How to Seize the Means of Computation

Jose Leal:

Welcome to rHatchery Live. My name is Jose Leal. I'm sitting here in my friend's cottage north of Toronto, Canada, where Cory was born. Our guest today, I'm with my partner Matt Perez and Cory Doctorow. Welcome, Corey.

Cory Doctorow:

Thank you very much. Are you… which part of cottage country are you in? The Muskoka, Thousand Islands?

Jose Leal:

Georgina.

Cory Doctorow:

Georgina. Very nice.

Jose Leal:

Yeah. So, you know the area?

Cory Doctorow:

Many mosquitoes in that area.

Jose Leal:

There's lots of them. At this time of year, though, we're pretty good. It's starting to be at the stage where it doesn't happen.

Cory Doctorow:

Excellent.

Jose Leal:

So, you're, you're down in LA now, right?

Cory Doctorow:

In Burbank. So, it's, if you're a Torontonian, it's sort of the North York to Los Angeles's Toronto. As what's her name? Sarah Palin. Like to say, I can see Los Angeles from my front door.

Jose Leal:

Exactly.

Cory Doctorow:

It's just a few blocks down the road.

Jose Leal:

I just happened to be visiting family and friends here in Toronto. But I'm actually from Silicon Valley myself as is Matt. And so it's kind of cool to be in a place where you were born. Tell us a little bit about your history. Born in Toronto and then authoring and writing and doing all kinds of other good stuff. So yeah, our audience may not know you.

Cory Doctorow:

I was born in Toronto. I had an extraordinary time. I was born at a very early age, and so I was thrust right into it. No, I was born in Toronto. My folks are technologists and educators and radicals, both of them involved in many political causes, both of them teachers. My dad was a computer scientist, so starting in the mid-seventies, we had teletype terminals with acoustic couplers in the house. My mom, who was teaching kindergarten at the time, would bring home a thousand foot rolls of brown paper towel from the kindergarten bathroom, and we'd feed them into the teletype. I'd get a thousand feet of computing up one side and another a thousand on the other. And then it would go back to the school to be used as hand towels, and I'd have to wait until my mom could bring home some more. And I was always a writer. Toronto's a great place to have been a science fiction writer. I'm just going to fix my camera here… That's a little better. Toronto's a great place to have been a science fiction writer growing up. Wonderful writer and critic editor called Judith Merrill, started what's now the largest science fiction reference collection in the world. It's called the Merrill Collection. She was writer in residence and world critique stories, even for little kids. So I would started bringing her stories when I was 10, 11 years old. She had encouraged a local fan to start what's now the oldest science fiction bookstore in the world. A store called Bacca, which always had lots of writers working there, who were always willing to critique my manuscripts. And then I ended up when one of those writers, Tanya Huff, quit to write full-time, I got her job. So I worked there. I also was involved in technology from early days. I was a multimedia programmer and a software developer and then a gopher developer, and then a web developer. And then I started peer-to-peer free and open source search tool startup. Moved to Silicon Valley, ended up working for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which is a nonprofit that works on digital human rights. I'm now in my 22nd year with EFF, I was their European director. I lived in the UK and oversaw operations in 31 countries. And now I am what's called a special advisor, and I work on issues related to competition and interoperability. In the meantime, I've sold about 22, 23 books, mostly science fiction novels, but also lots of nonfiction. My latest one is the Internet Con from Verso, which came out a couple, three weeks ago. I wrote eight books during lockdown. I write when I'm anxious. So, yeah, this is the third book in about a year. And there's two more in the next six months, and there's going to be more in the couple of years to come. So it's been a busy, busy time for me. I'm one of the OG bloggers. I help start a website called Boeing Point, which I still co-own. And then for the last three years, I've been writing my own website, solo project called pluralistic.net which is kind of a multi-platform free and open, open access surveillance free, analytics free, near daily newsletter which you can get links to@pluralistic.net and which you can republish, including commercially 'cause it's all licensed Creative Commons attribution. I'm also the former European Director of Creative Commons, and my first novel internet in the Magic Kingdom was the first novel ever released under Creative Commons.

Jose Leal:

Wow. So the tech part and the radical part, it's genetic. It's, it's not just something that you.

Cory Doctorow:

Yeah. I was in, I got it in my, I got it in my mother's milk.

Jose Leal:

Exactly. Exactly. Yeah. So today we're going to talk about seizing the means of computation. Tell us about what you mean by that and, how do we get our heads wrapped around?

Cory Doctorow:

Well, look, I think lots of people are upset about big tech. Tom Eastman says, you know, I'm old enough to remember a time when the internet wasn't five giant websites filled with screenshots of text from the other four. And you know, for me, that really captures it. And there's a lot of people who view big tech as the kind of inevitable consequence of like, the great forces of history. And that the best we can do in a world where everything is dominated by a handful of very large firms, is try to make those firms behave themselves. And in fact, maybe it's a feature and not a bug. Because if there's problems that arise because of tech, whether that's the trade in disinformation or fraudulent products, or bad conduct like harassment or so on and so on, then perhaps the public accountable entities like lawmakers or regulators who are interested in addressing those problems can do so more attractively, once there's only four or five companies. Because you can reach into those four or five companies, regulate them, force them to do what you want them to and sort of turn them into an arm of the state. I mean, I think the first people to really get this were the NSA who very famously deputized all of these firms to undertake surveillance for them and intervened on behalf of those firms when there were attempts to create strong privacy laws and, were their partners in preventing it. This is something with a very long history AT&T was almost broken up in the 1950s, but the Pentagon stepped in and said, oh, we'll lose the war in Korea if we don't have Ma Bell. Of course, they lost the war in Korea, but Ma Bell got another 30 years intact as a result. And I don't think that… I think that those people are mistaken. I think that on the one hand, it wasn't the great forces of history that produce this extraordinary concentration. Tech is by its nature a very dynamic sector. The fact that we only know how to make one computer, which is the Universal Touring Complete Von Neumann machine that can run every valid program, means that however you lock in customers, end users, business customers, or other stakeholders, someone else can write a program or make a tool that unlocks it. You know, IBM can sell you a hard drive for your 360 mainframes at a 15000% markup. And Fujitsu can make a plug compatible one at a 100% markup or a 10% markup and eat their lunch in the same way that Apple can prevent Microsoft's hegemony over operating systems and office programs from driving Mac OS out of a business by reverse engineering Microsoft Office and making a format compatible environment with the iWork Suite pages, numbers, and keynote. So you can throw away your PC without throwing away your files, and you can use a Mac without sacrificing the ability to collaborate with Windows users. And in the same way that when Facebook started, they didn't ask Myspace users to come and admire the wallpaper at Facebook while they waited for their friends to join them. They gave them a scraper, a bot where if you gave it your login and password, it would go to Myspace, pretend to be you get all the messages that Myspace had in a queue for you, put them in your Facebook inbox, let you reply to them there, and then push them back out to Myspace so that you could resolve these high switching costs. And that what has happened to create the environment that we're in now is that the tech firms were allowed to engage in conduct that historically would've been prohibited under competition law, as competition law itself was drawn down. And this is a process that's approximately speaking coterminal with the rise of the tech sector. Ronald Reagan goes on the command on the campaign trail, the year the Apple two plus goes on sale. And, you know, every new pc, every new digital service that comes out, comes out in an environment that's even more permissive of monopolistic tactics than the environment that its predecessor was in. And as a result, you see these companies that buy all their competition or use predatory pricing to foreclose on new market entrants and do things that just generally speaking, we would not have permitted. And whether that's, you know, mark Zuckerberg getting up in the middle of the night and setting his CFO an email saying, you know, I know you think I'm overpaying for Instagram, but you need to understand people like Instagram better than Facebook. So we have to stop them from leaving. And the way we do that is by buying the place they prefer, or whether it's Google, a company that made one excellent product a quarter of a century ago, a world changing search engine, and then failed to make another successful product in in-house for the next 25 years. Everything they made in-house, you know, crashed and burned from Google video to all of those social media startups that they tried, to even their RSS reader say nothing of their Smart cities program and the Wi-Fi balloons and everything else they've done. But what they have done is bought all their rivals, right? They bought a mobile stack and ad tech stack, a video platform, server management documents, collaboration maps, satellite photos, you name it, they bought it, they operationalized it. Sure. But like, that's not innovation, right? That's just operations. And I think that we didn't have to have tech companies that looked like this. We didn't have to have a tech landscape that looked like this, and that we cannot really get them to behave now that they look like this. When a sector degrades into just a handful of companies, they become very hard to regulate, partly because they're too big to fail. Where anything that we do to them is just likely to have so much collateral damage that they can argue over and over again that they should be left to their own their own whims. A as you see with Facebook whenever, or Amazon, whenever there's a complaint about how the targeted marketing of Facebook, or the abuse of conduct of Amazon is harming both end users and business customers, they will always be able to drum up a bunch of small businesses that say, look, we'd go out of business if it wasn't for Amazon and Facebook. They may be right. You know, because they're so they're so integrated. But at the same time we can't afford to let them be the defect regulators of whole swats of our economy. They're not good at it, and no one is good at it. Right. The problem isn't just that Mark Zuckerberg is a creep who, you know, shouldn't be the self-elected zar for life of 3 billion people's online lives. It's that that job shouldn't exist. And so that brings me to the book, which I guess we'll talk about now, which describes how we got here, what opportunities we have to deal with that and, how we could build a new good internet that's a worthy successor to the old good internet we used to have. And take this current internet that we have, what I call the in internet and, you know, banish it to the scrap heap of history.

Jose Leal:

So, but before, maybe we talk about the new internet the reason we got here is because we've built a system of this internet where not only do we as individuals have to play in their ballpark… the society as a whole is just sort of narrowed and narrowed and narrowed. Why do you think that we've become, so diversity seems to disappear when it comes to the internet. Why do you think that happens?

Cory Doctorow:

Yeah. So I think, the way to understand this is that first you get concentration. And the concentration, as I said, comes from a, a general change in the posture of competition, regulators around the world to tolerate conduct that would've otherwise been intolerable and that the statutes say is intolerable. So we just had a, not really a change in the law, but a change in enforcement posture. And that led to vast concentration in many sectors. So it's not just tech that is hugely concentrated. You know, I'm wearing my union shirt today for my, my brothers and sisters on the picket line down the road from me at Warner, Disney, and Universal. You know, they're in an extraordinarily concentrated sector, as am I as a member of the entertainment industry. We have five major publishers. Four major studios, three major labels, two companies that do all the ad tech supported media, and one company that controls all the eBooks and audiobooks. That's true everywhere you look. Three cartels control all international shipping. There's about five major banks that control most of the world's finance, two companies control most of the world's beer. Two companies control most of the world's, world's spirits. Two companies control most of the world's running shoes. One company controls most of the world's bottle caps, and one company controls most of the world's vitamin C, one company controls most of the world's eyeglasses. A company called Luxottica Essilor, they own Bausch and Loam. They own… they're the ones who make Dolce & Gabbana. They're the ones who make Coach and Oakley. They're sunglass Hutt. They're LensCrafters, Sears, optical Target optical, they're also Essilor, which makes more than 50% of the optical lenses in the world. And their mimed, which is the insurer that writes the majority of the world's eye insurance policies. So even if you like, find some internet hipster and a leather apron who gnaws your glasses frames themself out of, you know, a whole log and makes your lenses and an artisanal forge, the insurer that's paying for them is still going to be Luxottica Essilor. And they've raised the price of glasses a thousand percent in the last decade. When I was a kid, there were 30 professional wrestling leagues. Now there's one, the owner who's a Trumpist billionaire, has reclassified all of his workers, or misclassified all of his workers, as contractors, took away their health insurance. All those wrestlers I grew up watching, they're on GoFundMe begging for pennies to die with dignity of their work-related injuries. Right… So, across the board, you in tech, that market concentration not only reduces our choice, but it also produces regulatory capture in which we get a surplus of laws that are bad and an absolute poverty of laws that are good. So no one, we either don't have or don't enforce privacy laws depending on whether you're in the US or in Europe. Our labor laws are floated routinely because they say, when your boss is an app, you're not a worker. You're a small business person. Our consumer protection laws don't exist online. You know, a company that like Amazon, you can go and search for a specific product, even down to the skew or model number. And Amazon will take money from third parties to return a screen full of results that aren't that product and that look like it. And that trick you into buying that product. And under normal circumstances, if you went into a store and you see, said… I need parts part X, Y, Z, and they sold you a different part, that would be fraud. When Amazon does it's a $31 billion a year, So-Called advertising business, which is really a payola business. So we have no enforcement of the tech laws that we need. And then we have over enforcement of the tech laws, we desperately don't need, right? Which is laws that allow them to stop us from doing what tech industry businesses have done since the year dot, which is reverse engineer, adapt, and modify the products that, and services that we use. So, for example, if you have an open platform, you can always adapt it to block ads and tracking. One in four web users are in fact blocking adds. Docs calls it the largest consumer boycott in human history. He's right. If you wanted to do that with an app, you would have to reverse engineer the app. And doing so is a violation of Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which Bill Clinton signed in 1998, which makes it a felony punishable by a five-year prison sentence. And a $500,000 fine to bypass and access control for a copyrighted work like the software for the app. And as a result, if you were to add an ad blocker to an app, you could go to prison, right? And so this goes across the board. If you as a writer, when my books, if my books because were sold on Audible, which is Amazon's 90% Monopoly audiobook platform, they're not, because I won't let them be sold there. If my books were sold there, Audible would require me to allow my books to be wrapped in their digital rights management, their digital locks. Removing those locks is a felony. So even I, the author, the proprietor of the copyright who wrote the book, paid the narrator, paid the editor and produced the book. I cannot authorize you, my customer, my audience member, to convert that file so you can play it in a non-audible player and quit the platform, which means that Audible is able to lock me and you to the platform and abuse us both. They abuse you by raising prices, adding ads to audio books, which is a thing Audible is experimenting with. And they abused me by stealing my wages. Audible was embroiled in a scandal last year called Audible Gate, in which at least a hundred million dollars was stolen from independent audiobook creators. And so you combine these three factors, right? You have a drawdown of antitrust enforcement that reduces choice. You have the drawdown of legal restrictions on the conduct of these firms that allows them to use the flexibility of a digital platform to endlessly change the rules in ways that would otherwise be a law unlawful, but which they can get away with by saying, we did it with an app. And we have the increased enforcement of laws that stop us from taking measures to defend ourselves. And the combination is this monoculture you described, where we are deprived of choice and deprived of the ability to create choice.

Matt Perez:

But is it… so Cory, before… I mean, everything you're saying is music to my ears is it's the kind of stuff that we've be saying different ways. We've been saying pretty much the same thing. We published… how many? do we… oh, one book, and it's called Radical Companies. I'm supposed to plug… It's the book, the book. And if you read, if you read it, a lot of things would be familiar to you there. But what can we do differently? How can we rebuild this thing from where we are now, right? We have an alternative. We describe an alternative in the book and, and subsequent book, which is like a week away from me publish. But really there's the current environment, which we call fiat, which means, because I say, so move the box. Why? Because I say so. That's it. That's fiat.

Cory Doctorow:

Computer says no. Yeah.

Matt Perez:

Yep. That's it. And don't argue with it. And but the hard part is moving from one to the other because in, in our view, it involves ownership. I mean, our ownership is so F** up, screwed up. And the fact that we have this, these mega things belong to somebody like Zuckerberg, is just plain. It goes against humanity. It goes against us. So that's the one of the things that we have to fix. But that's a hard problem to fix. So how do we go from what we have now, what we can have if we want to?

Cory Doctorow:

So let me give you the good news and then the bad news. So the good news is that the intrinsic interoperability of technology means that all of the things being equal, there's actually a pretty straightforward way to bring users from old systems into new ones. And that's to do a kind of ship of thesis where you replace one part of the system and then another, and then another. And before you know it, the customers who, you know, use their service, but your add-on are eventually just using your service. And historically, that's exactly how tech companies have grown. And you know, the reason that historically new market entrants, right? Which the fancy economists speak for, like startups, but also like co-ops and nonprofits and even, you know, public agencies and whatever, the historically new market entrants could just look at an incumbent tech platform and say, where do you make your money? Right? What is it that you do that has your highest margins? We're just going to offer. Like, what is, where do you impose the most pain on your customers and users, right? Whether that's through advertising or through price gouging, or through opaque business arrangements. Look at Unity, right? And it's recent and possibly rescinded new royalty scheme for independent game devas, right? If you had a plug compatible runtime for Unity, one that would just like, act like Unity, but that wasn't Unity. You know, the same way that there's like more than one Java that will interpret your Java commands this would be the moment, right? You just turn around, you say, hey, Unity wants like Italian dollars from the game sector for continuing to use its engine. How about you just recompile it with my engine and I'll just charge you a hundred bucks? Right? You could, you would have all the money in the world, right? If you could make that offer. And indeed like…

Matt Perez:

Yeah, actually Unity were up, were by me, would somehow bring me into their…

Cory Doctorow:

Ecosystem. Their environment… Yeah… So, you know, like all of the things being equal, you would expect in a market where we were oriented around innovation, value creation and respect for the public. That would be what would happen when Unity did this. But when we're oriented around something that economists call rent extraction or rent seeking which is like when you make money not by making something useful, but by owning something someone else needs to make something useful then it becomes much harder. And this is the bad news. The bad news is that we are living in a policy environment where if you were third party and you tried to do that to Unity, Unity would come after you with claims of tortious interference, probably trademark violation, copyright violation, patent violation, anti-circumvention violations. They would work the refs. So, you know, all of those apps are going through two app stores and like Steam and the Xbox store. And they would go to them, and they would demand takedowns of all of that material, on the grounds that it violated their…  what is called IP. Which some people say is a term that doesn't mean anything. I think IP is best understood as a term that businesspeople use to mean any policy that allows me to control the conduct of my competitors, critics and customers. And so they would say, this is an IP violation. We demand that you remove it from these app stores and so on. So how do we get to the world where we can change the policy landscape so that the norms, the commerce, and the technology that are within our grasp, right? Nobody likes what Unity has done. Normally, Unity should be done in the water technologically. It's not hard to reverse engineer and make a different runtime for it. Commercially it would be a smash success and there would be investors lining up around the block to do it, but it's just policy that stands in the way. And so, how do we fix the policy? Well, again, I have bad news and good news, right? The bad news is that individuals can't fix this policy, right? You can recycle with every hour that God sends as carefully as anyone can imagine. And without a policy change, the climate emergency is going to continue unchecked. Your kids are going to end up drinking their own urine. You know, there will be choking clouds of smoke. This, the coastal cities will drown, zoonotic plagues will ravage our civilization, right? It's, there's just nothing you can do to fix that. Except as part, as an individual. But as a polity, we can make policy changes. So that's the bad news. The good news is here's how policy changes get made by polities. And this is advice that comes from my arch enemy. You should always learn from your enemies. My arch enemy is dead. It's a guy called Milton Friedman. He was the architect of the neoliberal revolution. Basically the reason we stopped enforcing anti-monopoly laws 40 years ago, along with like smashing unions doing a bunch of other terrible things allowing unlimited commercial contributions to political candidates, all, all that bad stuff. It all starts with Milton, and he was a crank, right? And, and he was a crank with an improbable idea because his idea was, Hey the post-war prosperity in the New Deal took the vast proletarian eyes, peasantry of the world and gave them a claim on social mobility so that they could hope to feed themselves, take vacations, send their kids to university, get their illnesses and injuries treated, not be maimed on the job, and then have a comfortable retirement. And he wanted to end all of that. He thought it was a bad idea. And people would say, like, nobody wants to go back to tugging there for locks for their social betters. How are you going to make this bananas idea into reality? And he said, in time of crisis, ideas that are lying around can move from the periphery to the center. And our job as radicals, is to have good ideas lying around until the impossible becomes the inevitable. And right now, the one thing we have an absolute abundance of in technology and in other domains, is crisis. Everything is on fire all the time. Because there is no way to run a social media network for 3 billion people, that doesn't involve its continuous eruption into crisis. And when that crisis strikes, what we've done historically is the same thing we did last time, but harder and hope for a better outcome. It has been a catastrophic failure. If you and me and the people around us who are knowledgeable about this stuff and care about it, locate the problem with, with the area where the problem is actually occurring. Not with having the wrong people run tech monopolies, but with having tech monopolies at all. And if we talk about how we can resolve those tech monopolies, with interoperability as an interim stage between tech monopolies and breakups, cause breakups take forever, right? Monopolies are rich and powerful. They can fight breakups till the bitter end. IBM when they were in antitrust health from 1970 to 1982 for 12 consecutive years, spent more money on lawyers to fight the US Department of Justice than the US Department of Justice, had to hire all the lawyers fighting all of its cases. They outspent the US government for 12 consecutive years. Right? So, this is why we try to stop monopolies from forming. Because once they're formed, they're very hard to get rid of. It took 69 years to break up AT&T. So yeah, we should be talking about breaking up tech companies. But while we're doing it, we should be talking about how we can use interoperability and other unique, distinctive, what lawyers would say sui generis, right. Unique to the platform remedies like interoperability that allow us to do things in tech that we can't do in health insurance or beer or professional wrestling. Where we can unwind those monopolies piece by piece.

Matt Perez:

But I don't think it's the technology problem.

Cory Doctorow:

No, it's not.

Matt Perez:

And I was at some microsystem when I was started. One of my things was in the package that went on and stuff like that. It is not a technology problem. It's a people problem. I was chatting to my wife this morning, and women are chattel. I know that women don't like to hear that, but they are shadow… mostly in their heads, okay? The laws now have gotten out of way as much as possible. A few women, relatively few women are taking advantage of that. But for the most part, it is… they have in their heads that skip prevents them from doing that. So, how is the.

Cory Doctorow:

I don't know. I mean, look, I don't know if I agree with your thesis about women, I agree that you know, again, I hate using these big fancy words, but hegemony, right? Which is like when one system just like dominates everything, hegemony does put a zap on your head. You know Steinbeck didn't say it, but he's quoted as being the guy who said socialism will never take root in America because we see ourselves as a nation of temporarily embarrassed millionaires. And it is definitely true, that like, you know, tech workers don't think of themselves as workers, right? And so, like, they have resisted labor organizing. Now that's changing because we went from this dream that was mostly a fantasy that you could work for a big dumb company like Sun for three years, but then go out and start a company that, that dethroned it. And then that fantasy was replaced by work for a big dumb company for three years and then do a startup that they acquihire as the world's least efficient way of getting a bonus. And then that changed into work for a big dumb company. But get a job for life with stock options and free kombucha. And like, they'll give you a massage every Wednesday, and now it's like, work for a big dumb company, but keep looking over your shoulder. Cause Google just fired 12,000 workers. The within six months of doing a stock buyback that would've paid their salary for the next 27 years, even as their product quality is that its lowest ebb in the history of the company and they need all hands to fix it, right? And so, you know, I think that that now we are seeing tech workers understanding themselves as workers, and it's not a coincidence that we're seeing more labor organizing and solidaristic labor organizing. So, for example, you have Amazon tech workers, in solidarity with Amazon warehouse workers, which is the other zap that they like to put on our heads. And they say, oh, we know you're a white-collar worker. You're not, you're not like those, those right. Unskilled laborers, I mean, unskilled laborer. I couldn't do that job. Are you kidding me? I'd be dead in a day. Right? They're not, they have skills I completely lack. Right? and so, you know…  I think that like, there's lots of consciousness raising to be done, but consciousness can change pretty fast. And the one thing I want to be clear on here, is that the kind of tech leader we have didn't get worse over the previous years. You know, Sun, I know a little about sun because I work for EFF, which was founded by John Gilmore, right? And so, I've got some deep sun ties here. And Sun, was like a champion of interoperability and user freedom. That was its deal. I used to work for an SGI integrator, right? And Sun was like our greatest frenemy because they were always like making the stuff, we made even cheaper to unlock our customers. But also, whenever we needed to use anything that, like SGI wasn't making, Sun made it. And it always plugged into whatever we were using. And so, we loved and hated Sun, but, you know…  it's founding executives like Vina, KoSA, like the guy who said that no one should be allowed to use the public beach in front of his house. He's not a good guy, right? Like that guy's a creep, right? What changed was not the caliber of the leader or the moral character of those leaders. It was the restraint, the discipline that was exercised by both the threat of regulation and the threat of competition. The fear that your customer could go elsewhere, or the fear that someone would stand up a new service that made it possible for your customer to go elsewhere. And with regulation now being what Jay Freeman calls felony contempt of business model, where you can mobilize copyright, patent, trademark, and so on, to forestall any new market entrant. And with competitors having dwindled to nothing thanks to all those predatory acquisitions, including Sun now being, you know, a distant memory left behind in the, you know, the furthest outbuilding of Oracle. That now these firms, these people, who are ordinary mediocrities no better than you, no better than me, and no worse, really, are able to yield to their worst impulses because they are not disciplined by those external forces.

Jose Leal:

Michael Linton in the comments says that it's not stupid people. It's the money stupid.

Cory Doctorow:

Incentives matter as our friends on the right, like to remind us.

Jose Leal:

Exactly. And we've built a system were getting bigger makes sense. Making more money makes sense. The whole system is about more power in concentrated and fewer and fewer hands.  And that's what we've got as we've been talking all along. But do we have a system, where simply changing the policy is going to change our behavior. Because our behavior has been to follow that same structure. And our argument is, is that we need to actually do something fundamentally different. Not using the current policy structures but circumvent the policy structures all together by creating new organizations that can do that.

Cory Doctorow:

Well, look, I don't know where you guys stand on, like markets as efficient allocators. I'm kind of a skeptic of markets as efficient allocators, but I'll tell you what, even a skeptic like me, like Marx and Engels do in the, in the in the Communist manifesto has to recognize that when you unleash markets, powerful things happen. I think all the people who are freaked out about the Communist manifesto being taught in American universities have never read it. Because like chapters one and two are just like, look at the amazing things capitalism can do. You've never met someone who is more enthusiastic about the power of capitalism than Karl Marx and Frederick Engels. But people tend to forget that. I think that there is very little class solidarity among financiers, that people will be very happy to make money building that. Like the people who built who invested in Facebook and got rich would be delighted to get rich again, investing in Facebook add blockers, right? They don't care, right? They didn't invest in Facebook because they hated privacy. They invested in Facebook 'cause they loved money, right? And I think that if we, if we unleash the potential for founding new firms that can make money by fulfilling the manifest desires of users, and users really want to leave those platforms, you know. There's a reason that Facebook, Google, apple, Amazon and so on spends so much energy on preventing new market entrants. It's because they understand that if you could even try an alternative that you go to it. I mean, I don't know if you guys are paying to attention to the Google antitrust case that the DOJ has brought right now, but at its core is that Google is spending $45 billion dollars per year to be the default search on every platform you might try on the off chance that you might try something that you like better, right? They're lighting a whole Twitter on fire every year. People were like, Elon Musk spend so much money on something that was really dumb. Apple is spending that much money every single God or Google rather, spending that much money every single year just to be sure that you won't try anything else. Now, maybe they're doing it because they love you, and they understand that their products are so much better than everyone else. And they don't want you to endure the pain of using an inferior product, even for a minute. But I think that it's far more likely that they're doing it because they understand very keenly that the same thing that they did to Alta Vista and Ask Jeeves, could happen to them in a hot second, if people were allowed to try something different.

Jose Leal:

Can we do it in a scale that poses them? Or do we need to start small? What's the structure of this movement?

Cory Doctorow:

Yeah. So, the thing that we need to make sure of, is that people can move from one service to the other easily. That's the most important piece of it. You know, I don't know where you guys are on the whole Web three crypto thing. I, as a technical and economic matter, I think it's incoherent. But I think that the things that they said often rhymed with the things that I say. And in fact, you know, I've keynoted a bunch of decentralized web conferences and an Ethereum conference and so on. I've been to all these different places where I meet these decentralizes, and they all have this, like, we will build it and they will come attitude, right? We will make a better service. That service will be better, and people will see that it's better and they'll leave. And what they fail to understand is that it not only has to be better than the existing service, it has to be so much better, that it's worth giving up everything you have to part with, in order to leave an existing service. And in social media, which is I think one of the more important areas here, although not the only important one, that's all of the people you love. That's everybody, right? That is a lot to ask. And you know, I’m speaking to you today in English, instead of in Russian because my grandmother, a Soviet refugee, gave up everything, right? She…  everything she owned, and all contact with her family for 15 years. And as far as she knew, it might've been the rest of her life. When she was a child soldier, who served in the siege of Leningrad, escaped across the winter ice to Siberia, and the second year was inducted into the Red Army. And at 15 met my grandfather there, was knocked up by him. They deserted, they went to Azerbaijan when the war ended, they made their way to Frankfurt, and then on a displaced personship to Canada. And none of her family followed, right? They all could have, they all like, things were in chaos at the end of the war. They all could have done it. My grandmother probably arguably had a harder time. She had a baby in her arms, then her brother or her mother or her other relatives. They weren't willing to give up everyone that mattered to them. And so, they stayed right? Even though it caused privation for them in the moment, in the years since. And right now, too, I don't want to tell you how things, how bad things are for my family in the former Soviet Union right now. It's very bad in Russia. And there aren't many people who are willing to trade away everything they have and everyone that matters to them, even for something that's much better than their current situation. Because That stuff matters. And so, what we have to focus on is reducing those switching costs. And as I said in technology, the switching cost, the natural switching cost in a digital technology is zero. Because you can always make an interoperability layer, a compatibility layer, a conversion.

Matt Perez:

You just, you switch from a people problem leaving people behind, to a technology problem or interoperability. And that's the thing is.... Interoperability and all that stuff is to me is the easy thing to do.

Cory Doctorow:

It's just illegal.

Matt Perez:

It's just illegal, but it's the easy thing to do. The stuff that's between the ears hard.

Cory Doctorow:

I hear you saying that, but like, the tech platforms don't act like they believe it, right? The tech platforms act like if there was interoperability, people would rush for the exits. They put so much energy into fighting people who add compatibility layers, reverse engineer their products.

Matt Perez:

You're right. You're right, you're right. But the thing is, and by the way, we're not for markets.

Cory Doctorow:

No, I just don't know where you stand. I don't know. I don't know what kind of… I don't know much about you guys…

Matt Perez:

I'm just… No, Marcus…  As they stand is…  never mind. It's a mess. So, the thing is to get people to do, like Jose said, a fundamental change of going from, from where they're at now, whether my thesis is wrong, right? It's beside the point where they are now to something that's better for them. And Dave Marquette just wrote a book called “Leadership is Language” …  And it is not okay book…. it's not as good as first one.

Cory Doctorow:

The phrase every writer dreams of hearing.

Matt Perez:

But his first book Turning Ship Around is really good. But anyways, but it's got one piece in there. The people accept the profile of being good. I want to be good. And of course, good is defined by everything around you. Not supposed to get better. And that's another huge distinction in my book. And but how do you get people going.

Cory Doctorow:

So, I think you got to make it… I think if the first step is a doozy, then, you know… then fewer people take it. Right? I like, this is a thing that everyone who's ever made a successful product knows, right? Is that onboarding, is really important, right? So, one of my early tech industry jobs that came out of my work with SGI was a CIO for a bunch of film houses, little film houses working with cutters who had cut on analog film, and then we're switching over to Avid and using SGI boxes as like intermediate servers. And one of the things that Avid did was they had a keyboard layout that mapped onto the analog processes of one of physical film cutting, right? And it wasn't the most efficient way of doing it that, you know, we had Premier, and we had other kind of next generation services that completely broke with those conventions. But what Avid did was they had this mode where you could take all of your tacit knowledge, all of your skills, import it over, and then bit by bit, learn how to use the distinctive elements of digital that had no analog-to-analog computing, to analog film cutting, right? That were just completely, you couldn't analogize them to it. That they were completely novel. And that journey of individual steps. I mean, I think about my grandmother's journey from the firm of Soviet Union to Canada, and then all of my perambulations were, you know, I started in Toronto and then I moved to Central America, and then I was in San Francisco, and then I was in Toronto again, and then San Francisco, and then London, and then LA and then London, and then LA and then London, and now back in LA for seven years. And I'm a US citizen, and I was able to make all those choices because I could do them a little bit at a time. I kind of oozed from one place to another, you know, splitting my time, having an office space and, you know, a home or a mailbox in one place, and then the other going back and forth regularly. And then eventually I made the separation, right? And… I like to think that if the situation for leaving Leningrad in 1945, had been like the situation for going from say, San Francisco to Toronto now, where you could go and come back, stay in touch, keep your bank account, have a mover, ship your stuff over, or put it in storage, that a bunch more of my family would be living in Canada right now instead of in St. Petersburg, right? That, it wasn't that they like lacked the mental fortitude, right? It was that the first step was such a doozy, right? And, you know, I grew up in activist contexts and so, you know, I cut my teeth like riding a bicycle around Toronto all night. We pasting posters to telephone pools, right? Getting people out to protests, getting arrested, all of that stuff. And like… when collectivism started, right? When we started to create tools where you could sign a petition online or like display a banner to show your loyalty for a cause or whatever. A lot of people who were fellow travelers of mine and even more who were just armchair quarterbacks said, oh, this is nonsense, right? No one's going to make a difference this way. This is such a symbolic gesture. It's going to diffuse people's energy, right? People are going to go; I can do one thing. I could go to a sit-in and get arrested, or I could post a ribbon on my Twitter profile, I'm going to do the Twitter profile, and then I won't go to a sit-in and get arrested. And they said, no change will happen as a result of this, because we are just going to divert people from meaningful action to purely symbolic empty gestures. And I think it's wrong. I think it's wrong as an organizer, and I think it's wrong as someone who's involved in these struggles. I think what that ribbon on your Twitter profile is, is it's the top end of a funnel. And that funnel, the easier that first step is, the wider the funnel is. And again, like everyone who's ever marketed a successful product knows that the bigger the top of your funnel is, the more people there are at the bottom of the funnel. And so, casting a wide net by making these small steps that we can take, making it incremental, that's how we're going to evacuate the big tech platforms.

Jose Leal:

And you talked about, I was just going to say, you, you talked about the technical interoperability, but what you've just described a really social interoperability, right?  it's the ability to do those little things and still migrate towards that new platform.

Cory Doctorow:

Leave Twitter and go to Mastodon, and still stay in touch with people at Twitter. And you know, what, if we created a law that said that Twitter had to stand that up, unlike other laws that we might pass about Twitter that it desperately needs, like don't abuse your user's privacy or, you know, police harassment and real true threats or doxing or whatever those are really hard to police, right? Like, it's really hard to know if they're complying with the rule. And it's really even hard to know whether the, what the rule covers, right? If we say, oh, you mustn't harass people, then we have to argue about whether an individual element of conduct rises to the level of harassment. And then we also have to say, well, did they do everything that was technically feasible to prevent it? And so on. These are like fact intensive hard questions. But if we say, hey, if Jose and Matt leave Twitter and go to like Cory to Mastodon and set up there and want to reconnect with all their friends, like the way that we find out whether Twitter is complying with it, is by trying to send messages between them. And if they're not, we just go and we clobber them. We take, you know, like the GDPR does, like 5% of their annual global turnover per day of noncompliance. You know, that would be a quite easy to administer remedy. And unlike other rules that say, like for example, you have to police everything your users do, which requires that every startup have an army of moderators, that none of the existing platforms had when they started and would've prevented them from coming to existence if that had been the rule. A rule like this, doesn't require any special expenditure for a new market entrant. Whether you're developing new software from scratch or whether you are using off the shelf software, supporting activity pub isn't hard, right? It's like a, an open standard with reference code that's quite robust that anyone can download and implement for free. And so, unlike the remedies that we currently propose, when we try to make tech better instead of less important… this is something that would not fence out new market entrants and that we could enforce without having to have these like crazy seven year fact intensive inquests where we depose every engineer to find out whether or not the company was living up to its promises or failing because the technology had reached its limit.

Jose Leal:

So, we're going to do this at the technology level, we're going to do this at the cultural level, if you will. And at what pace… when does this kick in? Because we've been talking about things like this for 20 years.

Cory Doctorow:

Well, we are at a turning point, and I should mention we've gone a little long... I actually have another call starting in five minutes.

Jose Leal:

Yeah. And we should be wrapping this up.

Cory Doctorow:

But I'll say we're at this turning point. There is more energy for doing something about this. And there has been since the Carter years, and that's happening in the US it's happening in Canada, in the UK, in the EU, even the Chinese cyberspace directive is full of pro-competitive, pro interoperability measures. Because despite what, you know, Facebook will tell you, like China does not view its tech companies as national champions that it plans to take over the rest of the world with China views those tech companies as competitors with the power of the state and is throwing the leaders of those companies in Google Logs. Not a thing I endorse for the record, but like, you know, they're reigning them in too. Everywhere you look, it's happening.

Jose Leal:

Well, Cory, thank you so much for your time today. Thank you for joining us. It was not only cool talking to you, it was cool talking to you from where you were born, which is kind special.

Cory Doctorow:

I wasn't born in Cottage Country.

Jose Leal:

Well, but you know… Toronto… I think you drank a few beers up here.

Cory Doctorow:

I have indeed. You have to replenish your fluids after the mosquitoes get you.

Jose Leal:

Absolutely. And you want them drunk as well, not just yourself.

Cory Doctorow:

That's right. That's right.

Jose Leal:

A real pleasure. Thank you for your time. I know you got to run. So…  we'll just let our audience know that we don't have a guest to announce for next week, but it's coming up. So, take a look, and check it out. We'll see you next week.

Cory Doctorow:

I hear they got Elon Musk.

Jose Leal:

Oh, there you go. If you could give him a call, I’m sure all those guys… You've got him on the hotline.

Cory Doctorow:

He blocked me on Twitter once, I don't know.

Jose Leal:

Have a great day. Thank you.

Cory Doctorow:

You too.