little illegal either. Violations of DMCA 1201 carry a five year prison sentence and a $500,000 fine. Once DMCA 1201 was on the books, corporations could think of entirely new ways of restricting how you used your property. Take region coding. Movie studios wanted to sell discs at different prices in different countries. A disc that sold for $10 in the US for $2 in India. But they were worried about parallel importation. That is what if people brought home discs from Mumbai for use in Manhattan? This could wipe out the extra profits they stood to make from discounting abroad. So they added region codes to discs and players. A DVD player knew which country it belonged to and if it encountered a disk from another country, and it would refuse to play that out of region disc. Now, it is no copyright violation to walk into a DVD store in Bangkok, put down your money in exchange for an official licensed dvd, and then bring it home to play in Boston or Buffalo. But the fact that the disc was digital, combined with the fact that it had an access control, made it a felony to watch that disc, even though you weren't violating anyone's copyright. This irritated a lot of people, but very few of us realized the profound change that was taking place all around us. If you were paying attention in 1998, you could see what was coming. Computers were getting much cheaper and much smaller. From cars to toasters, from speakers to TVs, we were shoveling them into our devices. And it doesn't take a lot of expense or engineering to add an access control to any of these computers. That meant that DMCA 1201 was about to metastasize. Once you put a computer in a thermostat or a bassinet or a stovetop or a hearing aid, you can add an access control and make it a felony to use it in ways the manufacturer disprefers. You can make it illegal to use cheap batteries or a different app. Store. You can add little chips to parts, everything from a fuel pump to a touchscreen, and make it illegal to manufacture a working generic part, because the generic part has to bypass the access control in the device that checks to see whether it's the manufacturer's own part. This scam is used by GE to force you to pay a 10,000% margin for the charcoal filter and your fridge's water chiller. It's used by Medtronic to force hospitals to pay for a service call to fix their ventilators, rather than having their own technicians fix them when they're needed. It's used by Mercedes to rent you the accelerator pedal in your own car, which unlocks only half of your engine's power unless you pay a monthly subscription. Tesla does it too, letting you use only half of the charge in your battery unless you subscribe to the other half. This is not normal. It's not normal to own something and for it to be a crime to use it in ways that benefit you, even if it makes the manufacturer sad. It's not normal to have a book you can't sell or loan or give away. We've been selling and loaning and giving away our books for millennia. These practices predate publishing. They predate printing. They predate binding. They predate paper. It's not normal for the government to hand over its legal and judicial apparatus to corporations that sell you things but still demand to dictate how you use the things you buy. I'm not the world's biggest private property, Stan, but this is what it means to own property. To quote Blackstone from 1753, There is nothing which so generally strikes the imagination and engages the affections of mankind as the right of property, or that soul and despotic dominion which one man claims and exercises over the external things of the world in total exclusion of the right of any other individual in the universe. You get to decide what you do with your stuff. Sure, the government might ban you from branding your neighbor with a frying pan, but it is not normal for the government to offer the frying pan's manufacturer a blank check to dictate what you're allowed to cook with that panel, or to charge you extra if you want your eggs scrambled, not fried. This is not normal. It's been more than a quarter of a century since we entered this abnormal state, and in that time the abnormal has been thoroughly normalized. Suggest that people own iPhones should be allowed to decide where they buy their software, even if Apple would rather they use the company's App Store. And you will be more mobbed by Apple customers who think that buying products from a $3.8 trillion corporation makes them a member of an oppressed religious minority, and who view your ideas as dangerous heresy. For a decade, states have tried, with limited success, to pass right to repair laws that require automakers to end the sleazy little racket of charging mechanics $10,000 a year for a diagnostic tool that turns your check engine light into an actual error message. Every time one of these bills comes up for debate, the automakers howl bloody murder and seemingly reasonable people say things like they got a point. Why shouldn't you be forced to use the manufacturer's repair depot if that's what they want? This has been normalized, but it is not normal. The idea that you can own something and thus decide how you use it, even if the manufacturer disagrees or was with us for millennia. It can't be overturned in a handful of years by a cabal of inbred monopolists. It's not normal. What is normal is the idea that your stuff is yours and you should have the final say over it. That's not a radical idea. It's just normal. I may be an old guy, and far be it from me to argue with Douglas Adams RIP but I do think that this is against the natural order of things. I hope you agree. All right, then next Sunday, I don't think I'm going to be anywhere near my desk. Let me have a quick look. Yeah, Next Sunday I'll be on a plane from Toronto back to London after Democracy Exchange. And you know, the following Sunday I'll be in a plane from San Francisco back to London after the Berkeley Forum. And the following Sunday I'll be in a plane from New York to London after the Penworld Voices. And then the following Sunday, Ugh, I'm gonna be on another plane. Boy, I take a lot of planes on Sundays. Oh, but Sunday 16th May, I will be back in town and I'll be running a Kickstarter for the Reverse Centaur. So I will definitely come on and talk to you about that. What I'll probably end up doing then is playing you an hour of the Reverse Centaur Audiobook. Sounds like a good idea. So mark your calendars 16th of May. Talk to you then. Bye now. 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 Ryneck Studio. That's W R Y N E C K 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.