It Could Happen Here - An Interview with Author Cory Doctorow

Episode Date: December 15, 2021

We chat with author and journalist Cory Doctorow (Little Brother, Attack Surface) about internet privacy and the importance of hope. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

You should probably keep your lights on for Nocturnal Tales from the Shadowbride. Join me, Danny Trejo, and step into the flames of fright. An anthology podcast of modern-day horror stories inspired by the most terrifying legends and lore of Latin America. Listen to Nocturnal on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to It Could Happen Here, the show that is normally introduced by me shouting atonally, but today I did like a professional because today myself and my colleagues Garrison and Christopher are talking to someone I'm very excited to chat with, Mr. Corey Doctorow. Corey, welcome to the show.

Thank you very much. It is my pleasure to be on it. It's great to meet you all and to be talking to you today. Corey, you do a lot of writing about kind of technology and surveillance and cultural issues around those. You're also an author. You've written some great fiction. I think today we'll probably talk most around books like Attack Service and Walk Away, but you've written a lot of wonderful stuff. And you've also worked with the EFF for years and years. So you're coming at what I love about – I mean we're going to be talking today broadly about surveillance and kind of the future of of of the internet we'll probably talk about some metaversey stuff what i love about the way in which you think and write about the future is that you're kind of coming about it from a number of angles both as like a tech industry journalist

as a fiction writer imagining the future and as somebody who's kind of weighted in as an activist to this. And I'm kind of wondering, where do you see like the greatest potential for actual like change? Is it in kind of, is it in lobbying and engaging as an activist or is it in sort of imagining as a fiction writer what might be? So I see them as adjuncts, you know, diversity of tactics and all that stuff. The thing is that tech policy arguments are often very abstract, and they are only visceral for the people who would provide the kind of political will to do something about them usually that that comes when it's too late right people people care about tech monopolies once the web is turned into five giant websites filled with screenshots of text from the other four but

not when yahoo is on a buying spree of tech companies and we're saying oh that's how tech companies grow and all tech companies will grow in the future by buying all their nascent competitors and rolling them up into a big vertically integrated monopoly which is kind of how we got facebook and google and the rest of it and um you need to be able to make policy arguments to policy people but you also need to be able to put uh some some sinew and muscle on the bone of that highly abstract kind of argument. And that's where fiction comes in. It's kind of like a fly through of like an emotional architect's rendering of what things might look like if we get it wrong or if we change it. It preserves the sense of possibility. You know, I think one of the great enemies of change is the um inevitabilism

of capitalist realism and the idea that there is no alternative so if you can make people believe in an alternative then they might work for one and certainly the opposite is true if people don't believe there is any alternative possible they won't work for one why would you uh and so all of that together i think is is part of how you mobilize people to care about stuff. Yeah, I mean, that makes total sense. And it's difficult, I think, because I first came into technology as a journalist, and it's very difficult to get people to care about stuff. And I think in particular privacy, which there was, it has been one of the most interesting cases of like the kind of thought leaders in, in an industry freaking out over something and people not really having an

issue with it because we kind of all agreed to hand over all of our data to a number of big sites, not all, but I don't know. I'm interested in your thoughts on that. I understand the idea that like fiction is, is a much better way to try to get people to care about these things. Cause it makes them feel as opposed to kind of reporting on,

I think people can get kind of lost in the weeds of acquisitions and like, uh, uh, pivots and, you know, tech companies acquiring each other and whatnot. Sure. Well,

look, I think that the part of the, the problem with privacy, the reason that we were late to wake up and do something about it is because it was obfuscated you know if you've ever seen the maps of like how an ad tech stack works the flow diagrams uh you know there are some things that are complicated because um there are some things that are hard to understand because they're complicated and then there are some things that are made complicated so they will be hard to understand

and i think in the case of um the surveillance industry the the latter is true and it wasn't just that they were trying to play us for suckers they were also playing their customers for suckers right one of the reasons that the ad tech stack is such a snarled hairball is so that the people who buy ads and the publishers who run ads can't tell how badly they're being ripped off by their intermediaries. But this also has the side effect of making it very hard for us to know as the kind of inputs to that system how our own dignity and private lives and safety and integrity are being put to risk by these systems as well. And, you know, it may be that people, if they had been well-informed about what was going on, they might have been indifferent as well. But I think that when most people were very poorly informed, right, when all there was was this kind of, that privacy discourse was just like stuff as being your personal information is being siphoned up but no kind of specifics on how that was being used and how that was being

done and how it might bring you to harm um it's not clear that that you can say that that the reason they were indifferent is because they were fully informed and didn't care if you know that they weren't fully informed, if you know that they were barely informed. I mean, yeah, I think you're absolutely right. Because when the Cambridge Analytica scandal broke, which was, I think, one of the first times that there was a really huge international story that made it clear some of the consequences of all this, like it did provoke a lot of, a lot of anger. Um, I, I, do you worry at all that like there's a degree to which, because it, because people got tricked or however you want to frame it and it's gone, the, the kind of, um, financialization of people's private data of

people's like personal information, because that has gone so far, there's a risk that people are just kind of inured to it. Um, yeah. Well, well, I mean, that kind of gets to my theory of change here, which is that there is always going to be a, a, um, point of, um, uh, maximum indifference, peak indifference. You know, um, if you think about something like being a smoker, if you think about something like being a smoker, the likelihood that you care about cancer goes up the longer you smoke and the more health effects you feel. And certainly there will come a point in your life when you will only ever grow more worried about the effects of smoking on your life. But there's also a point of no return,

right? If the point at which you your concern reaches the point where you're actually going to do something about smoking is the day you get diagnosed with stage four lung cancer then that um denialism can slide into nihilism you can say why bother right it's too late. It's like if we spend years arguing about the crashing population of rhinos, and then finally there's only one left, and you say, you're right, there was a problem. You might as well say, like, why don't we eat him and find out what he tastes like? It's not like the rhinos are ever going to come back, right? So for me, so much of the work is about shifting the point of peak indifference to the left of the point of no return on the timeline so that people actually start to care earlier. Because if you have a genuine problem, like the overcollection of our private data, the mishandling of it, the abuse of it, that problem will eventually produce uh tangible effects that are

undeniable right that the our ability to ignore it just goes monotonically down it's the thing about the climate emergency you know even if shell had not or exxon had not hidden the data it had on the role that its products were playing in in climate change in the 70s it would have been hard to muster a sense of urgency in the 70s right because the story is that in 50 years something bad's going to happen but here we are 50 years on something bad is really happening and a lot of people are caring about it they still don't seem to care about it enough or maybe they've slid into nihilism there's certainly i think on the part the elites, a kind of nihilistic sense that maybe they can all retreat to like mountaintops and build fortresses and breed their children by Harrier jet, you know, and, you know, that nihilism, I think, is what you get when the point of no return is passed before peak denial. return is passed before peak denial uh and the privacy um catastrophe that is looming in our future that we haven't quite reached yet i mean we just had the first kind of trickles of the the

dam breaking that's in our our future it hasn't been enough yet to shift people away from it but but we might be getting there right we might we might eventually be able to uh do something about it and one of the things that will hasten that moment is um uh restoring uh competition to those industries that one of the reasons that uh the industry that spies on us is able to foster denial and indifference is because it is a monopolized industry. Two companies control 80% of the ad market, Google and Facebook. And as monopolists, they're able to extract huge monopoly rents. They're among the most profitable companies in the history of the world. And some of those monopoly rents, rather than being returned to shareholders, can be mobilized to distort policy,

to make us think that there's nothing wrong with the way that they collect data and use it, to forestall regulation, to pay Nick Clegg $4 million a year to go around Europe and the world and say, as the former Deputy Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, I'm here to tell you that Facebook is the friend of the democratic regimes of the world. And if the anti-monopoly movement which is a thing i've become very involved with is able to go from strength to strength it's surging now then one of the things that we might do is just is destroy the ammunition that's being

used by these large monopolistic firms to distort our policy and harm us in these ways with impunity. And then maybe we can actually take the nascent and natural alarm that people do feel about the invasions of their privacy and actually turn that into privacy policy that is meaningful in respect to these big companies. It actually reigns them in. Yeah. And I think I like that you frame it as a privacy catastrophe because I think, I mean, what I just exhibited earlier in this episode is this tendency that I certainly see in myself and I see in other people to get kind of beaten down by the continued excesses of this industry and the continued kind of failure of

anything to be done to curb it. And I think you're right. It has to be viewed as a calamity. And nothing, I think, makes that clearer than some of – watching some of the stuff Facebook in particular has put out about their plans for the metaverse and kind of thinking back from all of these sensors they want to store in your house, all of the ways in which they want to map everything around you, they kind of advertise this like you'll be able to play basketball with somebody who's in a different state. and all this stuff that maybe we don't quite know what it would be useful for from a financialization standpoint, but it's unsettling to think that they'll have to find a way because they'll have it. I don't know. I don't know what is to be done about that other than, as you say, kind of breaking up these monopolies. Well, and I mean, breaking up is like one of the things we can do to monopolies. And it takes a long time you know um at&t the first

enforcement action against it uh happened 69 years before it was broken up in 1982 i don't think we can wait that long but there's a lot of intermediate steps right like we can force them to do interoperability we can block them from from uh predatory acquisitions we can force them to divest of companies and engage in structural separation. We can do all kinds of things. It actually looks like the United Kingdom is going to stop them from buying Giphy,

which might seem trivial. After all, it's just like animated GIFs. But what it actually is is surveillance beacons in every social media application, right? Because if you're hosting a GIF from Giphy in your message to someone else, Facebook has telemetry about that message. And so the, not the ICO,

the Competition and Markets Authority in the UK was like, yeah, this is just going to strengthen your market power. That's why you're buying this company. You have too much market power already. We're not going to strengthen your market power. That's why you're buying this company. You have too much market power already. We're not going to let you do it. It was almost the case that the Fitbit merger was blocked. Google's Fitbit merger. I think it's still not too late to roll it back.

And Lena Kahn, who's the new fire breathing dragon in charge of the FTC, who is an astonishing person who was a law student three years ago. She has said, oh yeah, this yeah this this like 1.3 trillion dollars worth of mergers and acquisitions that you're doing right now to get in under the wire before we start enforcing guess what we're gonna unwind those fucking mergers if it looks like they were anti-competitive and not only are you gonna lose all the money you spent on the m&a due diligence and the paperwork and the corporate stuff but all that integration you're gonna do

between now and then you're gonna have have to deintegrate those companies. When we tell you that you don't have merger approval and you're on notice, you can't come and complain later, right? Like you can either get in line and wait for us to tell you whether or not your merger is legal, or you can roll the dice but i tell you what if you come up snake eyes you are fucked and that is amazing right that is a powerful change in american industrial policy that really makes a difference yeah i mean and that is a beautiful thing to think of being in place and actually hitting as hard as it could obviously the concern is that like who will be you know picking the head of the ftc in three years and change and like how how how much influence is peter teal gonna have there

and the like um yeah well and peter teal of course loves monopolies he says competition is for losers so you're right i mean obviously elections have consequences uh but you know one of the ways that you win elections is by making material differences in people's lives. And so if people are policy, then one of the most important policies Biden has set so far is hiring Lena Kahn and her colleagues Cantor at the DOJ and Tim Wu in the White House. Yeah. I mean, I would love nothing more than to see particularly like facebook reigned in at this point because i'm one of the casualties of the uh of the of the the ad market like crash of uh started in like 2016 17 it feels like the odds of them being able to like i don't know

we've got three years where we know you know theoretically the these policies will be in place and and i don't know i'm hopeful like when i when i because the republicans are talking a lot about regulating social media too about even breaking up these companies but they they often tend to be talking about it in a very different way and with a very different kind of end goal in mind um and i guess you know obviously they know that right facebook they they are well aware that like this might be a wait out the clock situation for them and they have some arrows in that quiver i mean that may be so but also remember that 80 of facebook's users are outside of the u.s yeah and that even a change in administration here won't won't um put margaret

vestager who's the the competition commissioner in the eu back in the bottle and she's another fire breather great right she's another amazing person and so you know i i wouldn't be too quick to write that off i mean facebook uh needs its foreign markets yes its u.s customers are worth more to anyone else because we have the most primitive privacy frameworks so it can extract a lot more data for like we're the we're the richest people with the worst privacy yeah so that's that's um you know it's a real home court advantage for facebook but it needs that other 80 of its users it wouldn't be what it is without them and that makes it subject to their jurisdiction and you know one of the things about ad driven firms like facebook um is that they really need sales offices in country. So, you know, even before we

had the proliferation of national firewalls, which don't get me wrong, I don't think is a good thing, these large global firms that operated sales offices in country in every territory they worked in were vulnerable to regulation because if you have staff in a country then you have someone that can be arrested right and so it's not like they can just be like i don't know like the tor project which just you know it has people um who who sit and hack on tor who are close to lawyers who can defend people who sit on hack and on tour uh you know if the tour project had to have staff full-time in turkey and china and russia and syria in order to operate it would be a very different project but you know facebook and twitter and google they

all have staff in those countries and it makes them vulnerable to regulation and so you know china's really interesting because because um uh xi jinping for his own reasons which are not my reasons and distinct from the democrats and the republicans reasons is doing stuff to rein in big tech in china and it's actually quite interesting because you know the argument that nick clegg makes when he says why we shouldn't break up facebook as he says uh you know china is coming for your um for your ip and for your industrial competitiveness uh with its big tech giants that it treats as national champions that project soft power around the world meanwhile china is like these tech giants we hate these tech giants they present a countervailing force to the hegemony

of the communist party and the and the executive branch that xi jinping sets at the top of we're going to neuter them and we're going to we're going to disappear their founders like jack mon to fucking gulags right like they're like we don't want national champions because the nation that you know webo and alibaba is the champion for is Weibo and Alibaba and Tencent. They're not champions for China by any stretch of the imagination. They don't give a shit about China. And so, you know, all of these companies are going to face regulatory pressure, anti-monopoly regulatory pressure all over the world. pressure all over the world. And you're so much more optimistic, I guess, about the potential for that to bite than a lot of people I talk to, and I think more knowledgeable as well. And I kind of wonder, because there's this very strong, obviously influenced by decades of cyberpunk attitude that like, we're in this age of mega corporations whose power is, you know, there's nothing that can stop Amazon from doing what Amazon wants to do, right?

Facebook is going to keep doing whatever they want to do forever. You clearly don't believe that and you clearly know your stuff. I'm wondering why you think that image is still so persistent, that like attitude in our heads of these are kind of monolithic forces in our society that just have to be endured. So I think it's a belief in the great forces of history, right? And the great man theory, you know,

that the, the, these you know, that these rich people are driving history. These, these, these powerful figures are driving history. Yeah. These powerful figures are driving history. They're in charge. They're in the driver's seat. I mean, that's kind of what's behind Trump derangement syndrome, right?

The idea that Trump is a uniquely powerful and talented demagogue as opposed to just like a demagogue-shaped puzzle piece that fit in the demagogue-shaped hole that was left by the collapse of credibility of capitalism uh and you know a man who is clearly too stupid to be a cause of anything and will only ever be the effect of something and uh you know the the for me the theory of of history and how it goes was really uh transformed by an exercise that my friend Ada Palmer does. So Ada is a science fiction novelist. She's just published the fourth book of her Terra Ignota series, her debut series. It's an incredible series of books. But she's a real multi-talented, multi-threat.

So she's a librettist and singer who's produced album-length operas based on the Norse mythos. album length operas based on the Norse mythos. She's also a tenured professor of Renaissance history in Florence at the University of Chicago, where she studies heterodox information, pornography, homosexuality, witchcraft, and so on during the Inquisitions. And every year with her undergrads, she reenacts through a four week long live action role-playing game the election of the medici's pope and each of her students takes on the role of a cardinal from a great family and the uh in the actual election of the i forgot what year it was uh 15 14 90 or something maybe 15 10 i forget but uh they each take on the uh the the this role and they have a character sheet and it has motivation it's like a dinner party murder mystery but for four weeks

they make alliances break alliances stab each other in the back uh stage surprise reversals and at the end of the four weeks there's this uh faux gothic cathedral on campus and they dress up in costume ada has a a google alert for theater companies that are getting rid of their costumes so she clothes them in the garb of of the medici's cardinals and they gather and they go into a room and then a puff of smoke emerges and you get the new pope and every year four of the final candidates uh there are four final candidates rather and two of them are always the same because the great forces of history bear down on that moment to say those people will absolutely be in the running for the for the papacy and two of them have never once been the same

for the papacy, and two of them have never once been the same. Because human action still has space to alter the outcomes that are prefigured by the great forces of history. And so for me, the idea of being an optimist or a pessimist has always felt very fatalistic. It's this, either way, this idea that the great forces of history have determined the outcome and human action has no bearing on it and i think that rather than optimism or pessimism we can be hopeful and that's the word you used before hope is the idea not that you can see a path from here to the place you want to get to but rather that you haven't run out of things that you can do to advance your your goal right because if you can take a step to advance your goal, if you can ascend the gradient towards the peak that you are trying to reach, then you will attain a new vantage point. And from that vantage point, you may have revealed to you courses of action that you didn't suspect before you took that step.

So, so long as a step is available, there's always another step lurking in the wings that you can't see from where you are. And the reason I'm hopeful about this is I can think of like 50 things that could improve the monopoly picture that we're living in now. And it's up from 30 things last year. And so even though I don't know how we get from here to a better future, and even though I absolutely see the blockers you're talking about, I'll Trump landslide, uh, losing Congress because they let Joe mansion and, and Christian cinema neuter the,

the, the bill back better bill. Um, you know, all of those things that can happen. I have hope, you know, which is not the same as optimism or a belief that things will be great,

or even, even like a sense, a lack of a sense of foreboding i have that in spades but uh i have hoped that when the next phase of the fight begins that we will have many um vulnerable spots we can strike at and that we can capitalize on whichever victories we attain to find more vulnerabilities and move on. I think that's so important. And I think it goes in line with, to bring up climate change again, the idea that like one of the most toxic things you can think are e-climate change is that there's nothing to do.

We're already past every point of no return and there's no, there's no positive action because it just leads you to doing the same thing as the people who deny it. And it's, yeah, I think think it's it's very important to um recognize that like not only are there things you can do but when you do those things you start taking those steps other steps reveal themselves yeah um yeah and you know what if you're feeling nihilistic about uh about climate um i'm nearly through saul griffith's book electrify uh saul's an old friend of mine he's macarthur winner winner. He's an electrical engineer. And he's need are hugely overestimated and it's basically that like keeping uh fossil fuel power online requires a lot of fossil fuel right so something

like 40 of that estimate is just it's the energy that we need to make the energy and it's not present in electrical models here's how we can manufacture. Here's how we can manufacture it. Here's how we can distribute it. Here is basically how, if we can figure out the financing, Americans can spend less money every year than they do now to get more stuff that they love every year, that we can do this without hair shirts. It's a spectacular book. I don't agree with everything Saul says all the time, but he is very careful about his technical facts. There aren't technical errors in this.

There might be assumptions that we disagree with. But as a technical matter, he's basically written a piece of design fiction in which over the next 15 years, using clever finance and solid engineering, we really actually do avert the climate emergency. And yeah, as always, kind of the main barriers to doing the best version of the thing is the political realities on the ground. But I think that's the value of at least trying to make it clear that there are options. Tales from the Shadows, presented by iHeart and Sonora. An anthology of modern-day horror stories inspired by the legends of Latin America. From ghastly encounters with shapeshifters

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I wanted to shift for a moment. I was thinking recently about, I think, probably the earliest back book of yours that I've read, Pirate Cinema, which is heavily involved. If you're one of the folks like me who was on the internet back when file sharing sites, when that was a huge topic of discussion, when the RIAA was going after people, when copyright was kind of a much more prevalent part of kind of the online discourse. It deals a lot in that and these kind of – I think there's elements of it that kind of prefigured what Disney has done buying up every imaginable fictional property in the world. That's kind of the elements of dystopia that book deals with is the attempts of these giant multinational entertainment corporations to shut down the

free trading of ideas, remixing and all that stuff. And then kind of thinking about the difference between the focus of that and the focus of books like Attack Surface where you're really delving more into the fictional versions of real-life companies like TigerSwan that do surveillance on protesters and all around the world and that are kind of using tactics that were pioneered by other contractors in like Iraq and Afghanistan years earlier. I guess kind of the things that I find interesting about that is I can remember when I was first on the internet, the big social kind of crusades online with the people that that i paid attention

to at least was all around copyright it was about not just you know the attempts to stop people from remixing and sharing copyrighted work but about um attempts to like buy up copyrights and like into these these ever kind of larger uh uh um agglomerations. And that's kind of hit, it seems to have hit like a terminal point with movies like Ready Player One and kind of a lot of the stuff we're seeing in Marvel where everything's showing up everywhere. Space Jam 2.

Space Jam 2. I guess the part of it that feels less dystopian today is attempts to crack down on file sharing, which I don't think went kind of in the worst case scenario. I'm interested actually in your thoughts on that. Because I can remember, you know, when the RIA would be threatening people with years in jail and whatnot over sharing stuff on Kazaa, we seem to be, I don't know, is it just that it gets less, like, I'm interested in your thoughts on that. Is it just that it's less publicized when they crack

down on people or has kind of the nature of their response to that really changed? Well, I think that what's happened with the kind of steady state of the copyright wars has been the introduction of brittleness and fragility into our speech platforms like Twitter and Facebook and YouTube, where it's very easy to get material removed by by making copyright claims um and you know we see that with the sleazier side of the reputation management industry where they use bogus copyright claims to take down uh criticisms you you know there was a group of leftists who were really celebrating the idea that if you if nazis were marching in your town you could stop them from uploading their videos by playing copyrighted music in the background. And I was like, you have no idea what a terrible fucking idea that is. And, you know, within a couple of years, cops in Beverly Hills were doing it

whenever people tried to film the police. They would just turn on some Taylor Swift to try and stop uploading. You know, the thing about the copyright wars is that the real action turned out to be in wage theft through monopolization. So, you know, the neutering and destruction of label-independent music distribution platforms like Kazaa or Grokster or Napster

and the Supreme Court decision, the Grokster decision that supported that, meant that the only way that you could launch a service like that was in cooperation with the big labels. And the most successful one is Spotify. Spotify is actually partially owned by the labels and the labels use that ownership stake to negotiate a kind of formalized wage theft where they allowed for a lower per stream rate because when they get royalties for a stream part of that money goes to their musicians and that meant that the firm spotify retained more profits which it returned to it in the form of higher dividends and dividends go just straight to their shareholders they don't that there's no claim

that musicians can make on this and because they set the benchmark rate it meant that everyone irrespective of whether you were assigned to one of the big three labels ended up uh getting the same uh per stream rate as as universals artists so they were able to structure the whole market in the meantime in the industrial side uh copyright laws notably section 1201 of the digital millennium copyright act which is a law passed in 1998 that makes it a felony to remove drm to bypass a technical protection measure that has become the go-to system for blocking repair, interoperability, and to prevent third parties from creating services or add-ons that accomplish positive ends like improved accessibility, improved security, ad blocking and privacy, and so on. They just say,

we put a one molecule thick layer of DRM around, say, YouTube, and when you make a YouTube downloader for archival purposes or whatever, you bypass our technical protection measure, and so you're committing a felony, and you can go to for five years and and pay a five hundred thousand dollar fine and so you have this like relentless monotonic expansion of drm into like automotive tractors medtronic uses it to block people from fixing ventilators um so you know this this um assault on the ability to reconfigure a technology that is ever more prevalent in our lives and that increasingly holds our lives in its hands, right? Its choices determined whether we live or die has been really consequential. And I know we don't really think of it as a copyright problem. We think of it as right to repair. We think of it as security auditing or accessibility.

problem we think of it as right to repair we think of the security auditing or accessibility but the the rule that is being used to block interoperability is a copyright law it's what printer companies use to stop you from buying third-party ink it's what apple uses to stop you from installing a third-party app store and you know the absence of a third-party app store is why when apple removed all the working vpns in china chinese users couldn't just switch to another app store that had working vpns in it and so you know that this um end game of the copyright wars is i think a lot more dystopian than uh merely suing college kids yeah uh it's it's actually really screwed us in ways that are hard to fathom. going to get cracked down on or have their stuff pulled. And the kind of thing that I didn't – I don't think a lot of people saw coming until it hit. I certainly didn't was what And then, you know, you get situations like we just kind of averted with the John Deere strike where there was a very real possibility that we wouldn't be able to get a large chunk of a harvest because there wouldn't be parts and you can't put your own in. And that's to think that the thought process that led us there started with like to protect Metallica in some ways. It's kind of funny. Because the same force that has allowed John Deere to cram down its workforce for 40 years is the force that allows it to take away the agency and economic liberties of farmers who own John Deere tractors. And it's the political power that comes with monopoly.

And so if John Deere were a smaller, weaker firm, it would be less able to resist both the claims of its workforce and the claims of its customers. Yeah, I mean that makes sense. And it is like I like that idea of – because it's not just kind of solidarity between John Deere purchasers and the people who work in the factories. It's also there's kind of solidarity between john deere purchasers um and and the people who work in the factories it's also there's kind of solidarity between a wide like anyone concerned with um copyright the it's a much broader base of solidarity than just people who are worried about you know what's happening uh to fiction or like what disney's doing to like copyrights around mickey mouse or whatever like it's it can, you can draw in concerns from right to repair to a bunch of other things, which potentially means there's, there's a greater body of people available for action. If you can make them see kind of, um, converging interests there, which is, I think is an

interesting idea. Well, I think you're getting at something really important. And this is, um, uh, this comes from James Boyle, who's a copyright scholar at Duke University and was really involved in founding Creative Commons and in those early copyright fights. And Jamie makes an analogy to the coining of the term ecology. And he says that before the term ecology came along, some of us cared about owls and some of us cared about the ozone layer, but it wasn't really clear we were on the same side you know it's not clear if you're a martian looking through a telescope you might be hard-pressed to explain why you know the destiny of charismatic charismatic nocturnal birds and the gaseous composition of the upper atmosphere were the same issue

right and the term ecology let all these people who cared about different things find a single point to rally around it turned a thousand issues into one movement and i think that in the in the course of resisting corporate power which is to say resisting monopoly we have the potential to weld together people from very diverse fields you know farmers and and people who make tractors sure but you know if you grew up uh watching professional wrestling and now you're aghast that the wrestlers that you loved are begging on gofundme for pennies to die with dignity you know once someone explains to you the reason that that's happening is that 30 wrestling leagues

became one wrestling league that was able to practice worker misclassification turn those performers into contractors take away their health insurance and leave them to die then suddenly you're on the same side of the people who are worried about big tech and big tractor and the people are worried about the fact that there's only one manufacturer of cheerleading uniform uniforms and two manufacturers of athletic shoes and two manufacturers of spirits and two manufacturers of beer one manufacturer of eyewear that also owns all the eyewear stores and the eyewear insurer you know that duff beer thing from the early simpsons where there's like duff beer raspberry yeah yeah yeah it's all coming out of one thing dolce and gabbana oliver people's bausch and lohm versace every eyewear brand you've ever heard of is one company coach all of them. And they also own Sunglass Hut and Target Optical and Sears

Optical and LensCrafters and Specsavers and every other eyewear store you've ever heard of. And they bought all the labs that make the lenses. So more than half the lenses in the world come from them, a division called Essilor. And they bought Ey imed which is the company that bought all the insurance companies that insure eyewear and so they're also the company that's insuring your glasses your your eyes one company and eyewear costs a thousand percent more than it did a decade ago they stole our fucking eyes right so people who care about that have common cause with people who care about wrestlers and people who care about beer and big tech and the fact that there's four shipping companies and they have no competitive

pressure and so they just keep building bigger ships that get stuck in the fucking suez canal right we're all on the same side yeah and i i i like the idea that i like i like hoping that that kind of inherent solidarity if you can point it out to people, is potentially an antidote to – or at least a partial antidote to the level of the layer of politicization that's fallen down over everything. That stops people from actually considering matters but instead considering like, I don't know, is this owning the libs, right? the libs right like if you if they if if you can get them to see that like yeah their favorite wrestler is like dying because he couldn't afford insulin and that like that's tied to the issue of like the reason his dad can't get tractor parts this year or whatever um and that that's tied to other issues that are maybe championed by people he would reflexively dismiss but like yeah i i i find that really inspiring it It's still a significant,

there's a significant challenge for people who are trying to make those connections for folks who are, who are trying to like inform them of, of that state. I mean, yeah, that's true. And, you know, like Steve Bannon will tell you that the reason to do culture world culture, culture war bullshit is because politics are down downstream from culture and there's probably an element of truth to that but i also think the reason that people find culture war bullshit so uh attractive is because they got nothing else yeah right i think we we talk about that a lot within the context of conservative for politics i grew up very conservative and i do remember how the tenor of things I was hearing through the Bush years changed from advocation of policies to just all culture war all the time, all striking the dims all the time.

And it was the kind of – and that's not the only place it's happened. You see it on the left too, absolutely. Like it's endemic now. It's a poison in kind of the, the discourse. But I think that there's a lot that needs to be, I think there's a lot to be discovered still for like how to break people out of that. Welcome. I'm Danny Threl.

Won't you join me at the fire and dare enter. Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows presented by iHeart and Sonora. An anthology of modern day horror stories inspired by the legends of Latin America. From ghastly encounters with shapeshifters, to bone-chilling brushes with supernatural creatures. I know you. Take a trip and experience the horrors that have haunted Latin America since the beginning of time. Listen to Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows as part of my Cultura podcast network, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

I'm kind of bullish when we talk about these issues like you were bringing up with sort of the monopolization of these industries you wouldn't expect to be monopolized. I'm hopeful about the future that stuff like 3D printing presents for that. We have an organization in Portland that does kind of 3D printing glasses frames and stuff and is helping people with that sort of stuff. And I'm in conversations with like the um uh the four thieves vinegar collective uh i think it's called um yeah some of the folks doing like trying to do working on pharmaceutical hacking making at the moment like lower cost uh uh kind of home scratch brewed versions of like different aids medications and the the holy grail is doing that with insulin effectively. And I think it is – and I do think one of the things that's exciting about that is because the way in which collaboration on 3D printing works and the way in which actually spreading like the ability to do stuff works, I think it synergizes nicely with the ability of people to kind of reach other folks through writing or other forms of content because they can both spread through the same you can have a video or a story and you can have like kind of embedded guides on how to do that um i i i don't know that i've i've read into a lot of

your writings on kind of the potential of 3d printing in this space but i'm interested in like to what do you do are you looking at that as kind of an area of hope or do you see that still as kind of too too niche and labor focused to really actually take off in the way that it would need to to crack some of these nuts this is where i do my my woody allen uh you know nothing of my work uh shtick because i i had this novel maker makers in 2009 i haven't read makers yet 2008 it's it's why uh uh brie pettis went out and founded maker bot uh and it's you know credited with like kick-starting the homebrew 3d printed revolution blah blah blah blah blah and um and it was a very bullish novel about 3d printing i um you know the reality hasn't lived up to the hype yet. It may just be that we're in the long trough of despair as the Gartner hype cycle model has it.

But, you know, I think the problem with 3D printing was that the patents had been concentrated into the hands of two large firms that had bought all their competitors, including MakerBot. And when those patents finally expired the big one was the the laser centering of of powder patent expired there just wasn't a big bang and i think it's because the supply chain for it still had a lot of proprietary elements and so producing the the powder and producing the the components that allowed for that powder printing remained a very high bar. And so we just didn't see the kind of new industry emerge that we would have hoped for. And, you know, it's like seven years since those patents expired or five years since those patent expired. Now we're seeing a few more of those powder printers.

You get a lot more like UV cured epoxy printers because those came off patent earlier and they have a less complicated supply chain. But still, I mean, mostly when we talk about printers, we're talking about filament and just filaments, just not a great technology. It's been pushed in ways that you wouldn't even believe. And people have figured out how to do absolutely incredible things with it,

but it's not, it's not something that you would make aerospace components for. You know, it's something that you make novelty Dungeons and Dragons dice out of. Yeah. Which is an important industry to disrupt, don't get me wrong, but.

I'm with you. I'm with you. I can remember paying 30 bucks for a set of dice as a kid and thinking, somebody's got to fix this scam. I can print you some for Christmas, Robert. Thank you, Garrison. And you know, now I own a – I bought a Comic-Con a couple of years ago.

I bought a tiny little D20 made out of meteoric ore. So I have a Sky Metal D20. Oh, now that's – yeah, that's classy. I'm curious. We've got a little bit of time left. And I wanted to ask, in your novel Attack Surface, I know it was released 2020, right? October, if I'm not mistaken. And obviously, a lot of that deals with, again, these kind of like corporations that have been contractors for the DOD doing like fucked up surveillance shit in Iraq and Afghanistan, bringing that technology to crack down on like U.S. sort of dissident left-wing political movements.

It comes out the year that we have a nationwide kind of uprising that a lot of fucked up surveillance shit that had been kind of demoed stateside around it like Standing Rock and whatnot gets really put into its own. How much of that was written before shit went down? And I'm assuming like, I don't know exactly how your process works, but I'm wondering like, I assume you started the project before everything went the way it did last summer. How much did kind of what happened last summer affect

the way you imagined that technology and those tactics functioning in that book yeah the the timeline goes the other direction i i wrote that book uh before the the summer uprising um long long long long before that and i wrote it about things like um the surveillance technology we saw in belarus and kiev and also at occupy and standing rock up and at other black lives matter demonstrations and uprisings in america i'm assuming yeah and if you you know also the monotonic expansion of surveillance leaks right where you know first we learned about mc catchers and then we learned about dirt boxes which are mc catchers on airplanes. And, you know,

like we just, all of that stuff leaked like crazy. Cause you know, these surveillance giants are, are not good at what they do. Right. Which isn't a reason we should be hopeful. No.

A company that's bad at what it's, it does is, is in some ways even worse because one of the ways that their incompetence expresses itself is that they often gather a bunch of data on innocent people and then leak it yeah right not not maliciously just through incompetence um and so you know the the this expansion of surveillance has like been on my mind for a long time yeah i've been writing about it well at least since little brother right so 2006 i wrote that novel and and i've had my finger in that yeah so i've had my finger in that

for all that time and and working with eff it was impossible to miss sure was there a degree to which um i don't know i guess were you surprised by anything that happened last summer or did it just kind of comprehensively feel like these are everything slotting into place that I knew was heading in this direction? Because, yeah, I mean, you're right. I did like there was like everything was kind of presaged years before. Yeah, I'm wondering if there was anything that kind of surprised you or was it was it all just sort of what you'd been braced for?

Yeah, I don't feel like there were any kind of surveillance surprises i mean the reverse the the the use of reverse warrants i think we all kind of uh assumed was going on there had been hints of it in google's warrant canaries beforehand but uh you know those geofence warrants which again if you're like sitting there going oh geofence warrants are awesome because they're catching the uh one six rioters like yeah dude you are going to be so disappointed yeah holy shit that's not where they're going to keep using those yeah um so you know learning more about those reverse warrants i think was was interesting um but i don't feel like i don't, well, off the top of my head,

I can't say that there was any new technical stuff that emerged. You know, I, I, um, kickstarted the audio book for attack surface. Uh, and I, I offered as like the top tier, you could commission short stories in the little brother universe. And there were three of those. And I just finished the first of them and it's about future pipeline protests. And, you know, I spent a lot of time in my research looking at the surveillance that was done on the pipeline protests. And a lot of it was provocateurs and undercovers who were just terrible at their jobs. Yeah. Right.

Like the intercepts long publication of, you know know long documents about how those operators worked he just like showed up in military haircuts and combat boots and then we're like hey i'm from portland and i'm here because we're gonna fuck up some bad guys let's go do it let's go do violence and save indian country and like everyone was like you and like does anyone want to buy drugs and and the actual protesters were like you you, you're a provocateur, like go away. You know, like we, they could tell, I mean, I guess, you know, there are a lot more effective in the UK in, in infiltrating the climate movement. You know, they impregnated several protesters. So, you know, and had long-term relationships with them and raised kids with them.

So there is that, but here, yeah, here it was not, we just didn't see that incredible efficacy. Yeah. And I do think that that's, I think kind of the message I took out of it. Cause I, I was, I started reporting on like dirt boxes back during Standing Rock, just having them like, it explained to me by people who were on the ground when I showed up that like, yeah, there's this, you – your like phones don't work the same out here. And like we're trying to figure out what's going on. But like everything is – and it's not just that we're out in the sticks or anything. And I think the only surprise – the big surprise for me last year was how – I think how little the technology accomplished for them and how much – it just wound up back down to violence. Like that was kind of the, for all of the toys they had, the toys that actually made

the most difference was gassing and beating people. And violence and like old fashioned informants. That was the stuff. Yeah. And just having a dude there. Yeah. They really relied on. And the fact that you, Corey, weren't super surprised by anything last year, I think kind

of just more shows kind of the strength of your work in terms of how you're very good at seeing the trends that are already happening but taking them to their next logical place um and it's a really great way to kind of get a sense of what is something what is what will something maybe look like in the next decade or so because it's all based on already existing stuff, just in different kind of original ways. So that's why I think it's so useful to look at your books as an activist, specifically around like surveillance and stuff, because it's really good for kind of keeping an eye on...

Keeping ahead. Yeah, and keeping an eye on what's keeping an eye on you um and all that kind of stuff this was a really lovely conversation was a lovely last thing to do in my home office in 2021 because i leave tomorrow and won't be back until the next year and then i'm actually going to be offline for a month after a joint replacement so it was uh it was really lovely to meet you all and to chat with you. Thank you so much for chatting with us today, Corey. My pleasure. It Could Happen Here is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from Cool Zone

Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can find sources for It Could Happen Here updated monthly at coolzonemedia.com slash sources. Thanks for listening. You should probably keep your lights on for Nocturnal Tales from the Shadow. Join me, Danny Trails, and step into the flames of riot. An anthology podcast of modern day horror stories inspired by the most terrifying legends and lore of Latin America.

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