← Podcast – Cory Doctorow's craphound.com
Podcast – Cory Doctorow's craphound.com
The age of vapor
This week on my podcast, I read my latest Locus Magazine column, “The Age of Vapor,” about the role science fiction imaginaires plays in fueling high-tech investment bubbles. It’s one thing to make everything about imaginary technology when you’re writing SF. The point of those imaginative exercises is to illuminate: To provoke reflection on our... more
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Well, hey, it's the Cory Doctorow podcast, Los Angeles edition. I'm back at my desk in la, but not for long. I will be in Kansas City at the Woodneath library center on June 10th. And yes, that is sold out. But I, as is inevitably the case, probably about 25% of the people who got tickets will not show up. And while I wouldn't swear to it, I think that you can almost certainly count on the fact that if you show up with or without a ticket, they will find a seat for you. So, June 10th, Kansas City, Woodneath Library Center. Then I'm back in Los Angeles on June 19 to start the tour for the Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life after AI. And I'll be with Brian Merchant at Skylight Books. I will be in Menlo park at Kepler's with angie Coiro on June 21. I will be in Toronto on June 23 at Osler Records in the Junction, hosted by Type Books. It's a small venue. It only seats 90, and they expect the tickets to sell out very quickly. They'll be going up this week. I don't think they're actually going to charge for tickets. I think it'll be free. You might have to buy a copy of the book. I'm not sure it's cheap, it's paperback. But get your tickets as soon as they go up. I will post something about that to my socials, et cetera, when that goes live. I will then be in New York on June 24th at the Strand with the Amazing Jonathan Coulton, and then in Philadelphia on June 25th at the Fitler Club with David Williams, presented by The Philadelphia Citizen. June 26th in Chicago with leftist historian and very funny man Rick Perlstein at Exile in Bookville. Rick, you may remember, was the guy who had actually read Project 2025 as well as Project 2021 and Project 2017 and all the other additions because heritage have been for years and he was like the only guy who was reading all 900 pages of it every year. I will be in London at the Idler Festival July 11th through 13th, and at the Edinburgh International Book Festival with Jimmy Wales. And to do a solo talk on August 17th. I'll be at Notre Dame in South Bend on October 6th for an event. And then there's a bunch of other events between now and November that aren't yet public, but I thought I would just mention them so you can kind of make a little bookmark. If you live in or near these places and you want to come see me. I'll be in Sydney, Melbourne and possibly Brisbane at the end of August for a Little Australia mini tour. Then back in London and Brighton and Manchester for the British tour for Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life. After AI, I'll be in Warsaw for the Polish launch of Enchitification and Budapest for the Hungarian launch of Enshitification. I'll be in Berkeley at UC Berkeley for the 25th anniversary of the Samuelson Clinic at the law school. There's then at the Edmonton Public Library. Then I'll be in Hudson, Ohio at the local library. I'll be in Vienna, Austria, in Miami for Wired World, in Kilkenny for Kilkonomics. I'll be in Victoria, Vancouver and Kelowna Vancouver Writers Festival and then some local events in Victoria and Kelowna before going on to the Ottawa Writers Festival. I'll also be in Folkestone in England and in Madrid. And that's all between now and the middle of November. More to come, undoubtedly. But I am for now, as I said, back in Los Angeles after little over a month's absence, and I'm gaining a newfound appreciation for just how much entropy there is. I got back after a month and the washing machine is broken and the trees at the front of the house are now doing terrible things that necessitate much gardening and the outdoor lights have stopped working. And all of this somehow just by like not looking at them and paying attention to them every day. Entropy is a terrible thing. Even the chain on my E bike was shot and needed to be replaced. Who knew? But it is nice to be back in la. Nice to be seeing friends again. We've had a couple of social outings in the last couple of days. I've been home for two days. We've got a few more to come this week, but much of this week is taken up with that trip to Kansas and also doing fulfillment on my Kickstarter. If you backed the Reverse Centaur Kickstarter. I am doing my damnedest to get you your books and discovering every bug in the Kickstarter platform, which there are many of. But I am so happy that people have been so enthusiastic about filling in their surveys and getting their stuff and I can't wait to start shipping out the books at the end of the week and it's going to be really good. I got a busy day today after I finish recording this podcast. I'm going for a swim and then I'm starting work on the rewrite of the Post American Internet. My book that's coming out in August 2027 about digital sovereignty and geopolit. And then this afternoon we're going to go see the new Boots Riley movie, which is I Love Boosters, his follow up to Sorry to Bother your, a movie I absolutely adored. They are not getting the wide release for this movie that it deserves. I am sure it's going to be amazing. Every review has just left me salivating. If you get a chance to see it in your town, I really recommend it. I love Boosters. Boots Riley, the frontman for the Coupe and all around like genius creator. So yes, I really recommend going to see that. And now I'm going to get to this week's reading, which is my latest column from Locus magazine came out in the May 2026 edition of Locus and it's called the Age of Vapor. Making up imaginary new technologies is a fun game. It's so fun we built a whole genre around it. Even more fun is making up the social arrangements of those technologies, imagining who will use them and how. Think of Gardner Dozois. Quote, most science fiction can predict the car. Some SF can predict the drive in theater. But SF that can predict the changes in teenage sexual behavior as a result of the drive in is vanishingly rare. Thought experiments are great. They can be inspirational or cautionary. Cyberpunk was a warning, not a suggestion. W. Gibson. They can be both. What they are not, however, is investment advice. Speculative technological narratives are not limited to science fiction. They play a critical role in the tech industry, and that role has increased dramatically in this century. In the late 2000s, American tech giants began to saturate their markets, and as a result, their long run of meteoric growth looked set to end. After all, once Google had a 90% market share in search, how is it going to continue growing? Sure, they could raise a billion humans to maturity in the hopes of turning them into Google users. But Google Classroom was going to take 10 to 15 years to pay off, and Wall street wants to see growth now. Wall street is the key impetus for these companies to continue growing. Wall street values growth stocks at a much higher multiple than mature stocks. That means that two companies with the same income and the same profit can have wildly different valuations. If one of them has been holding steady for years while the other continues to grow every year. A share in a company is a claim on its future profits, after all, and the future profits from a growing company are larger than the future profits from a company that has reached a steady state. Edward Abbey famously observed that growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell. But for companies exposed to the financial markets, the imperative to continue growing isn't the ideology of the cancer cell. It's not an ideology at all. It's a purely material phenomenon. Because the corollary of the idea that a growth stock is worth more than a mature stock is when a growing company saturates its market and stops growing, it suddenly becomes grossly overvalued. The company is no longer a growing concern, so it should be revalued as a mature firm. In practice, that means sudden, dramatic sell offs of company stock. Think of what happened to Meta in January 2022 when Mark Zuckerberg disclosed that the company's US growth wasn't as high as they had predicted. This news, a mere slowdown in growth, triggered a panic sell off of Meta stock, which plunged 25% as $240 billion was wiped away in a single day. At the time, it was the largest drop in corporate valuation in world history. This is bad news for Meta investors, of course, but it's far worse news for Meta's executives. After all, Meta executives are largely compensated with company stock. So a 25% drop in the stock price is roughly equivalent to a 25% drop in top executives personal net worths. This kind of stock slump can easily induce a mass exodus of the most employable, most sought after executives and employees in the company. Which means that a company the tips into this kind of nosedive will find itself with fewer and fewer skilled technicians to help avert the crash. That's just one way that a slumping share price makes growth far harder. But it's even worse for the company itself. After all, one of the surest ways for a company to grow is to buy another company. And if your stock price is buoyant, you can buy that company in a stock swap. Which means that your company can hoard its cash to spend on other things like marketing, real estate, capital, dividends and buybacks. But once your stock starts to dive, no one wants to trade their company for it. Which means that the newly mature company can only achieve merger based growth by parting with its precious cash. So any company that is in danger of saturating its market needs to have a powerful narrative up its sleeve about how it will continue to grow. The alternative is serious and possibly fatal financial calamity. This is why companies like Google started to make showy announcements and internal full court presses to invade the markets that had been claimed by other firms. In 2011, Google announced Google plus or G, a Facebook like service. The not so buried subtext of that launch was that Google Google was about to absorb Facebook's market too. Perhaps the plus meant our market will be Google's plus. Facebook's. There are plenty of narrative advantages to announcing your intention to capture Facebook's market. For one thing, it's very easy to determine how big Facebook's market is. You just have to look at its latest balance sheet and say, that's how much bigger we'll be once we wipe out Facebook. But there's a downside to pegging a narrative to a real thing in the world like Facebook. Facebook itself has definite opinions about the plausibility of Google taking over its market, and they're not shy about sharing them. The existence of Facebook's counter narrative makes Google's own tale less convincing. The same thing applied a few years later, when Facebook announced through its pivot to video that it would shortly take over YouTube's market. The downsides of making claims about real things, counterclaims from the people who currently control those things evidently exceed the upsides. A non controversial way of valuing real things. Because shortly after Facebook's pitch invasion against YouTube, both Facebook and Google and the rest of the tech sector pivoted to making claims about imaginary technology. This is our modern era, the era of cryptocurrency and NFTs, the metaverse and Web3, and now, of course, AI and superintelligence. There's no way to provide high quality evidence about the potential value of these markets. Sure, but what if that was a feature rather than a bug? If no one can say how large these markets will be, then who's to say that they won't be gigantic? Back in the dot com days, when I had a startup, I asked a tech finance lawyer how he came up with evaluations for the companies he built term sheets for. He drew himself up and said with great seriousness, any number multiplied by a sufficiently large imaginary number is an even larger number. In other words, figure out a way that the company might make a dollar, then multiply that by a very large number representing how many times the company will have the opportunity to make that dollar, and you'll get a whopping number of dollars. Indeed, it's one thing to make everything about imaginary technology when you're writing science fiction. The point of those imaginative exercises is to illuminate, to provoke reflection on our present moment, to inspire or warn about the future. But spinning narratives about imaginary technology as investment advice is a very different matter. The point here is to obscure to convince investors that a company with a 90% market share will somehow continue to grow to stave off the day when Stein's Law, that is if something cannot go on forever, it will stop asserts itself. Okay, that's it. Next Sunday, I want to say I'm out of town again, right? I'm out on tour. Yeah, I will be. Oh, I will be here. No, no, that's Saturday. Hang on. No, no, no, I'll be in. Yeah, I'll be in Menlo Park. So next Sunday. So I won't be podcasting then. And the following Sunday I'm going to be in New York, and the Sunday after that I will be in London. So you might get a podcast on the 5th of July. Don't hold me to it, but I'll do my ding dangdest. And in the meantime, I hope to see you at one of those stops on the road and I hope you have a great week. And I hope if you got your copy of the Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI and the Kickstarter that you are enj and if you didn't get one, well, you can get one at your favorite bookseller. It'll be on sale on the 23rd of June. Nice talking to you. Talk to you later. 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.