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Understood: Artificial Intimacy
Bonus: Cory Doctorow chats about his new novel on Bookends with Mattea Roach
00:41:48
<p>In this special bonus conversation, Cory Doctorow sits down with Bookends host Mattea Roach to discuss his latest novel, Picks &amp; Shovels. The book is the third in his series about forensic accountant Martin Hench, who investigates financial crime in Silicon Valley.</p><p><br></p><p>When the book ends, the conversation begins. Mattea Roach speaks with writers who have something to say about their work, the world and our place in it. You’ll always walk away with big questions to ponder and new books to read.</p><p><br></p><p>You can find Bookends wherever you listen to podcasts, or here: <a href="https://link.mgln.ai/5tjomL" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">https://link.mgln.ai/5tjomL</a></p>
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- [00:01]
Cory Doctorow
World Ocean Day is upon us. But can we really talk about 2/3 of the Earth's surface in just one day? Absolutely not. I'm Ian Urbina, back with an all new season of the Outlaw Ocean. My podcast delves into the impossibly vast and shockingly lawless world of the open seas. Find and follow an all new season of the Outlaw Ocean wherever you get your podcasts. This is a CBC podcast Hi, I'm Cory Doctorow. I'm the host of the latest season of who Broke the Internet? I'm back in your feed because I want to tell you about another CBC podcast you might like called Bookends. The show is the go to place for authors to have insightful conversations, giving listeners the chance to go inside the creative minds of of both emerging authors and the writers topping the bestseller lists. I had the pleasure of speaking with Mattea Roach on Bookends. We dove into my latest novel, Picks and shovels. It's the third in my series about a hard fighting, two fisted forensic accountant called Martin Hench, who spent 40 years fighting finance crime in Silicon Valley. Mattea and I also chatted about the dawn of the PC, how the promise of computing got so off track, and why jailbreaking your Tesla might might be the best response to Trump's tariffs. I hope you enjoyed this conversation and I recommend checking out the podcast now. Here's my interview with Mattea on Bookends.
- [01:43]
Mattea Roach
Hey and welcome to Bookends. I'm Mattea Roach. As a Toronto teen in the 1980s, Cory Doctorow was fascinated by computers. A decade later, he found himself in San Francisco, taking part in the movement that was redefining the world. So Corey witnessed firsthand how the early promise of computing was squandered in the name of profit and monopoly, and how the decisions of policymakers allowed this to happen. Now he's a leading journalist and policy advocate, sharing his research and analysis through his blog and many books. But Corey's also a novelist, using fiction to imagine new possibilities and to look back at history, asking how could things be different? And that's what he does with his new novel, Picks and Shovels. It's the third in his crime series about a character named Martin Hench, who works as a forensic accountant in Silicon Valley. Picks and Shovels is one of six books that Corey has published in the past three years, which just goes to show how his brain is absolutely bursting with ideas. Today, Cory Doctorow lives in Burbank, California, but he came into the studio when he was in Toronto to launch his new Book. Here's our conversation from a few weeks ago. Hi, Corey. Thanks for coming in.
- [03:16]
Cory Doctorow
Hi, Mattea. What a pleasure to be here. You know, I hadn't counted how many books it had been until you said that. That does feel a little extreme.
- [03:22]
Mattea Roach
Yeah. That's the real mark of a prolific author is you've lost count of how many books you've published just in the past couple years.
- [03:28]
Cory Doctorow
There's another one October, too, so.
- [03:31]
Mattea Roach
Yeah, so as I mentioned, you're a journalist and activist. You're constantly writing and speaking about technology and policy, but at the same time, you're also crafting these kind of fun adventure crime novels. I tend to think of these as two very different types of work. But how do they work together for you, the fiction and the nonfiction and analysis?
- [03:51]
Cory Doctorow
Well, the first thing I should say is that writing novels is an artistic activity. And. And the point of art, irrespective of what medium, I think, is to take a big, numinous, irreducible feeling that is in a creative person's head and embody it in some intermediary medium and then hope that when an audience experiences the dance or the song or the painting or the photo or the book, that some facsimile of that big, numinous, irreducible thing appears in their head. And the big, numinous, irreducible ideas that are mostly occupying my head are about how we relate to technology and both the promise and peril of ubiquitous technology. And so while I do a lot of nonfiction that is, you know, policy oriented, I hope, never dry, but sometimes very abstract ways of talking about technology, the emotions that this evinces in me, these feelings and that I hope it evinces in you, because I think things are very alarming and we need to do something about it. Those emotions are the emotional motifs of the fiction. It's not necessarily that the fiction is didactic, although admittedly, sometimes it is. It's just that the feeling, the structure of the feeling is the same.
- [05:10]
Mattea Roach
Yeah, you mentioned this sort of sense of alarm, and you've talked also before about writing being kind of a therapeutic practice, that it's a way of processing your anxieties on the page, and it's sort of imagining, I guess, the world otherwise, or imagining the world as it is a little bit. What are you anxious about exactly, that you feel like you need to process in fiction?
- [05:30]
Cory Doctorow
Well, how long have you got? I mean, look, we are standing on the brink of, you know, incipient fascism and climate collapse and xenophobia, genocide, a pogrom against trans people like, you name it, it's happening. And technology is very intimately interwoven into all of this. Right? Technology is the medium through which these pathogenic views transmit themselves. It is the medium through which it traverses. It's also the medium through which we fight it, I think. I mean, look, I spent, I can't tell you how many long nights riding a bicycle around the streets of Toronto with a bucket of wheat paste and a stack of flyers trying to get people out to protest marches. I don't ever want to organize a demonstration with wheat paste and flyers again. And. And so if this is our future, and I think it is, we better figure out how to make this digital nervous system fit for purpose for human civilization, which involves necessarily creating some kind of response to the spread of these very dangerous currents through our technology.
- [06:43]
Mattea Roach
Well, I think your latest novel, this third adventure in the Martin Hench series for me, does hit at this point. Duality that you're talking about that technology can be terribly oppressive is something that can really limit and constrain people's lives, but it's also something that can be liberatory for people. I want to talk about the character Martin Hench first, and we meet him in your first novel in the series, Red Team Blues, as this grizzled and hard hitting forensic accountant who's got one job left before he retires. For folks who are not familiar with the series, can you tell us a bit more about him as a character? Like, what is forensic accounting? Because that's a type of accounting that not everybody might be familiar with.
- [07:22]
Cory Doctorow
Yeah, sure. So forensics, broadly, if you've watched CSI or whatever, forensics is figuring out what happened from the evidence available. And so forensic accounting is figuring out where the money went. There are a lot of people who make the money go places it's not supposed to go. And Marty Hench, his origin story is that at the moment where a sizable fraction of the people who were first encountering a spreadsheet in the 1980s were thinking, I can steal a lot of money with this, he was one of the very few people who are like, boy, I'm going to find a lot of money stolen by people dumber than me using this thing. And that is his story. 40 years in Silicon Valley, being the zelig of finance crime, unwinding every baroque scam that every self important tech bro who thinks that they can design a system so fiendish that no one can ever unravel it, that he's been unraveling them.
- [08:14]
Mattea Roach
I was Raised by a regular government auditor. And so I have very strong feelings about financial crime and loved seeing this hero who was unraveling these scams basically. But you don't think typically of an accountant as a character that would be the lead in a crime thriller. They're not typically seen as a hero figure. Why write about this forensic accountant who's tracing instances of money laundering and all sorts of other financial crimes?
- [08:43]
Cory Doctorow
Well, you know, the epigraph that was supposed to run in the second one of these books, the bezel, but which my publisher cut because we couldn't get copyright clearance, was a quote from a Woody Guthrie song, Pretty Boy Floyd. Some men rob you with a six gun, other men rob you with a fountain pen. And you know, I think in these mangionian times, we are spending a lot of time thinking about the difference between social murder and murder with a gun. If you know anything about crime statistics, you know that if you add up all the shoplifting losses, even at the inflated rates claimed by retailers, and you double it and double it again, you don't even scrape the sides of the wage theft losses, right? So the crime that happens in the finance sector happens at an unimaginable scale. And it seems very abstract. And it's tempting to think of it as millionaire on billionaire violence. Right? Hedge fund managers stealing from high net worth individuals. But mostly what it's doing is it's whacking normies. My poor parents. Ontario pension plan, a teacher's pension plan seemed to be the sucker at every table. Giving $90 million to Sam Bankman fried here and buying magic beans from some other grifter there. And it is a source of enormous pain and suffering. Right. It is the way that people are ruined at scale.
- [10:08]
Mattea Roach
This new novel, Piction Shovels, takes us back to kind of the beginning of your main character Marty Hench's story. It takes us back also to sort of the early days of computing where people were first figuring out that they could in fact use spreadsheets to rob people more efficiently. Essentially to set the scene. It's the mid-1980s. Marty Hench is in his early 20s and he's arriving in San Francisco as personal computers are starting to become a thing that a regular person and might possibly have in their house. Why did you want to turn the clock back to this time specifically?
- [10:41]
Cory Doctorow
Well, first of all, because I think there's a sense that the juncture we've arrived at now what Tom Eastman says calls five giant websites filled with screenshots of text from the other four that it was somehow inevitable. Right? Like the great forces of history showed up and they bore down on us in this moment to transform what was once a wild and woolly place where we had a lot of fun and really interesting and exciting things happened into this kind of toxic hellscape. And I don't think that happened. I think individuals, named individuals in living memory, made specific policy decisions after being warned that those policy decisions would have terrible consequences and that we are now living through those consequences. And instead of living in this kind of passive voice, abstract, third person mistakes were made world, we can point at the people, we can say those guys made these mistakes and they're to blame. And maybe we should be figuring out what size pitchfork they wear. And so in the 1980s, we dismantled competition law. This was Reagan's great innovation. We think a lot about what he did to labor and so on, but that was very immediate. And I think that the long run effects of dismantling antitrust law were much worse. But returning to this moment and showing how in this heroic moment of the PC when nobody knew what they were for, nobody knew who was supposed to be making them, nobody knew how you were supposed to use them, gives you the chance to understand how much possibility we had and what got lost right when we burned down the forest and replanted trees in neat rows.
- [12:17]
Mattea Roach
Yeah, it does seem to me like this time of possibility. And you talk about no one knew what computers were for. As I was preparing for this interview, I realized I actually completely have no idea what computers could do in the 80s. Like, I was born in 98. I've always had Google, I've always had Windows XP or later as my operating system. What was exciting about this time for people that were on the vanguard of personal computing?
- [12:43]
Cory Doctorow
Well, I'll tell you an experience I had. So my dad was a computer science teacher in Scarborough, and in 1979, Apple very shrewdly offered a free computer to take home for the summer to every CS teacher in, I think, the world maybe. And we got this Apple II plus at home. My dad never got to touch it because I didn't leave the house. All summer long I sat in front of this thing with a modem, just having the world expand and expand and expand again, discovering new people, new places, new ideas, hand keying in programs that we got in magazines, on the newsstand and learning how to program by trial and error. And it was like being in the eames Powers of Ten movie where every day the world gets 10 times bigger and 10 times bigger again. And I later on in life, moved to San Francisco and I got to know a lot of the people who were on the other side of the modem, right, the people who were making this stuff. And one day I was at the Asilomar microcomputing workshop, this venerable computing workshop, as the word micro always tells you. And I was sitting with John Gilmore, Tom Jennings and Tim Pozar. And John started something called the Alt hierarchy, which was the first free conversational space on the Internet where you could talk about anything. And Tom Jennings was this amazing activist. He had this magazine called homocore in the 80s. He's actually got a little cameo in this novel selling zines at a dead Kennedy show. But he also created a thing called Fidonet, which was a way for dial up BBS's to call each other and so you could exchange messages. And I was on Fidonet BBS's and you know, hear from people in Hamilton or maybe Nova Scotia or whatever. It would take a couple of days because one BBS would call the next one when the rates were cheap and then that one would call the next one when the rates were cheap and eventually all the messages would arrive. And one day, as these three men were working together at a company called the Little Garden, which was the first dial up Internet service provider in the world, they decided to connect Usenet with Fidonet. And they were describing this day that they were doing it. And I remember that day because I remember dialing up to my local BBS and discovering not 40 conversational areas, but tens of thousands. It was like opening your bedroom closet and finding Narnia on the other side of the door. It was amazing.
- [15:04]
Mattea Roach
It's the way, I mean, sitting across the desk from you, your eyes are like lit up talking about this. It sounds so exciting. I want to talk a bit about the San Francisco of it all as well, because I think there's something that was pretty special about a lot of people that had maybe connected through, whether they subscribed to the same magazines. These very like, if we can call them kind of primitive or early ways of connecting through computers. And then a lot of these people did find themselves in the sort of early Silicon Valley Bay area. Marty in your novel is no exception. He finds community in San Francisco. He really falls in love with the city in this, you know, story that we see through picks and shovels. He's going to dead Kennedy shows and kind of getting into the queer scene a little bit through a roommate that he has. But he's also given a warning by one of the other characters where she's like, you may be in love with San Francisco, but San Francisco's not gonna love you back. What does that sort of statement mean for you?
- [15:58]
Cory Doctorow
Well, look, I idolized San Francisco as a kid. I loved the Beat poets. I read Abbie Hoffman's autobiography a hundred times. The technology stuff going on was so exciting. So I was really excited about it. And I started going out there in the mid-90s to work on Unix workstations as a technician on Silicon Graphics workstations. And the city was so bohemian and so exciting. But it's a city that has been built by a succession of gold rushes, starting with the first one, the actual gold rush, but many since. And it's had a lot of weird and contingent aspects to its history that have added color and flavor to this boom town. Like, it's the place where they started a lot of the naval electronic engineering because it's this very defensible harbor. That's why the Spaniards wanted it so much. That's why they've got Alcatraz, the old fortress in the harbor. And because of that, it was a naval headquarters. And because of that, it's where, like, radar was being developed. And that means that there was tons of electronic stuff. And you have Stanford and you have the other universities in the region that are feeding that. And you also have the Navy discharging all of its gay sailors into San Francisco with either dishonorable discharges or just don't ask, don't tell discharges. And so it becomes a hub of gay culture. So you have people flocking to it because they're hippies. You have people flocking to it because they're gay. You have people flocking to it because they're into sonar. You have tons of military presence. You have the beat poet. You have everything going on. And you have the legacy of the gold rush. You know, like, the city hall looks like a wedding cake and it's covered in gilt. And you can just imagine, you know, some prospectors made good setting up camp in San Francisco and going, well, now that we're rich, we need a really big, fancy city hall and some architect from back east going, I know what you guys need. You ever seen a Grecian temple? We're gonna build you one of those, but with, like, it looks like Caesar's Palace. It looks like Las Vegas.
- [17:52]
Mattea Roach
It's a crazy city hall. It really. San Francisco, to me, having only been there, it's full of things like that where it's just sort of like, who thought to design a city this way, like, who wanted to build this? And I mean, people are still rushing out there even now in the time of ridiculously high cost of living. And San Francisco having. I mean, the one thing that was striking to me as a visitor in 2022 was like it was the worst income inequality that I have ever seen.
- [18:22]
Cory Doctorow
I was just in New Delhi and also in San Francisco in the same month. And the vibe is pretty similar in terms of the number of people who are unhoused, visibly addicted, in distress, living on the streets, and then people who are very wealthy living in another side by jowl with them. It's quite alarming. And so, yeah, you have all these contradictions. And in a gold rush, whether metaphorical or an actual one, the people who reliably make money, the people who supply, the people looking for gold, the people who sell the picks and shovels, and that's where, like Leland Stanford, the despicable eugenicist who started Stanford University, that's where his family made the money. They were gouging prospectors on the supplies that they needed to go and pan for gold in the hills. And San Francisco has been built by the people who survived each gold rush. And to a first approximation, those are the people who, who didn't try to get rich themselves, but instead grifted off the people who had stars in their eyes. Hey, I'm Reshma Sajani, founder of Girls.
- [19:33]
Mattea Roach
Who Code and Moms First.
- [19:34]
Cory Doctorow
I consider myself a pretty successful adult woman. So why is it that in midlife, as I'm about to turn 50, I feel so stuck? Join me as I try to find the answer on my so called Midlife From Lemonada Media. I talk to experts and extraordinary guests about divorce, exercise, menopause, sex, drugs and more to understand what we're going through and how to make the most of it. Listen wherever you get your podcasts.
- [20:00]
Mattea Roach
Corey, we've been talking a lot about unscrupulous business practices, let's say in the Bay Area. And I want to talk about the particular unscrupulous business practices that we see taking place in Picks and Shovels. Your protagonist, Marty Hench, starts working for this company called Fidelity Computing initially, and it's run by these three religious men. It's like the premise for a joke. I don't want to steal your thunder. You're the author. So can you tell listeners who have not read Picks and Shovels about this business and how you came up with it? Because it's truly. It was so silly. I loved reading about it.
- [20:36]
Cory Doctorow
Well, yeah, Fidelity Computing is a pyramid scheme founded by a Mormon bishop, an orthodox rabbi and a Catholic priest, masquerading as a computer company and what they are selling to their parishioners. Because pyramid schemes work really well in faith communities. Because a pyramid scheme is a way of converting the social capital that especially disadvantaged people rely on for survival into cash money that annihilates the social capital and then very quickly moves the cash money up to the people at the top of the pyramid. And so there are these very destructive forms of cults and, and they really root themselves in faith groups, and especially faith groups that have a tradition of large families, because those people are the most precarious. And this is why you have, for example, so many Mormons energetically selling each other essential oils or leggings or what have you. Because it is a grift custom made to fit into that milieu and exploit it and leave destruction in its wake. And so that's what the Reverend sirs of Fidelity Computing are doing. And the computers, they say, are designed to lock in everyone who buys them. So you can only put their special floppy disks in the floppy drives and those cost ten times as much. They have those old school fan fold belt fed printers with a ribbon up the side with the little holes in it that goes in the tractor feed, only they've spaced the holes a little further apart than standard paper so that you have to buy their paper to work in their thing. And basically it's like an iPhone, but built out of 1980s technology. It is designed to pick your pocket at every turn and to create a kind of sealed bubble you can never escape from. Your data, your programs, your consumables, the computer itself, the more you use it, the harder it is to leave and the more you end up giving to these companies.
- [22:26]
Mattea Roach
I definitely am somebody where I've had a MacBook and an iPhone for like 10 years. And the thought of having to switch to anything else is great horror to me. Like, I just don't want to have to learn how to use something different. But this does feel, I think, perhaps very familiar for a lot of listeners. How does this sort of getting people locked into one system actually manifest in real life?
- [22:46]
Cory Doctorow
Well, it didn't used to be a very stable configuration because it used to be that if you designed a technology to lock someone in, someone else would design a technology to unlock it. So, you know, HP goes out and figures out how to charge more for ink and they lock the printer so it'll only take an HP ink cartridge. All other Things being equal, someone's going to write a program that unlocks the printer so it'll take their ink. However, in 1998, Bill Clinton signed a law called the Digital Millennium Copyright act. And section 1201 of the DMCA makes it a felony punishable by a five year prison sentence and a $500,000 fine to bypass these digital locks. And so now when HP locks its printer so they only take HP ink, you either have to throw away your printer or you have to bite the bullet and pay for the ink. And this is how we come to the juncture we're at now. So HP Inc. Is the most expensive fluid you can buy as a civilian without a special permit. It runs more than $10,000 a gallon. And that means that the colored water you print your grocery list with costs more per milliliter than the semen of a Kentucky Derby winning stallion. Right? And this is a product not of technology nor of greed. It is a product of policy. Can I tell you about the Canadian angle on this, please? Okay, so there is a Canadian angle on this. And I know, I am a Canadian, I know that when we hear about dumb things Americans do, we start feeling smug. And I want to warn Canadians we should not feel smug about this. So this, this thing where they passed the law banning breaking digital locks, that was 1998 in the US and like you could be forgiven for failing to understand how salient and important technology was. Right? I know to you it's a whole lifetime. To me it's just an eye blink ago. But, but it, it was still early days for technology. In 2010, two of Stephen Harper's ministers, Tony Clement and James Moore, decided they would bring in a digital locks rule for Canada modeled from the U.S. statute book. So they had to consult on it. 6,138 Canadians filed consultation responses saying, oh my God, this is a terrible idea. Don't do it. Look at what's happening in America. 53 people filed comments saying, we think this is a great idea. And they passed this law. And today, this is why Canadian mechanics can't fix cars. This is why Canadian hospitals couldn't fix their ventilators during the pandemic. This is why farmers can't fix their tractors because of this policy, not because of technology, not because of greed.
- [25:12]
Mattea Roach
So I guess, like two questions in response to this one, like, why? Why in 2010, after seeing 12 years of the Digital Millennium Copyright act being destructive for consumers in the states, would Canadian legislatures be like, we want our version of that? And then I guess Second, what is the policy solution to the fact that this is just like how a lot of our technology, including things like tractors, which are not, we don't think of them as being high tech? What's our solution for getting out of this situation where there is no right to repair?
- [25:44]
Cory Doctorow
Yeah, in fact, we do have a right to repair. They passed a bill last year. But you can't use the right to repair if you have to bypass a digital lock because it remains illegal. So you can only repair things you don't have to bypass digital locks for. Thanks for nothing. So it's funny because the answer to both of those questions is the same answer. The reason, the excuse anyways for passing this law in 2010, is that the US wanted it as a condition of trading with America. If we were going to have free trade with the us, tariff free access to American markets, we needed to pass a law that made Canadians beholden to American tech monopolists and other kinds of monopolists who could work tech into their gadgets. So I'm inclined to think that in 2010, Obama wouldn't have shut down free trade with the US with Canada. Rather, if we had failed to pass this law, I don't think GW Bush would have done it. I think even Trump won, probably wouldn't have done it. But you may have heard Trump too has said that he's gonna put a 25% tariff.
- [26:42]
Mattea Roach
Really? I only walk by the screen in the atrium of the office every day and it yells at me telling that it's gonna happen.
- [26:49]
Cory Doctorow
So here's the thing. I mean, Trudeau's response to this is charging a 25% tariff on American goods, which will make everything that Canadians buy from American firms 25% more expensive, which is a very weird way to punish America. On the other hand, we could just remove this law. We could legalize Canadians jailbreaking American technology, and we could allow Canadian firms to spend the next 10 years sucking up all the high profit lines of business from the handful of giant tech companies. They're the only thing keeping the S and P 500 in the black. If you want to really hurt Elon Musk, if you really want to kick him in the dongle, then make it legal to jailbreak Teslas so that you can drive your Tesla to a Canadian mechanic and they can unlock all of the features that you would otherwise have to pay a monthly subscription for, for one price forever, which transfers to the next person you sell it to. And hell, every other country in the world is gonna wanna buy this or replicate the feat. So whoever gets there first makes the money first.
- [27:51]
Mattea Roach
I appreciate that we've pivoted, I think, to a more hopeful orientation, I suppose, to where we're at in tech policy. You know, there is a real hopeful bent to the world that we see in Picks and Shovels, where we see your main character, Marty, his friends, these, like, three very cool women who leave Fidelity Computing to kind of start their own thing. And they're pushing back against crappy tech. They're pushing back against a company that's trying people locked into its products. It is a kind of quaint version of that compared to the sorts of behemoth companies that people are fighting against today. But there is this feeling of being able to push back against, I guess, insidification, as you call it. I want to talk about this word because there may be some listeners who are not familiar. Can you talk about how you coined this term inshidification, and what some of the other manifestations of it are beyond your printer being locked into using HP ink and such?
- [28:48]
Cory Doctorow
Yeah, well, in shitification, I've been talking about tech policy and trying to get people to care about it before it's too late, since, like the early 2000s, 23, 24 years now. And I eventually came up with a funny dirty word. And it turns out that people like cussin' and so my big abstract technical critique of tech, married to a minor license to be slightly rude, has been a very winning combination. The word was the word of the year from the American Dialect Society, the Australian Macquarie Dictionary, the British New Scientist. And it describes this process where you have platforms that are at first good to their end users, and then as those end users pile in, it finds a way to lock them in. And once they're locked in, it starts to make things worse for them. It withdraws some of the value that it's allocated to them and reallocates it to business customers. The business customers pile in, and then it finds a way to lock those business customers in by making them dependent on those end users. And then it withdraws value from them, leaving behind just the kind of homeopathic residue that is needed to make everybody remain locked into the service. I can give you an example if you want. So when Facebook started, it had a very simple value proposition. Show up on this platform, tell us who matters to you in this world, and we will give you a feed composed of just the things that they post for public consumption. And people piled in and they locked themselves in through something that economists call the collective action. Problem, which is just like 200 people and you're all on Facebook. And some of you are there because you emigrated from another country. And that's how you stay in touch with the people back home. And some of you have like a rare disease, and that's where you find the other people who share your disease. And it's just like how the little league team your kid is on organizes the carpool so you can't go. And so then once you're locked in, they turn around and they go to the advertisers and say, hey, do you remember when we told these rubes that but we weren't gonna spy on them, we are spying on them with every hour that God sends. If you give us a relatively small amount of money, we will target ads to them with exquisite fidelity. And we've got a whole building full of engineers who are gonna do nothing but police ad fraud. And they go to the publishers and they say, hey, do you remember we told these rubes we were only gonna show them the things that they asked to see. If you just post excerpts of your content, we'll like non consensually cram it into people's eyeballs. You put a link back to your website and you can monetize that traffic however you want to. And so those business customers become dependent on Facebook. And then Facebook starts to withdraw the surplus from both of them. And the cost of ads goes way up, ad targeting fidelity goes way down. The amount of ad fraud goes through the roof. And then Facebook goes to the final stage, which is terminal, and shitification turns into a giant pile of shit. Mark Zuckerberg wakes up one day and says, look, I know I told you for years and years, your future is to argue with your racist uncle using the primitive text interface that I invented so I could non consensually rate the bangability of my fellow Harvard undergrads. But it turns out I've had a revelation. I'm gonna convert you and everyone you love into a legless, sexless, low polygon cartoon character in a virtual world that I stole from a 25 year old satirical cyberpunk novel called the Metaverse. And like, that's the final stage of inshittification. A giant pile of shit.
- [31:56]
Mattea Roach
Yeah. I mean, I have had the experience certainly of going onto Facebook and, and my feed is full of what I can only describe as AI slop. And yet I don't want to delete my account because how am I going to stay in touch with the dozens of people that I know who Live in the states that I never see. And I'm in a Facebook group for former Jeopardy. Contestants where we can talk.
- [32:20]
Cory Doctorow
I love that that's a Facebook group.
- [32:21]
Mattea Roach
It's very sweet. I find all the time I'm trying to think about how I can make my experience of being online and dealing with tech less bad. What hope is there for a person who doesn't really understand how computers work but has to use them?
- [32:41]
Cory Doctorow
Yeah. So the answer is that as an individual, if you're just like a normie who wants to use computing without being exploited and treated horribly, you need firms that are exposed to some form of discipline that punishes them when they abuse you. And broadly, there's a couple of forms of discipline. There's discipline from states. We call that regulation. There's discipline from markets. Call it competition by allowing firms to buy all their competitors. And remember, Mark Zuckerberg bought Instagram explicitly, as he wrote in an email to his cfo, because people hated Facebook. They were leaving it. They were going to Instagram, and he wanted to recapture them so that even if you didn't use Facebook, the platform, you'd still be a Facebook company.
- [33:21]
Mattea Roach
And this is back in 2014, 2012, even earlier than I thought. So this is a while ago that already people were hating Facebook and wanting to leave.
- [33:28]
Cory Doctorow
That's right. People have hated Mark Zuckerberg more than they love their friends on several occasions. And we know that there are ways to do this with competition, to have new firms crop up and do this. We also know that there are ways to deal with this with regulation so we could have effective privacy laws. You know, the US hasn't updated its consumer privacy law at the federal level since 1988. Ronald Reagan signed a law called the Video Privacy Protection act that prohibits video store clerks from telling newspapers which VHS cassettes you have. And that is the last federal privacy threat that Congress saw fit to address. Yes. Right. So regulatory capture. Right. This expensively procured inaction on privacy is the result of cartelization. When there's 100 companies in the sector, they can't agree on their lobbying mission. They don't have a lot of excess profits because they're competing with each other. So even if they know what they want, they can't bribe someone to give it to them. But let a company dwindle to just a bare handful, and they fully take over the apparatus of government. And so without market discipline, you lose state discipline too. And so your individual responses to this will only take you so far. You can go to the electronic frontier foundation website, look at our surveillance self defense kit, download easy to use tools and make a difference in how surveilled and abused you are online. But ultimately, the way that we progress in this is the same way we solve issues like the climate emergency. You don't solve the climate emergency by digging your own subway or even by lovingly washing your soft plastics before putting them in the blue bin so that they can pretend they're gonna recycle them and then send them to the incinerator. Right. We saw this with popular movements that demand political responses. And so that's why I think at this moment where Trump is rewriting the global rules, that everything is up for grabs, that this is the moment at which Canada and other countries should be saying, okay, well, look, the dissolution of the neoliberal order is going to cause a lot of pain because for all of its flaws, it also delivered things at the same time. It opens up some opportunities and we should be pursuing opportunities to make Canada and other countries into a coalition of the willing that export the technology that sets everyone free, including Americans.
- [35:36]
Mattea Roach
This is funny. This is like the most policy oriented conversation I'm ever going to get to have as the host of this show, which is so fun for me. It's like a throwback to my last job. But I do want to take us back to the world of fiction because we're here today to talk about the way that all of this interacts with, with your fiction and this other portion of your work. There is a connection between fiction and all the stuff we're talking about. Obviously, tech moguls, as you mentioned, are constantly referencing science fiction in ways that suggest that I don't feel that they necessarily understand the books that they're reading. You mentioned Meta coming from this novel, Snow Crash, which is a dystopian story about people escaping reality. And Mark Zuckerberg is like, won't it be great to have meetings online? I feel myself as a reader, I like to take a bit of a different lesson from some of these books. How do you see the role of fiction in helping us address some of these policy or moral, ethical, philosophical issues that we've been talking about?
- [36:35]
Cory Doctorow
Well, like I say, or like you said, rather, cyberpunk is a warning, not a suggestion. And I work through a lot of my policy anxieties. The reason I do this stuff is because I'm really worried about what a world works. Technology is not under the control of the people who use it, what that world is going to look like. Last night I was at U Of t to give the Ursula Franklin lecture. And Ursula Franklin, her kind of jam was that the important thing about technology isn't like the technical specifications of the gadget. It's who gets to use it and who gets it used upon them, what does it do and who does it do it to. And those social arrangements are up for grabs. They are not determined with the technology what I think science fiction can do in its futuristic mode. You know, I write a lot of stories set in the future. Writing a science fiction novel set in the 1980s in 2025 is admittedly a little weird, But I write a lot of stories set in the future. And what it can do is expose you to just how malleable the things we think of as eternal are. This idea that, that the configuration we landed on in this first blush of the Internet is the last one we should have, and that the people who won the last round of this game should be declared the eternal champions and allowed to reign supreme for all time. This is a minds app, right? It's a thing that traps people. I got started on the work that I've been doing for the last decade on interoperability when I went back to the University of Waterloo. I'm a proud Waterloo dropout as well as U of T in York. I dropped out of four universities.
- [38:12]
Mattea Roach
It's an overachiever, really. Most people only drop out of one.
- [38:15]
Cory Doctorow
That's right. So I went back to Waterloo to keynote there, 50th anniversary of the computer science program. And I discovered that these computer science students, when you talk to them about jailbreaking, reverse engineering, all this stuff, they were like, but isn't that illegal? Won't that get me into trouble? And I'm like, you know, move fast and break things. Broke a lot of things that shouldn't have been broken. But the idea that when you confront a problem, that you might use your engineering skills to address them, right? In combination with policy, in combination with these other things, that is a valid idea, right? Like it's possible to mount a technological response. And it can start with technologists, and it can start with a change in our expectations from technologists. And so, just as setting a parable in the future can be a means by which a science fiction writer can pluck a single element out of the world and build a kind of world in a bottle out of it, such that when the reader experiences it, they're not experiencing a prediction, they're not experiencing a suggestion, but rather they're experiencing a kind of virtual fly through of an architectural rendering of what it might feel like to live in a world where our social arrangements of technology are different. So too, can this historic account do that? Because, of course, history is never a complete account. When you write history or you write historical fiction, you choose elements to upregulate, to focus on, to make the center of it. But by putting the spotlight on them, you can also call attention to just the same idea of limitless possibility and of the callowness and fallibility and, you know, eminent guillotine ability of the people who made these policy choices in living memory, against the advice of experts, took us to where we are now and seem to have faced not a single consequence.
- [40:02]
Mattea Roach
You know, it's rare, I think, for me to leave any conversation about tech feeling moderately hopeful. I think that kind of call, I guess, against reifying the Great man theory of tech is nice, being able to remember that there were other possibilities that could have been taken. And it's not too late. I feel like that's a good note to end on.
- [40:20]
Cory Doctorow
Can I say one more thing?
- [40:21]
Mattea Roach
Absolutely.
- [40:22]
Cory Doctorow
Because you've reminded me of something, which is that forensic accountants are really good for rebutting the Great man theory of novels and history. Because the forensic accountant, by definition, is not the person who made the thing and not the person who's leading the thing. The forensic accountant is the one who's unwinding the scam. And so the forensic accountant can only set in motion a plot where other people are driving. Which is why the three remarkable young women, why they can be the heroes of a story whose protagonist is Marty Hinch. And that makes for, I think, a really fun mode of storytelling.
- [40:54]
Mattea Roach
Well, you know, if that doesn't sell this book enough, we had this whole conversation. We didn't even talk about these amazing women. But go read Picks and Shovels, everyone, if you haven't already. It was completely not the sort of thing I normally read, but so fun. Corey, thank you so much for your work for coming in today. It's been such a pleasure talking with you.
- [41:11]
Cory Doctorow
And my apologies to my publicist for not talking about the book. More. I'm sorry, Jamie.
- [41:15]
Mattea Roach
My fault, too. My fault, too. We can both wear that one. That was my conversation with Cory Doctorow, the author of Picks and Shovels. We spoke in Toronto a few weeks ago. This episode was produced by Katie Swales. Eilee Yamamoto is our associate producer. Our senior producer is Jacqueline Kirk, and our executive producer is Erin Balser. Big thank you to our audio tech, Arande Williams, and to the entire CBC Books team. You can Tune in on Sundays and Wednesdays on CBC Radio or follow bookends on the podcast app of your choice. And don't forget to leave us a review. It really helps to get the word out to others who might enjoy the show. I'm Mattea Roach and this is Bookends. Thanks for listening and I'll see you next time, because when the book ends, the conversation begins.
- [42:28]
Cory Doctorow
That was my episode of Bookends with Mattea Roach. For more insightful conversations from the literary scene, you can find and follow Bookends on whatever inshidified app you use to get your podcasts.
- [42:42]
Mattea Roach
For more CBC Podcasts, go to CBC CA Podcasts.