← Podcast – Cory Doctorow's craphound.com
Podcast – Cory Doctorow's craphound.com
Post-political
This week on my podcast, I read Post-political, a recent essay from my Pluralistic newsletter, about the material, irreconcilable differences between leftism and other political beliefs. But when it comes to a “post-politics that is neither right nor left,” the definition I turn to most often comes from science fiction writer Steven Brust, who once... more
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Welcome back to the Cory Doctorow podcast. On August 12th, I'm doing a virtual event with the Electronic Frontier foundation for the Effecting Change series. My dialogue partner will be Nicole Ozer, our new Executive director, replacing the wonderful Cindy Cohen, who retired last month. Nicole comes to us from the ACLU and she is terrific and it's going to be terrific to get a chance to talk with her for all of you, so please do tune in and if you can't make it, you can tune into the video record afterwards. Then I'm heading to Edinburgh. I will be doing a few events at the Edinburgh International book Festival on August 16th and 17th, a solo event and a talk with Jimmy Wales. After that I fly to Australia. I will be in Sydney at the Festival of Dangerous Ideas. I'm doing two general events there, one a solo event, one a panel, and then I'm also doing a school event, so if you've got kids who are attending that they can come to that event. After that I fly to Melbourne. I'm going to be at the Wheeler center doing a solo presentation on inshidification. And then I fly back to the UK and on September 8th I will be in Brighton with Carol Cadwallader for my book the Reverse Centaur's Guide to life after AI. And on September 9th I'll be back in London with Riley Quinn from Trash Future and no Gods, no Mares at an event sponsored by Foyles Piccadilly at a nearby church. There are some other UK events, including one in Manchester on September 11, that are still being firmed up, but you'll be able to catch me at those as well. There's also going to be a Novara Media event in London around there too. Again, I'm just waiting for those details. I will be in South Bend at Notre Dame on October 6th, and I will be in Ohio for one or two events right after that. Those are also being finalized right now, so I hope this podcast sounds a little better than I've sounded in the last little while. When I moved back to London, I did not have my cool recording setup that I had in Los Angeles. I have now augmented my recording setup. I've got a microphone arm so I'm able to adjust the position of the microphone more precisely. And I've got a sound baffle behind me that I hope is deflecting some of the sounds from all the hard surfaces in my office here in London. So we'll see how this turns out. I really do like to try and make it sound as good as I can. And of course, John, who edits this podcast, always does an amazing job, even when I present him with substandard materials. So the last book that I published was the Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life after AI. It came out last month. It is in, I believe now its fifth week as the number one best selling nonfiction title in Canada. It's also an American national bestseller and it's doing very well abroad in the UK and elsewhere. So I'm very happy with how that's coming out. If you'd like, you can get a copy wherever books are sold, and I hope you will enjoy it too. I have a lot of nonfiction in the pipeline. There's another nonfiction book coming out next summer called the Post American Internet, and there's an essay collection called the Memex Method, both of which are going to be coming from Ferrer, Strauss and Giroux. And I do have some graphic novels in the pipeline as well. There's going to be a graphic novel based on my novella Unauthorized Bread from First Second next spring, and there's also going to be a graphic novel, also from First Second, adapting my book in shittification the following winter. So all of that is in the pipeline. What there isn't in the pipeline is any novels, and I think that's about to change. I have been having lots of ideas for novels lately, and I've been having a long dialogue by email with my agent this week about what kind of novel I might write and who I might write it for and how it might proceed. And I've really got the bit in my teeth. There's a moment before the novel sort of coheres where it's a bunch of set pieces and big complicated emotions and fragments, and eventually that starts to sort of unroll into a kind of linear structure with beginning and a middle and an end. And I can feel that starting to happen. So I'm really excited about that novel. I'll keep you up to date on it as it sort of gels and let you know how it's coming. And of course in the newsletter I always note whatever writing projects I'm working on. So once that has a title, once that is actually being written on a daily basis, you'll see it in pluralistic.net and get daily updates on the word count and how it's coming along. So this week I'm going to be reading to you another one of my pluralistic posts. This One is from the 8th of July, and it's a response to a presentation I saw at the Hard Art seminars. These are these seminars that Brian Eno organizes on a monthly basis in London. And this summer and last spring we've been talking about systems change, and the speaker was talking about system theory and theories of system change and tossed off a little remark about a certain idea being neither left nor right. And I thought to myself, this person does not have a solid idea of what is meant by left or right, and they're hardly the only one. And so I wrote this essay and so, without further ado, from the 8 July edition of Pluralistic this is post Political. There's plenty of reasons to be skeptical of centrists who bemoan political polarization and call for a politics that abandons the tribalism of left and right. Obviously there's the false equivalence. On the right you have fascists who want to send masked armed goons into the street to beat, kidnap, and murder your neighbors. On the left you have calls for higher taxes, unions, environmental impact reviews for data centers, and an end to the genocide in Gaza. Leftist extremism is moving some zines around. Right wing extremism is attempting the overthrow of the government, murdering brown people and gulags, and the earth's richest man slaughtering the world's poorest children for the lulz horseshoe theory. The idea that the far right and the far left actually bend around to meet each other is bullshit. The reality is that the right and the left have large substantive disagreements that are matters of life and death. Anyone dismissing these as tribalism doesn't know what left and right mean. At best, they have mistaken a collection of cultural signifiers like pronouns, mma, and brands of beer for politics. Mistaking cultural signifiers and identity markers for politics is centrism's most dangerous pathology. It's the thing that makes centrism the handmaiden of the right. If you think identity markers are politics, then you'll be tempted to think the answer to a world run by 150 rich white cis straight guys is to replace half of them with women, people of color, and queers. The difference between the left and the right isn't the identities of the ruling class. It's whether we have a ruling class at all. I collect definitions of right and left. There's Corey Robbins definition from the reactionary mind that conservativism is the belief that some people were born to rule and others to be ruled over, and that any attempt to elevate the latter group to positions of power through civil rights movements, affirmative action, and so on will result in dire misrule and disaster. This explains how the right can encompass white nationalists rule by white people, Hindu nationalists rule by high caste Hindus, libertarians rule by bosses, Zionists rule by Jews, imperialists rule by military aggressors, and so on. It also explains the right's obsession with learning the racial and gender markers of anyone involved in a plane crash or other disaster. See the oil tanker was being piloted by a DEI hire when it crashed into that bridge. Now another important definition is Wilhoyt's Law. Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition. To wit, there must be in groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out groups whom the law binds but does not protect. This one hardly needs explanation in this era of it's not a crime if the President does it, where Alex Jones can owe billions to the parents of dozens of murdered children and somehow not have to pay or give up his assets. But when it comes to a post politics that is neither left nor right, the definition I turn to most often comes from science fiction writer Steven Brust, who once told me left and right have had the same meaning since the French Revolution. If you want to know if someone is on the left or the right, ask them what is more important, human rights or property rights? If they say property rights are a human right, then they are on the right. That's it. That's the crux. If you think that property rights are a tool for achieving human rights, then you're on the left. You might support the right of farmers to block attempts to expropriate them via eminent domain in order to build a data center, or the right of people not to have their homes or devices searched by cops, or a library's right to own and archive digital books, even if the publishers insist that ebooks are never sold, merely licensed. If property rights are a tool to achieve human rights, then property rights can be set aside when they impede other rights. Human beings have the right to healthcare, which is why we should have taken away the pharma company's patents and copyrights, ending vaccine apartheid and letting the poor world make its own vaccines. Human beings have the right to shelter. If your town has a million empty homes and a million homeless people, there's an obvious solution. At the very least, you can tax the shit out of empty homes to discourage the creation of derelict, empty blights. Human beings have the right to food. If a cartel claims that you may not legally sell your £100,000 of nectarines, you can just give them away and tell the cartel to fuck off. As Brust says, this fight is as Old as the French Revolution. It's literally the plot of Les Mis in days gone by, I stole a loaf of bread in order to live. Note that this framework leaves plenty of room for disagreement among leftists. We can disagree about who should get taxed and how, when a company should be ordered to destroy its ill gotten loot and when that loot should be divided up among its victims. And what to do about empty houses and homeless people. We can disagree about reparations, about collectivization and cooperatives, about land reform. Very, very few leftists want to abolish property. But to be a leftist is to agree that property is only ever a means and never an end. In systems thinking we are counseled that the most profound and durable changes come from shifts in property paradigms from which all laws, rules and arrangements flow. Left and right represent two radically different paradigms. The rights paradigm is that property rights are human rights, which cashes out to property rights are the only human right. If property rights are a human right, then I can burn down my orchard and laugh as you starve outside the gates. If property rights are human rights, I can leave an apartment building empty while you freeze to death on its sidewalk. If property rights are human rights, I can fill my factory with death traps and insist that the workers I kill freely chose to assume that risk. As economists would say, they have a revealed preference for being killed at work. Leftists view property rights as a tool like laws or regulations or polls or voting. Used well, these tools can produce prosperity for all. But voting and laws aren't goods unto themselves. The Swiss practice of voting on whether your neighbors qualify for citizenship is barbaric. Good regulation and laws are good, but simply passing any law is stupid and gets you into terrible trouble, even if the stupid law you've passed is designed to solve a real problem. Viewed as tools, property rights are perfectly useful ways of achieving the primary purpose of a civilization to safeguard the human rights of its people. Viewed as ends unto themselves, property rights are a terrible danger to our civilization and species. If you believe property rights are tools, then you can pass laws banning corporations from electioneering. If you believe property rights are human rights, then you end up supporting unlimited dark money spending in elections. If you believe property rights are tools, you can order landlords who want to ban their tenants from installing balcony solar to free off. If you believe property rights are human rights, then landlords can force their tenants to pay every dime the fossil industry fuel demands of them. Property right as a tool allows you to defend a farmer's right to install a wind farm and still to block a data center from installing a gas turbine on its own land. Post political movements are made up of people who don't know what politics is. A centrist is ultimately a rightist, because the foundation of rightism is the supremacy of property. It is the ideology that breeds hereditary aristocracy. Property is a human right means that it's a violation of your human rights to expect you to work for a living if you emerged from a very lucky orifice. It's the ideology that breeds oligarchy. Politics are not a bunch of cultural signifiers or identity markers. Politics aren't about who rules, it's about whether we are ruled at all or whether we are free. Okay, so that is this week's podcast and let me see. I think I'm actually around next weekend, so you might get another podcast then. Look at that. I am, yes. So August 2nd, expect another podcast. It was great talking to you and I hope you're enjoying your summer. It's lovely, slightly foggy day here in London after a lot of very, very hot, sticky days, so it's a bit of a relief and I'm planning to enjoy the day we're seeing the Odyssey later. I hope you have a great week and I'll talk to you next week. That was the Cory Doctorow podcast. Licensed Creative Commons Attribution Non commercial share alike 4.0 or as woody Guthrie put it, but 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 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.