Factually! with Adam Conover - The Long, Slow Death of the Internet with Cory Doctorow

Episode Date: April 6, 2022

The early Internet was open, exciting, and deeply optimistic. So how did we end up, just a few decades later, with one that’s closed, exploitative, and makes most of us incredibly depressed? Longtime Internet gadfly and author of How to Destroy Surveillance Capitalism, Cory Doctorow, joins Adam to break down how the Internet has changed for the worse, and what we can do about it. Check out his book at https://factuallypod.com/books Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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So if all of that sounds good, if you want a big box of delicious snacks like this for yourself, use the code factually for $15 off your first order at Bokksu.com. That's code factually for $15 off your first order on Bokksu.com. I don't know the way. I don't know what to think. I don't know what to say. Yeah, but that's alright. Yeah, that's okay. I don't know anything. Hello and welcome to Factually. I'm Adam Conover. Thank you for joining me once again as I talk to an amazing expert about all the information that is locked inside of their skull. We are going to try to extract that information and jam it into our own ear holes by means of this podcast. We're going to have a great time. Thank you so much for being here. And of course, I want to thank everyone who supports the show on Patreon. thank everyone who supports the show on Patreon. If you want to join them, head to patreon.com slash Adam Conover for bonus podcast episodes, exclusive standup I don't post anywhere else, and our live book club where we all read a book together and discuss it, sometimes with the author

live on Zoom. Head to patreon.com slash Adam Conover to join up and thank you to you if you are already a supporter. Now, let's talk about the internet. I grew up on the internet quite literally. I was actually part of the first generation in history where that was even possible for a kid. When I was in seventh grade, there was one teacher at my school who had a single Mac that he had personally hooked up to the internet

because it was so new, that was the only way to get on. There was a computer lab, but all those were just Mac pluses that all you could do was play number cruncher on. We only had this one computer that was connected to the internet. And this teacher taught just my one class how to use early internet technologies like Gopher, MUDS, FTP, and yes, a very early version of the World Wide Web. I was fascinated by this new means of communicating that allowed me to talk with people all over the world, allowed me to create digital works that they could see and experience, and that fundamentally allowed me to escape my suburban middle-class life on Long Island. It was utterly intoxicating.

And after getting that first little taste, I was constantly trying to figure out how I could get more. And then one fateful day, the phone at my house rang and I happened to pick up. And on the other end was the cable company. And they were saying, hey, we are experimenting with this new thing called cable internet. We're rolling it out to certain homes around the community. Do you want to be one of the first homes to get it? And I said, without asking my parents, yes, we do. Please send someone to our house. And when the technician came, for some reason,

my parents instructed him to install the cable modem directly into my bedroom, where I had a very, at the time, advanced, but by today's standards, extremely slow and clunky PC hooked up. And so I got cable internet from the age of like something like 15 years old hooked up directly into my room. And from then on, I did nothing until 2 a.m. every single night, but surf the internet, hang in 10 on the information super wave. I don't know, I'm mixing my late 90s internet metaphors, but you get the picture. The internet was an intoxicating place back then. It was full of tinkerers, optimists,

interesting people debating ideas, sharing their creations, just doing cool shit in this brand new digital domain. And I could not get enough of it. And it only seemed to be getting better year over year. When I got to college, I started a sketch comedy group with my friends and we started uploading our videos to the internet. This was before YouTube. I literally had to compress the video myself using QuickTime, but they actually found an audience. Like we actually

had success. People around the world seeing our work in a way that wouldn't have been possible just five or ten years earlier. Every day, I was excited to log into the internet because it was a fun, magical place that was full of possibility. And you might notice that no one thinks of the internet this way anymore. Instead, we feel cursed by it, shackled to it, trapped in it in a way that we wish we could escape. Instead of a beautiful constellation of millions of independent websites, each one of which is expressing a different perspective, handcrafted by a different person from a different corner of the globe, now we've got just three or four gigantic platforms that algorithmically shovel the same meaningless memes,

takes, and arguments into our faces over and over and over again. And of course, none of us can leave them without giving up access to our professional contacts, friends, and family. I'll spend an hour scrolling through the same boring memes and trends on TikTok in hopes of discovering just one video that gives me a sense of spontaneity and surprise that I used to get from the old internet. Or I compulsively open and refresh Twitter and just see thousands of tweets from different people saying, Twitter is terrible. I wish I could quit. And I'm like, like, I agree with that sentiment. It is bleak out there. So how did this happen? Over the course of just my lifetime,

how do we go from an internet that felt flourishing, nourishing, and interesting to one where just four or five companies command almost all our attention and surveil our every keystroke just so they can commoditize it in ever more elaborate and inscrutable ways? Well, we're not going to

be able to answer that question in just one episode. But to get us started, we have someone on the show this week who has been there since the very beginning and who's been writing about and chronicling the history of the Internet nonstop for most of the decades it has existed. He's also one of the founders of Creative Commons and was an incredibly important part of the fights for net neutrality and the right to repair our technology. I have loved his writing and reporting for many, many years, and we have actually crossed paths before, as you will hear at the very beginning of this interview. So without further ado, please enjoy my interview with Corey Doctorow. Corey, thank you so much for being on the show.

Oh, well, thank you for having me. It's a pleasure to talk to you again. Yeah, I just want to talk about how we met because I thought it was interesting. I have read your work online for years, for a couple of decades now. I've been a fan for a long time. You reached out to me in something like 2018, 2017 to say, hey, there's a topic I really think that you should do on Adam Ruins Everything. You should talk about right to repair, about the fact that when you buy digital goods, you don't own them, about the fact that companies are using DRM, digital rights management, to make your physical objects work less well and make you unable to repair them and unable

to buy parts from other manufacturers. And it was one of the only times that someone came to us and said, you should do this topic. And I was like, yeah, that's it. We really should. We actually should do that. And I went and I took it to our research team and they were like, yes, this is a very good topic. And we did it basically exactly as you had pitched it. And I don't know if that was gratifying for you. It was very gratifying for us. It was a stellar episode. I was really glad to watch it. And I don't know if that was gratifying for you. It was very gratifying for us. It was a stellar episode. I was really glad to watch it. And, you know, I thought it fit in your sweet spot, which to a certain extent is my sweet spot, which is stuff that is really important and so complex that many people just don't even try to understand it. And, you know, there are subjects

that are hard to understand because they're complex, but then there are some subjects that are deliberately complex so that they'll be hard to understand. And a lot of them fall under the category of things like capitalist shenanigans, which I think Adam Ruins Everything did a really good job on. And so, that pocket of the digital rights world uh where the intersection of terms of service and copyright and anti-circumvention and product design and tortious interference with contract and automated takedown all this other stuff all kind of comes together is like very hard to get your head around but it is incredibly salient to our daily lives. It represents a really big shift in how our lives are lived. And so that's why I thought it'd be

good for you guys. And I thought you did an excellent job with it. Thank you. I'm very proud of that episode. That episode was Adam Ruins Tech, if people want to check it out on HBO Max. We also did a segment there about, just as a little aside, I love telling the story. We did a segment in that episode about the sort of oligopoly of cable providers and how they divided the country up between themselves. And that's why you only have access to one internet service provider, likely in your area that does cable, right?

For me, it's Spectrum. For someone else, it might be Comcast or whatever because of that. And we released that episode as AT&T was in the process of buying Warner Media and someone at Warner Media saw it as it was airing and got really upset and took that episode like off of reruns and off of internet distribution as a result.

Yeah. So you can watch it now on HBO max. It is now on HBO max, but for a while it was like not on digital on demand and stuff like that. And it wasn't, they didn like not on digital on demand and stuff like that. And it wasn't, they didn't upload YouTube of that segment because, not because AT&T told them not to, but because someone at Warner was like, uh-oh, this segment mentions AT&T and the other big ISPs. And we're worried about that. And like, you know, the president of the network got yelled at because of that segment.

that. And like, you know, the president of the network got yelled at because of that segment. So that was one that for me, especially as satisfying and successful. So that episode was called Adam Ruins Tech. So, you know, Jay Ward used to deliver Rocky and Bo Winkle episodes to the studios like five minutes before airtime so that no one could preview them because he could therefore do all kinds of crazy things. I, I love that. That's great. I love, uh, I love that amount of power. I unfortunately never had that amount of power, but the main thing I would do is if, if you fuck with me, I'm picking a bigger fight next time. Uh, and that's how, that's how I sleep at night. Um, and that's my approach at any rate. So, um, look, but let me say, I've read, as I said, your work on, I first encountered your work on

boingboing.net, the wonderful blog. But of course, you're a man about the Internet. You are a fiction author, but you're an essayist. You are also a technologist and just general gadfly. But one of the things I think where I'd like to start is that, you know, we all felt very differently about the Internet maybe 20, 25 years ago. Around when I started reading your work in the early 2000s. You know, the internet was about openness, you know, free access to information, open technology, open source, da, da, da, da, da.

It feels like we're in a very different place with technology now. What has that story been from your point of view? What have the changes been and what sort of future are we moving into? Yeah. So I think that there's like a story about the optimism of that period that is unfair in its criticism, which goes like in the beginning, there were the techno optimists and they thought that if we just gave everyone a computer, everything would be fine and connected it to the internet.

You know, that's, that's the, that's the kind of Zuckerberg doctrine, right? Connect everyone and everything will be fine. And there were undoubtedly people like that. And certainly people saying that to investors, uh, because they wanted to raise money or, or, or juice their share price. But the people who are most prominently accused of being techno-optimists, the people who cared about digital rights, were the people who were not only optimistic about what could happen if we gave people network devices and gave them the freedom to use them in ways that suited them, but also really frightened about what would happen if we gave people network devices, but didn't give them that freedom, right? Made them beholden to shareholder interests, made them beholden to the oppressive state power that wanted to use devices to spy on people. You don't found an organization like Electronic Frontier Foundation if you think everything's going to be fine. Yeah. Yeah.

You know, it's because you're, it's because you appreciate what's at stake, not not just how great it could be, but how terrible it could be that that you get involved. But there was a blind spot. And and it's a blind spot that I think we still labor under, which is that the the era of the current tech revolution, which I think starts with the Altair PC and the Apple 2 Plus, it also coincides with the era in which we dismantled antitrust enforcement. So Ronald Reagan hit the campaign trail as the Apple 2 Plus hit store shelves. And every year after that, we took away more of the controls that prevented corporate concentration. And those controls were really important to tech because they meant that if you had an idea for a

cool way to make technology make people's lives better, you could do all kinds of things to improve the world. You could launch a business and launch a product and so on. But what you couldn't do was sell out to the companies that you were actually trying to compete with. They couldn't buy you and they couldn't enter the market that was vertically adjacent to their own to try and crush you, right? So, you know, if they're offering photo hosting and you're offering cameras, they couldn't enter the camera space and then sell cameras at a loss to force you out so that they could capture both photos and cameras and tie them together. Wait, there was a time when that wasn't, well, you just described them like,

oh, that happens every day now. Yeah, no. So, from basically the passage of the Sherman Act, which was the late 19th century, and then through especially the New Deal in the next 30 years, there was the presumption that companies shouldn't be allowed to merge with their competitors to buy nascent competitors. So, major competitors couldn't merge, nascent competitors couldn't merge. competitors, right? So major competitors couldn't merge, nascent competitors couldn't merge. That vertical integration was considered suspicious, and that particularly important industries were subject to what was called structural separation. So like most notably, if you ran a bank, you couldn't also invest in businesses that competed with the businesses that borrowed money from your bank. Because if there's two pizza parlors on the same street as the bank, and one of them borrows from the bank and the other one borrows from the bank, but is also owned by the bank, and both of them come back to the bank looking for their next loan to expand, the bank gets to choose the winner. And so we had this idea of structural separation as well. And there had been this fringe idea for a couple of decades that had been promulgated

by the people who became known as the Chicago School of Economics. This is the people who gave us Reaganomics and trickle down and neoliberalism more generally. And in the case of antitrust, they had this thing that we can really only describe as a conspiracy theory. They said that if you went and you read the statutes really carefully, like kind of QAnon drop carefully, between the lines, you would discover that the people who wrote these statutes and voted for them, who were super explicit that they said they didn't like monopolies because monopolies created concentrated corporate power that made it hard to regulate

them and therefore allowed them to kind of usurp the role of a democratically accountable state, that they really didn't care about any of that. All they cared about was the tiny minority of possibly fictional monopolies that were inefficient, and that most monopolies were efficient, and that they created the benefits that, you know, today you would say, oh, they create the benefit of next day Amazon delivery, right? Because they can do this integration, and they can cross-subsid Because they can do this integration and they can cross-subsidize their lines of business and they're not mired in wasteful competition. As Peter Thiel says, competition is for losers. And that what we needed to do was err on the side of

caution because most monopolies are really good for consumers. And we should always take a wait-and-see approach to monopolies, give them the benefit of the doubt, and only shut them down if we could mathematically prove using models that only people from the University of Chicago knew how to build or interpret that the monopoly was inefficient. So it's a bit like appointing themselves court sorcerers and saying, like, before, you know, if you had a grievance about the operation of the kingdom, you could come to the king and say like, the oxen are starving in the fields, right? And then the king would listen to your experience as the herder of the ox, right? But after you would come to the king and the king would ask the court sorcerer to slaughter an ox and to spread its guts out on the floor of the court, and to read the guts. This is a really great description of an economist. Yeah, yeah, court sorcerer, right? And they could just stroke their beard, and they could say, I look in these guts, and I see that the gods favor the king's existing policy.

And when the person with the ox dying in the field says, but wait a minute, what about the ox dying in the fields? This court sorcerer could go, look who thinks he knows how to read the guts of a sacrificial animal. Like, did you go to the University of Chicago? Right? So, it created this kind of realm in which we had a forbearance for monopoly. And so, what ended up happening was that the growth tactic of firms became acquisition merger, and where that wasn't possible uh predatory extinction right so like uh pricing things below cost to drive out uh businesses neighboring or competing businesses and when that didn't work collusion so you know right now with um the texas

attorney general's antitrust complaint complaint against uh google they just unsealed a bunch of documents that show that the ceo of google and the ceo of facebook literally had illegal meetings where they rigged the ad market right wow they just colluded right yeah so and and you know unwisely documented it because you know these guys are not super geniuses they're like everyday mediocrities just like you and me they would like us to believe they're super geniuses. Like they would like us to believe that the reason that they control the discourse is not because they have monopoly on all the places we speak and how we speak and who, who our speech gets shown to, but rather because they have built a big data persuasion engine that bypasses our critical faculties and it turns into like a mind control ray. Yeah. The people who criticize big tech by saying, look, they use the mind control ray that was

supposed to sell your nephew fidget spinners to make your uncle into a QAnon. They're kind of doing these guys work for them, right? They're like, so these guys are very happy to be evil geniuses as long as they get to go on being geniuses. I have so many friends who are, who believe that these people are evil geniuses who think that, you know, like I want to get into Facebook a little bit. Let's not dive into it totally at the moment, because I want to return to one of your earlier points, but I have a friend who, you know, we were talking about, uh, Facebook's meta announcement, their big metaverse video. And I looked at this

and went, this is bullshit. This is like, this is CGI. There's nothing here. This is a concept video. There there's nothing in this. And my friend was like, no, Mark Zuckerberg is a genius. And he has technology that he's working on in his basement that we don't even know about. And like, no, he doesn't. He doesn't. He's he's a, he's an idiot. Like they're all idiots. They don't, there's no secret plan here. They're just, they're just dopes with a lot of money. But to return to your point about, about antitrust, when we had, we had, we had Scott Galloway on the show a number of years ago, said something that was stuck with me about how the antitrust case against Microsoft in the, in the what, late nineties, early two thousands, right? Late nineties was incredibly important. And I remember I was the kind of kid who like read Wired Magazine. So I remember reading about it

and going, oh, this is, oh this is oh, this is a big deal. Everyone's talking about this all the time. And it was a big deal because it like chastened Microsoft enough that they didn't go buy or murder Google, that they didn't go buy and murder tons of other companies. They were the one big dog. They had, you know, the leg iron strapped around them or they were they were chastened. Right. They had, you know, the leg iron strapped around them or they were they were chastened.

Right. And as a result, we had a very open sort of, you know, Internet economy for about a decade where you had all these little companies spring up. But now the dream of, hey, I'm going to start my own startup and build a company from scratch and compete doesn't exist. All that happens is you either are strangled in the crib by a giant company that will reproduce your product, you know, and steal it whole cloth as Facebook does. Or the other thing will happen, which is that Facebook or another company will buy you and kill your product and integrate it into their own to greater or lesser degrees. So the fact that, you know, what we have missed is that Instagram is not its own product. Like it's not its own company. Like it could, it could have been. And remember how great Instagram was in 2000, what, 2011? Oh, it was so nice and simple. It's just a feed of your friend's photos.

Like, wow, isn't that nice? It's just your friend's photos all in chronological order and that's it. And like, what if that had grown by itself? It probably would have sucked more than that. It probably would have gotten worse, but it wouldn't have been part of Facebook. It would have been its own. It would have competed with Facebook. We would have, we could have had two Facebooks or three Facebooks or 10 Facebooks. If we had, if Facebook had been chased into the same way that Microsoft was in the nineties, but instead they're doing the opposite. Right. Well, and, and, you know, I think that the, both what happened with Google

after Microsoft declined to give it the Netscape treatment and kill it before it could take off and what happened with Facebook and Instagram are really interesting examples of this phenomenon. So, you know, if Mark Zuckerberg was an evil super genius, his decision to buy Instagram wouldn't have been documented by two 30 in the morning email to his CFO, which was subsequently subpoenaed and released in which he said, our users, our young users don't like Facebook anymore. They're leaving for Instagram. We should buy Instagram so that they have nowhere to go that we don't own. He literally said that. Well, I'm paraphrasing, but not by much. And then he sent another email a couple hours later, which I think there's a wide presumption that there was a phone call between those two emails that said like, for avoidance of doubt, I did not mean this in any

anti-competitive and radioactively illegal ways. So literally he got a phone call from the lawyer. Hey, Mark, you need to just, we're worried about the paper trail. Could you stop doing this? Like, generally, like, because, you know, under the Chicago standard, you know, you have to prove that people are trying to form monopolies, right? Because it's not enough to prove that there is a monopoly. You have to prove that it's an intentional one. That's usually hard to prove because you've got to, you know, sort of look into their soul and divine their intentions. And it is somewhat easier when they commit those intentions to indelible permanent electronic trails in which they admit to the actual crime. So again, hard to reconcile that with the super genius. I mean, I'm not saying that I'm any better

than him. I have made lots of stupid mistakes. I just don't claim that I should be the unelected permanent social media czar for 3 billion people, which I think is a job that should require a higher bar than an online activist. So what happened with Microsoft, you know, I think you start the story a little too late because the real story starts with IBM, who had been sort of, you know, kneeling on the chest of the American tech sector along with AT&T for, you know, half a century and which went through its own antitrust, you know, ordeal. It spent 12 years in antitrust hell, 1970 to 1982. They called it antitrusts Vietnam. Every year that AT&T was fighting the DOJ, they spent more on lawyers for that one case than the DOJ spent on lawyers for every antitrust investigation they were doing for 12 consecutive years. And like Microsoft, because antitrust had been weakened by that point, it got off the hook, right? But it was so humbled by the experience that it made some really key decisions. Like one of the decisions it made was that it understood that the DOJ really hated tying software and hardware. So when it decided to make a PC, not only did it opt to use

non-proprietary standard components that anyone could buy and make their own clone PCs out of, but it also called up two kids, one named Bill Gates, the other named Paul Allen, who had a startup called Micro Dash Soft and said, will you make me an operating system? And some years later, Microsoft had turned into IBM and along came the DOJ and gave them the IBM treatment. I mean, it took seven years and not 12. You can't run the internet. You can run the software, but the internet, you have to let be a competitive space.

Yeah, you can't cross subsidize. You can't do predatory pricing. You can't use these anti-competitive lockout tactics. You can't do illegal tying. And then along comes Google, right? Which exists because Microsoft was cowed by this. In 2019, just before the lockdown, Kara Swisher had Bill Gates on stage and she said,

how come you didn't buy Android? And he said, oh, we were distracted by the antitrust debacle, right? And Android was sold eight years after the antitrust investigation ended. Yeah. Right? What he means is not that they were distracted. He meant that they had lost their nerve to do anti-competitive acquisition. The DOJ is going to come after us if we do this. We just got out of all this hot water. And as a result, it is funny when you think about it. Like, wait, why doesn't Microsoft have a phone operating system?

They tried Windows Phone. It failed. And they're still a giant company trying to build a new monopoly with their purchase of Activision. And, you know, they clearly have their old pants back on. Does that make sense? You know what I mean. I know what you mean. But they didn't, yeah, like, in a different world, they would have bought Android.

They obviously would have. Here's the kicker, is Google is what Microsoft and IBM were, but the DOJ was MIA until this administration, right? And Google is a company whose growth is entirely driven by acquisition. So Google has made one and a half successful products in-house. They made a really good search engine and they made a Hotmail clone that a lot of people like, right? Everything else they've done that's successful, including their mobile stack, but also their ad tech stack and their video hosting platform, their server infrastructure management stuff, their customer service management stuff, their mapping products, their satellite products,

all of those other products, with the exception of Google Photos that comes bundled with the products that they bought from other people. All those other products are products they bought from someone else. And every one of them has a corollary product that they tried to make in-house and failed with, like Windows Mobile. So what would it be like if all those companies were standalones? What would it be like if they were selling to all comers? If you could start a Google rival and integrate with all those pieces in the stack without integrating with Google? Yeah. Like what if, and I think about this all the time, because I think one of the death knells of the open internet, one of the things that sort of pinged for me at the time was when YouTube became the de facto only video platform

was, you know, cause before that video on the internet was very hard. I was in a sketch comedy group. I compressed our own video using QuickTime, using an app called Sorenson Squeeze. I, you know, like was up on video codecs. It was a lot of work and it was hard to find a host. Like we're constantly getting kicked off of hosts because we're using too much bandwidth with our 15 megabyte video files. Right.

So YouTube solved the problem by giving people a way. Hey, bandwidth is free. Right. We're not going to charge you for the bandwidth. But it became the only place that people watched video, which is bad enough for the prospects of an open open Internet and open ecosystem. But also, what if YouTube, one of the biggest websites in the world, wasn't owned by Google? Right. It would make a big difference.

And it's true. They just bought it. They bought YouTube. You are identifying a really key dynamic in how tech concentration works. And if you'll indulge me, I want to kind of surface that and talk about what everyone gets right about it and what they all miss. Please. So you're talking about what everyone gets right about it and what they all miss. So you're talking about network effects, right? The reason YouTube grew is because of network effects. And a network effect is a term economists use, both smart ones and ones from the University

of Chicago, to describe services that get better when more people use them. So you joined Facebook because your friends were already there. Once you joined Facebook, other friends who weren't there wanted to join because you were there, right? You made YouTube videos because there was an audience. Once you made your YouTube videos, that was a reason for more audience members to join. Someone makes an iPhone app because they're iPhone users. The more iPhone users there are, the more the reason there is to make an app. But the more apps there are, the more reason there is to become an iPhone user. So these are network effects and they're a virtuous cycle that drive extremely rapid growth in all kinds of service. And you and I are old internet people and you will remember things like Friendster going from zero to 60 overnight. That's the network effect in action. But you're an old internet person and

you don't still have a Friendster account. No. Because Friendster disappeared. And the reason it disappeared is that tech does have this other characteristic that's really important, which is that intrinsically it has very low switching costs, another economics term. And that's just what you have to give up to leave, right? If you leave YouTube and go somewhere else, like, you know, a bunch of people who've been deplatformed by YouTube did that. The switching cost is that the audience doesn't come with them. So they get a much smaller audience, much smaller reach. If you leave Facebook and go to the Fediverse and just hang out on Mastodon or Diaspora, you leave behind, you know, customers, family members, people have the same rare disease as you, whatever, you know, your kids' little league team, all of that stuff. Now, tech switching costs are low because tech is very flexible, right? Digital computers

can run every program that we know how to write. Like we only know how to make one kind of digital computer. It's called the Turing complete von Neumann machine. And it can run every program that can be expressed in symbolic language. Now, some computers are faster than others. Some have more RAM than others. And I wouldn't want to try to run Photoshop on like a Apple two plus. But, you know, the reality is that if you if you had enough time and you were willing to swap floppy disk long enough, you could run it. It might take a thousand years to see the splash screen, but you could run it. Theoretically, they're the same device. Yeah. And our internet is the network of networks. It's the network that replaces all of the special purpose networks, a cable network, the red hot network that goes to the president's desk phone when there's a missile in the sky, the faxing network.

All those other networks are all now subsumed into one protocol that has sub protocols running in a TCP IP with stuff inside it, right? And what that means is that like when Facebook was taking off and yet everyone was on MySpace and MySpace was owned by a, you know, jealous rapacious billionaire named Rupert Murdoch, who didn't want to let those people go. Mark Zuckerberg didn't have to offer people the stark choice of a better service on Facebook or all their friends on MySpace, he welcomed them into Facebook, gave them a tool where they could enter their MySpace login and password, and then it would go and fetch their waiting messages from MySpace. It would log in as them and bring them out.

And that low switching cost meant that you didn't have to arrange like international, everybody leaves Facebook for MySpace for Facebook day to get your friends to go over. You didn't have to bear another economics term. You didn't have to bear another economics term. You didn't have to bear the coordination cost that is, that creates the switching cost. You could switch and then your friends could switch when they had a moment, you know, it, it, it wouldn't be, you didn't have to all move in, in unison. Yeah.

And low switching costs are like a technical reality. That's very hard to defend against. You can, you know, like today, even if Google didn't have the full suite of tools for like downloading your email and moving them somewhere else, you can like forward email from one place to another. And it can be invisible to the people you're forward, you know, who you were sending email to and stuff. There are all kinds of these intrinsic tools in our tech world. There are email clients. There are web providers that have basically cloned Gmail that provide a better service

that you can, and I have done this myself. I left Gmail and loaded it all into another service. It has J and K keyboard shortcuts, just like Gmail. All my contacts are there. It's almost the exact same experience. And that company was able to create that product unilaterally. They didn't have to ask Google's permission. Sure.

And they can even make buttons to like download it all with IMAP and do all kinds of cool stuff. So those switching costs are high today and they're not high because of technical barriers. It is true that like if you tried to build a tool like that for Facebook, Facebook might object to it and they pay some engineers to try and block it. But, you know, ultimately you have the, the attacker's advantage, you know, in security context, we say that the defender is the worst person to be the blue team. You don't want to be the blue team because the blue team has to make no mistakes. And the red team, the attackers just have to find one mistake you've made one, one crack in the armor. Right. And so, you know,

Attackers just have to find one mistake you've made, one crack in the armor, right? And so, you know, Facebook, 3 billion users is 3,001 in a million use cases every day, which means that Facebook figuring out what's a user just being weird and what's a bot acting on behalf of a user getting their stuff, they're faced with like a real challenge, right? You have the advantage. What Facebook has is the law. And here's where corporate concentration, technology, and policy all come together. Because as companies grew and grew, as the number of competitors they had shrank and shrank, they not only had more profits because, as Peter Thiel reminds us, competition is wasteful. You have to lower your prices or pay your workers more or do other things that

competition requires of you, you know, in order to remain in the market. You can retain that money. Now, your shareholders expect most of it, but you can retain it. And also, it's easier to figure out what you want to do with that money. You and the other people can sit down and make a decision. We talk about Apple and Facebook and Google being at each other's throats, but there are so many policies they're united on. Should Ireland tax tech companies? They're all in complete unison. Should their workers be allowed to unionize? And we look at that photo. For me, it was a real turning point, that photo of all the tech giants sitting around at the top of Trump Tower in 2017 with Donald Trump around this kind of leatherette billiard table that he had up there. And people looked at that and they were like, how can these paragons of liberal democracy sit down with this demagogue?

And it was not a terrible point to ask. But I think an even scarier point is how do all the people who run the internet fit around one table? Yeah. Right. When you can all sit around one table, you can agree on a strategy, right? An industry that needs to rent out the whole Moscone center to sit down. They can't even agree on lunch catering. Right. But if you all fit around one table, you can figure out what you want. I mean, back to your net neutrality thing, you know, the cable companies have a unified position because there's not many of them. Yeah. Right. When, if there were hundreds of cable companies, some of them would be like, actually, my advantage is going to be not being the sellouts, right? Yeah. I'll get a lower margin,

but I'll get more business. Right. And similarly, they don't actually compete. The cable companies don't compete because they have divided up the country regionally, right? Well, and that's the position they've agreed on more than any of the rest, right? Exactly. Like the Pope dividing up the new world between Spain and Portugal, you know? And the tech companies don't really compete because they all have business models that are slightly different, right? Like Apple is only in it to sell the hardware. They really just want you to go to the Apple store and sell it.

They make a lot of money on app store commissions. Okay. They do. They do. But the core of their business, if you look at their profit, it's like, like 60% of all of the money is like selling iPhones or something. It's a huge portion. Um, and so, you know, when they're like making TV shows, right, they're not making TV shows to compete with Netflix, like for subscriptions, they're just doing it to sell more iPhones, right? Google makes all of their money off of ad revenue. So like these two companies don't necessarily compete, right? They're, they're, they're both giant tech companies that have their own ecosystems that you could buy into or not. You could be an all Apple person or you could be an all Google person. But the two companies can like, they're not actually fighting over the same dollar bill. So they're able to collude in a

way that is like a little bit easier than say, you know, if, if, uh, if Instagram and Facebook were separate companies, those companies would be directly competing. But Facebook in fact, has no, has no competitor in social media. And, you know, it's funny because when we talk about these firms, we talk about them like they're the Montagues and the Capulets, right? Like they must really hate each other. And then we go like, well, wait a second, didn't Sheryl Sandberg used to be like a top Googler and now she's the COO of Facebook? Like, are they Romeo and Juliet? And you know, this carries over into like other industries, right? Like, so for how long did we think of Fox as the anti-Disney and Disney as the anti-Fox? You know, we're Bob Iger and Rupert Murdoch star-crossed lovers from great houses that couldn't come. Like, no, they're actually more or less on the same side, right? They're basically

on the same side. You know, that guy who ran T-Mobile, who called himself the anti-CEO and called it the anti-carrier, who then, you know, merged with Sprint and exited. He was an ex-AT&T, ex-Sprint executive who then ended up running it. He's not the un-CEO. It's not like he's like Pauly Shore, who was vaulted to CEOdom after being picked up on a surfer beach or something. He was a telecoms executive. He was a lifer who'd worked for all the major firms. He was just a CEO. who'd worked for all the major firms. Yeah. Right?

He was just a CEO. So, okay. So when the sector gets concentrated, it can influence policy. It's much easier to influence policy when you all agree. And it's even more easy to influence policy if you all agree and you have a lot of money

to spend on influencing policy. And so today, the tactics that Facebook used and Apple used and Google used and all these other big firms used to grow, the interoperability tactics that they used to reduce the switching costs, let other people come into their business. Those tactics are now shut down, not by technology, but by law. Wow.

You did a whole show on section 12.1 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, you know, the thing that bans bypassing an access control system and is used to lock people in on repairs and on apps and a lot of other things. This is what allows a company to say, you can't open our technology and tinker with it or repair it yourself without our permission. It's actually illegal to do that. Or interoperate with it more broadly. So, you know, again, you're an old computer person. So you'll remember around 2000, Apple was really on the ropes. I was a CIO back then. We were running offices with Windows machines and Macs. Mostly the Macs would be in the minority and it was a couple of designers.

And then everyone else was using Windows and the designers would have to get like Word and Excel files and PowerPoint files from the Windows users. And Microsoft Office for the Mac was the most cursed piece of software ever. You know, nothing would open. And if it would open and you saved it again, it would never open again. And it was bad for Apple. You know, speaking from like my perspective as someone who was a CIO making purchase decisions, eventually my first cut at solving the problem was to buy a second computer for all of these designers to give them a Windows machine so that they could read and write the Office

files that everyone else used. Wow. And when that got too cumbersome, we threw away their Macs and bought Adobe and Quark for Windows, right? Yeah. So how did Apple solve that? Well, Steve Jobs didn't beg Bill Gates

to give him a better version of Office. He paid some engineers to reverse engineer the file formats of Microsoft Office, and they made iWork, Pages, Keynote, and Numbers. Yeah. he paid some engineers to reverse engineer the file formats at Microsoft office. And they made, I work pages, a keynote and numbers. Yeah.

And then they launched a campaign called switch, right? You can, the switching costs are now not zero. It's the cost of a Mac and, and the cop cost of I work, but it's not the cost of all the documents. Yeah. And it's not the cost of all the people you exchange them with.

I have, I have all my old PC files on my current Mac. because I have a big ass two terabyte hard drive. I have every single file from every PC I had back in college. I can open all the files now. They all open fine because they reverse engineered it. Yeah. So what if you were to do that with iTunes today, right? Here we've like stripped all the DRM off the movies so you can play them with another player. We've reversed out all the file formats. No, great point. Okay. So I have a gaming PC I use to listen to music. Sometimes it has a crappy old version of iTunes on it. They have not updated iTunes for windows PC with a new version called Apple music. And so sometimes it doesn't run right. And no one

has made a windows version of an Apple music player because that is impossible. You can't actually do that. Apple would come after you so hard legally that all that would be left behind is a radioactive crater, right, if you tried to do this. So, you know, this isn't unusual, right? Like, we often see that, like, yesterday's pirates now call themselves admirals, you know? But the difference is that in this case, they can make it stick. And it's not just Apple. Facebook, which was reverse engineering MySpace, when a company called Power Ventures made a tool that lets you just aggregate your Facebook messages with your LinkedIn messages, with your Twitter messages and whatever, Facebook just obliterated them for doing the same thing Facebook had done to MySpace. space. So they've bought these anti-interoperability policies, these laws, policies, and interpretations that allow them to block interoperators. And that has taken the switching costs and made them very high. And so you can actually even see this in their strategy. So again, the unredacted Facebook

briefs in the Texas AG case, some of the emails that they subpoenaed from Facebook are the guy who ran Facebook photos emailing Mark Zuckerberg and saying, Facebook photos has to be really good because if it is, people will trust their family photos to us, which means that if they leave, they'll have to leave behind their family photos. And that's a high switching cost, which means that we can probably really like abuse our users, right? We can extract more revenue from them in ways that are worse for them. And they'll tolerate it because the alternative is walking away from their family photos. And he uses the phrase switching costs

in that memo. So Facebook really understands that switching costs are a way to shift the balance from its user side of the ledger to their own side of the ledger. And so do the other tech giants. We have to take a really quick break or my ad sales team is going to kill me, but we'll be right back with more Cory Doctorow. And I want to ask you specifically about what you think is going to happen with Facebook in the future. We'll be right back with more Cory Doctorow. Okay. So we're back with Corey Doctorow. So you've been explaining interoperability, how the tech companies have done their best to kill it,

even though they all built the backs of their companies on it in the first place. So what are the prospects for creating more interoperability in the future? Well, they're pretty good. I think that we've now reached a point where a lot of people in policy circles no longer believe that the tech giants are super geniuses, even if they're evil geniuses. It is good that everybody hates them now. Like everyone across the political spectrum has some beef and that is progress. Yep. Yep. And it's true that like the reason Ted Cruz is on side is not the reason I'm on side, but whatever, right? We have a bipartisan alliance here. So they are no longer buying the story that it's just network effects that naturally produce a winner-take-all.

They understand that network effects services, digital services, are leaky buckets. They fill it fast, but a lot of users run out the bottom. And by blocking interoperability, they stopped up the leaks. And so people are stuck. You know, to switch metaphors, it's a roach motel. You know, you check in, but you can't check out. They want to make it easier to check out. So there are some bills in the European Union, in the US, and even in China that would force interoperability, mandatory interoperability.

So the way that they work in broad strokes is someone makes a standard, right? Like maybe it's a standards committee. Maybe it's a committee composed of like engineers from the platforms and engineers from their rivals and academics and someone from the National Institute for Standards and Technology. Someone makes a standard that allows for third parties to plug in to these existing services. The standard comes with a policy layer that says what you're allowed to do after you plug in. So like Cambridge Analytica can't plug into Facebook and just suck user data out. You're not allowed to commercialize the data. You're not allowed to use it without explicit consent, whatever.

Right. And then users then have a migration path where you just click a button and you leave Facebook and you go to a Facebook rival. Maybe it's run by a co-op. Maybe it's run by a startup. Maybe it's run by a nonprofit. Maybe it's run by your church. Maybe it's run by your local library. Maybe it's run by a big company that isn't Facebook. Right. Maybe it's run by a nonprofit. Maybe it's run by your church. Maybe it's run by your local library. Maybe it's run by a big company that isn't Facebook, right?

Maybe it's run by your own employer. And you jump over to there and you can just keep using Facebook the way you've always used it. You can talk to the same people you were talking to in the same ways that you were talking to, but you can have your own moderation policies. You know what this reminds me of? Sorry to interrupt, but this reminds me of when we had the law passed, I forget what year, in the U.S. that said when you change cell phone providers, you can bring your phone number.

That was such a big change because before that, people would not change cell phone providers. Just because, I mean, if you're listening to this, remember that? Like that was a very different, you literally couldn't switch. And now you can literally switch between, hey, do I want to have AT&T or Verizon? You can just decide and go tomorrow and have the same exact phone number and nothing, nothing will change. And your friends don't need to know, unless you tell your friends, they don't even know you've switched carriers. Yeah. In the same way that like, unless you tell your friends, they won't know that you switched from like using Thunderbird to a web mail client or whatever. It's like, it's none of their business.

They don't need to know. They probably think you were weird if you told them. Yeah. They're like, why are you, why do you love Verizon so much? Why are you telling me about this? I don't give a shit. Like they're all the same. It commodifies them. But it took a law to make that happen. Like the, the cell phone companies obviously didn't want to let you do that. And, but, oh, imagine if Facebook worked the same way, that would be incredible. So in the U S this law is called the access act and it's doing really well. In Europe, it's called the Digital Markets Act. Both of them are actually racing along because, as you say, there's this bipartisan consensus,

and there's kind of a moment that's arrived. And if I'm going to be perfectly honest, they also have a bit of a tailwind from telecoms and entertainment who would love to smash the power of tech, right? And those sectors, I think they're making a weird bet because their bet is like, we put antitrust into a coma 40 years ago. We're going to wake it up to fight like one more battle. And then it's just going to go back to sleep, right?

It's not going to, no one's going to turn that weapon that we're reviving on us. So it is a weird bet. The telecoms, meaning what? Like AT&T and then AT&T and charter. Yeah. And entertainment, the entertainment industry that I'm a part of. Yeah.

Those companies are hoping that antitrust will come back. They are stoking the flames of antitrust, embers of antitrust. But just for tech, right? So they, they, they talk, I mean, it's not a real secret. They talk a big line about tech's anti-competitive concentration. They don't say the same thing about AT&T, Time Warner, Disney Fox. I mean, it's not a real secret. They talk a big line about tech's anti-competitive concentration.

They don't say the same thing about AT&T Time Warner, Disney Fox, you know, all of these acquisitions, AT&T Dish, you know, like all of these acquisitions are not discussed in the same way. And, you know, the idea that they think we won't notice is very odd. It really is. that they think we won't notice is very odd. It really is. Especially, you know, I think in particular with entertainment, there's a real miscalculation because we focus a lot, thanks largely to Chicago School, we focus a lot on what concentrated sectors do to consumers, but they have a really bad impact on workers. Oh, yeah. And that is a dimension that is finally coming into view that these, I mean, look, now you're talking about what I know very intimately because I work in the entertainment industry. I'm a board member of the Writers Guild West for full disclosure, where we, you know, often discuss issues of antitrust in our labor work. And yeah, the fact that these companies are merging is bad for workers because, okay, I'm trying to sell a show, right?

Uh, that's what literally what I'm going to be doing in a couple of weeks is like, okay, I got a new show idea. I want to sell it to a couple of different places. Well, if there's only two places to sell it to instead of three or instead of

10, it's hard for me to get a bidding war going and they can offer me less. And I make less money. This is what is called, I believe a monopsony. It's sort of monopsony. It's the inverse of a monopoly, but you, but if you imagine yourself as someone who is selling your labor, say you're a freelancer and you're selling your web design skills, if you're a farmer and you're

selling your grain, the number of people who you have available to sell to really matters to you. And we're starting to see glimmers for the first time that the antitrust enforcers at the DOJ and with the FTC are finally looking at it that way and saying, oh, wait, that's bad for Americans in a different way. It's not just bad and not just Americans, people around the world. It's not just bad in terms of prices for consumers, but it's bad in terms of wages to people and also money coming into other companies because it gives these companies too much control over this part of the market, which is the real problem with monopoly is power, not price. Correct. And, you know, I should, I should plug something here. I have a book coming out in September called choke point capitalism, which is about how, um, creative labor markets are monopsonistic and, uh, and about how copyright doesn't really help there that like giving, giving there, that giving a creator who's being abused by an

intermediary, like a publisher or a studio, more copyright, it just gives the studio or the publisher more copyright to demand that the creator sign over, which they can then wield against their rivals. It's like giving your bullied kid more lunch money. The bullies are just going to take that too. And so, we think that there are – my co-author is a great copyright scholar named Rebecca Giblin, and she's done a lot of empirical work on this, like the largest study ever of authors' contracts and so on. And we talk about some copyright-like mechanisms, like the termination right, the right to terminate a copyright assignment after 35 years, which is not well understood, but

hugely powerful. Like George Clinton just took his whole catalog back from his label. Wow. And now he owns it. Even though he'd signed it away forever after 35 years, it doesn't matter what that deal says. Stephen King took a bunch of his books back. If you've got kids of the right age and you buy them a babysitter's club book, you're buying it from the author now because she terminated all of her copyright assignments to her publisher. This is something that anybody can do? After 35 years.

Now, there's a question if it's a work made for hire, and that's coming up right now with the heirs of the guy who made the Game of Life for Hasbro who are arguing about this. who are arguing about this. But all of the original Marvel stable, including Stan Lee's estate, are coming after Disney Marvel to terminate all their copyright assignments and all of the characters that Disney Marvel has made the MCU out of. This is really fascinating.

And it makes me think of something, which is, look, when I became more involved in my union, I read a big history of the Writers Guild of America, right? And something I had not been aware of before I read this book, there's a book called The Writers by a woman named Miranda Banks, excellent book. And it talks about how an early debate, this is like in the 40s, in the Writers Guild was over copyright because screenwriters who wrote movies were looking at it going, hold on a second,

authors who write books retain their copyright. They sell to the publisher, but the author still owns the book, right? Why don't we own the rights to the movie? We wrote the movie. Why not? And there was a fight for that. And basically they lost, they gave up. They said there's more important fish to fry. It was like a historic giveaway that we don't even think about anymore, right? You don't question why is that the case? And so I'm very curious to find out if it doesn't apply to Works for Hire. Well, so we have a bunch of mechanisms that we address. It's very shovel ready. But, you know, one of the points that I was getting at here when I say that they're attacking

creative workers is creative workers are actually pretty good at making noise about issues that matter to them. Yes. Right? So the Disney animator strike, one of the reasons, which is like this historic, very important strike for my union, I'm a member of the animation guild because I wrote an animated thing for Netflix that they didn't do but but i you know joined that join the union but um they the our union while our nascent union the thing that generated our union involved like tex avery and uh schleichen

jigger and all of these like these animation pioneers at the gates of the disney studio with giant billboards they painted satirizingizing the Disney management and creating these satirical mannequins of Disney management and hanging them in effigy. They know how to make a spectacle, right? You're in a war for emotions, right? For the heart of the country, going after the people who have the heart of the country is a losing bet. So I want to get back to this interrupt thing. So these interrupt mandates, I think are great, but I think they're incomplete. I think of them as being like one part of two part epoxy, right? That they're the sticky part, but they're not the stiffener. And the stiffener is that stuff we were just talking about, that reverse engineering, right? Because Facebook could like slow walk this API that they're forced to deliver. They could change their internal data structures so it doesn't provide the interoperability that we want it to and say, oh, we had to do that.

And then, you know, the regulator would have to come in and like seven years later, they would say, oh, you were wrong. Okay, we'll put it back. Meanwhile, seven years later, like all of the companies that had started up have now exited the market because they had seven years without interoperating with Facebook. But what if reverse engineering was also on the table, right? What if we also said that the same tactics that Facebook used to grow and Apple used to grow and Google used to grow and Microsoft used to grow, those tactics were available to new market entrants that if they

didn't like Facebook's API, if it didn't go far enough, or if Facebook subverted it, they could just figure out how to do it with bots and reverse engineering and scraping. And yeah, it's an unstable situation to be in, in the same way that iWork was in an unstable situation because Microsoft could change the file formats and then you'd have to re-engineer them and make them again. But big tech firms by and large, and I've heard this directly from senior execs at big tech firms,

they don't like unquantifiable risks. They don't want to get in a guerrilla war of engineer on engineer where they're playing the defender and the other side gets to play attacker. They want no risks, but if they have to have risks, they'd like them to be quantifiable. They'd like to be able to like tell their investors what to expect. You know, when Mark Zuckerberg failed to tell his investors to expect that they were going to see a minor drop in US

daily users, the company lost more money in one day of trading than any company in the history of the world. Yeah. It was a 20% of its value or something, right? Yeah. 280 billion, I believe. Wow. It's a big number. So, you know, and a billion here, a billion there, pretty soon you're talking real money. Yeah.

So, I think that by and large, just the threat that interoperators would have defense in law for coming after them in this way would stay their hand. But in the event that it didn't, because there's no overestimating the hubris and foolishness of tech executives, then they would have a remedy too, right? And that's the other half of the epoxy. Adversarial interoperability, at EFF, we've been calling that competitive compatibility because adversarial interoperability is impossible to say. And you can turn competitive compatibility into ComCom, which is nice to say. So ComCom on the one hand, tech mandates on the other. And you could do this with repair. In Massachusetts, they passed a right to repair law for cars. It forced the automakers

to give independent mechanics the tools to debug messages on the wire network in the car, the automakers immediately moved those messages to the wireless network in the car. Eight years later, they passed another ballot initiative saying wireless networks too. In the intervening eight years, a lot of independent mechanics went out of business, right? What if like three MIT kids could have built a gadget with a cost of materials of three bucks, made it in Guangzhou by the boatload, imported it, sold it to mechanics for 50 bucks, built ancillary services on it with backing from investors like insurance, warranties, third-party parts, all this other great stuff that the car makers are making bank on and genuinely directly threatened those automakers in a way that independent repair just scratches the surface of, I think the automakers would have like not played shenanigans. And again, if they had,

well then in comes our three MIT kids. Yeah, that's a really cool vision. I wanna ask you before, I know you have to go. I just wanna ask you this. Because so much of what I loved about reading your work over the years, but especially in those internet early days, was there was that spirit of creative independence and technological play on the internet. You were deeply involved in Creative

Commons, which is, you know, a sort of new copyright system that allows people to share, you know, to give their copyright up for others to remix, right? There was an early internet remix culture, you know, that sort of thing. That is a culture that I deeply miss. But when I read your work today, I'm like, ah, maybe it's still alive and well, because Corey's still out there doing his thing and linking to cool shit. Do you feel that it's alive and well? Do you feel that that culture can come back? And how can people be a part of it? Yeah, I mean, in some ways, remix culture won. Like one of the weird things about Disney's acquisition spree, for example, is like, they're doing all kinds of mashups. Yeah. Right. I mean, the whole business, that's like all Marvel does now is just like,

oh, what if Dr. Strange were also, I don't know, Nightcrawler from X-Men or whatever the fuck. Yeah. Or like, what if the Muppets were stormtroopers? Right. Like they're just, they're just doing all of it. Right. They're just like mixing up all the stuff, right? Which is, which is great. And they've, they've kind of stopped declaring war on fans, which is pretty interesting. You know, there's, there's a lot of like fan act that is pretty good. There was, there are a couple of exceptions around the edges and the fact that they are so exceptional is what makes them weird. Like there was the axanar lawsuit paramount brought against fan films and then dr seuss coming after the um uh oh the places you'll boldly go which was a star trek mashup with dr seuss that was um it was like written by david gerald who wrote uh the the tribbles episodes of star trek uh and illustrated by ty templeton, who's a great comics illustrator.

And those are noteworthy because they're so weird. But in general, the firms have kind of dropped their attacks. And we have a mix of licensed frameworks, right? So like TikTok, where there's just all kinds of material that's pre-licensed for use and forbearance. And it's imperfect and it's precarious, but it's so much better than it was 20 years ago. YouTube is still full of people being demonetized by automated filters or having their copy struck and having their channels removed and so on. But by and large, YouTube is full of the stuff that we were fighting for video hosting services to be able to be full of. True. In really interesting ways.

I mean, I know Lindsay Ellis has exited YouTube, but her videos are an amazing example of the kind of creativity that used to be impossible. Yeah. of mine named Eric Faden, who 10 years ago, 15 years ago, made a short video called Fairy Use Tale, where he cut Disney clips up to have Disney characters explain fair use. And it's really good. And then he has a colleague in the UK who's a film prof who just did it again to explain fair dealing, which is the UK version of this with her students. And they did it with Simpsons clips. And they were able to, he took like a year to build his. Because there are all these giant databases that transcribe Simpsons episodes with timecode, they were able to do theirs in like two weeks.

So we are living in something of a golden age. There are things around the periphery we need to fix. There's still very fragile speech. You know, Beverly Hills Police Department officers are playing Taylor Swift when people try to record them to see if they can trigger YouTube's copyright filter. That is like something out of one of your novels, that is such a science fiction idea. It's a little hacky for me, I would like to think. The idea that a cop is going to try to avoid surveillance by, oh, I'll get this video taken down by an algorithm because I'm playing Taylor Swift during it. Yeah. So, you know, work to do, right?

But I would say that there's plenty of cause for hope. And I think that there is a generation that does not recognize that they should consult a lawyer before they make a TikTok. And I think the fight to have that be our norm, that fight has been decisively won. There are other problems with TikTok, the surveillance, whatever, but that problem is pretty decisively solved. And that is something that you can participate in and go be a part of today if you're listening. Corey, I'll let you go. This has been an incredible conversation. I hope you'll come back again another time.

I would love to. Absolutely. Well, thank you once again to Corey Doctorow for coming on the show. I hope you loved that conversation as much as I did. If you did, please consider supporting our Patreon at patreon.com slash Adam Conover. And I want to thank our $15

a month supporters, Adam Simon, Allison Lipparato, Alan Liska, Antonio LB, Aurelio Jimenez, Charles Anderson, Chris Staley, Drill Bill, Em, Hilary Wolkin, Kelly Casey, Mark Long, Michael Warnicke, Michelle Glittermum, Paul Mauck, Rachel Nieto, Robin Madison, and Spencer Campbell. I want to thank our producer, Sam Roundman, our engineer, Ryan Connor, Andrew WK for our theme song, the fine folks at Falcon Northwest for building me the incredible custom gaming PC that I'm recording this very episode for you on. You can find me online at Adam Conover, wherever you get your social media, or adamconover.net. Thank you so much for listening, and we will see you next time on Factually.

That was a HeadGum Podcast.