librarypunk - 111 - Seizing the Means of Library Interoperability feat. Cory Doctorow

Episode Date: October 30, 2023

Cory Doctorow comes on to talk about his books The Internet Con and Chokepoint Capitalism and the applications to libraries. We talk interop, vendor contracts, and even writing productivity. Pre-order Cory’s new book The Lost Cause: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865939/thelostcause  Media mentioned https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2023/10/google-will-shield-ai-users-from-copyright-challenges-within-limits/  https://chokepointcapitalism.com/  https://www.versobooks.com/products/3035-the-internet-con DEF CON 31 - An Audacious Plan to Halt the Internet's Ensh*ttification  - Cory Doctorow  https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/751443/technofeudalism-by-yanis-varoufakis/ https://librarysimplified.org/ 

So first off, it's not a professional podcast. You can say fuck. You don't have to be serious. I didn't realize that was the distinction. Yeah. Well, yeah, more or less, I think. Librarians are really uptight sometimes. That would be the demonetization I've heard so much about. As soon as you say, fuck, you're not a professional anymore. They take away your own as. Yeah, we don't even have a Patreon. Jokes on you. We don't make money.

Right. But I am kind of curious if, how are where you? How are you for like what's going on in library land discourse? Are we talking about book bands or something else? Anything that has come across your radar because I know you. I mean, book bands are the big one. You know, drag queen story hour, etc., etc. All the culture war nonsense and defunding and shrill, swivel-eyed loons joining city councils and library boards.

Everybody hates genderqueer. I mean, is there anything else I'm missing? I mean, they're still like decolonizing Dewey, but I don't know if that's a thing anyone's really paying attention to. It feels like there are more pressing issues than that. We were paying attention. We wanted to pay attention to it. Yeah. Our podcast used to be way more fun, and then all this shit started happening.

Right. Yeah. And people started taking us seriously. And then there's the Internet Archive and the Control Digital Lending. Oh, yeah. Yeah, yeah. And the awesome Democratic Socialist running the ALA, that's good.

Yes. Yeah, we had Emily on when she was still campaigning. But I think that's all the library stuff I'm following right now. I don't know. There's probably other stuff, but it gets lost. Life comes at you fast in the waning years of human civilization. I'm always saying this. True more words.

Okay. Oh, yeah, let's go. I'm Justin. I'm a touring complete. von Neumann machine and my pronouns are he and they. I'm Sadie. I work IT at a public library and my pronouns are they then? I'm Jay. I am a music library director who succumbs to the foibles of recording companies every hour of every day, literally. And my pronouns are he, him. And we have a guest which

would like to introduce yourself. Sure. I'm Corey Doctro. I'm a writer and activist and my pronouns are 808.3876. Just a little, a little dewy humor there. Everyone who listens will appreciate it. We promise. Yeah. Oh, Justin, are you needed? Oh, there you go. No, it's just whispering. Formally, it's like he, just for avoidance of doubt here. But also literature by topic, rhetoric and anthologies, rhetoric of fiction, genre writing mysteries, horror, Western science fiction and fantasy, writing science fiction and fantasy is my other pronoun. You had that in your back pocket. Yeah, that's quick. Well, I suppose you're wondering why I've called you all here today.

Oh, shit. At the tables of term. I thought it was on our podcast. No. So we asked Corey to come on to talk about his latest book. And we were a little behind the times. We were wanting to talk about choke point capitalism and then shitification. In the meantime, he fucking went out and pumped out a whole new book.

So we got to talk about that one too. So we'll be talking about Showpoint Capitalism and the InternetCon. But first, we don't normally do news with a guest, but I thought you might like this one. Google will shield AI users from copyright challenges within limits. So Google has joined a couple of other companies in saying that, look, you can use our GANS, our generative networks for creating images. And if it spits out something that the court finds violates copyright, we'll cover you. asterisk, asterisk. And I just thought this one was really interesting because the way I've been thinking about both the training data and the outputs, it seems like the big companies

are really just willing to eat any legal costs while they get themselves set up. It just seems like the latest iteration of that. But I don't know, Corey, what's your take on that? I have thoughts. I was going to say. So, feel free to jump in. There's a kind of monkey's paw getting ready to curl around people who are worried about AI. Look, I think it's fine to be worried about AI. Our bosses definitely have like insatiable horniness for firing us and replacing us with software, even and especially when the software is not very good at doing our jobs.

Like we have all called the switchboard that used to be staffed by a human who was good at their job and could connect us to the person we needed to talk to. And then just spent like 10 minutes going 17, no, 17, 17, 17, 1, 7, operator, operator. Like they will replace every screenwriter, radiologist, taxi driver, librarian, you know, they're going to replace them all with things that are sort of that equivalent if they can get away with it. So there's a good reason to be worried about it, and particularly in the creative arts, because our bosses really hate us.

But I think that there's on the one hand, like a cold, hard reality of how copyright stands today, which is that it's just not an infringement to take a transient copy of a work and then do mathematical analysis on it. Like, it just isn't. Like, I'll stipulate. I am on the lunatic fringe of copyright liberalization, but my arch enemies, like, people who wouldn't piss on me if I was on fire, the one thing we agree on is that the precedent does not support the idea that making transient copies of works are subjecting them to mathematical

analysis or then embedding that analysis in a model is an infringement. So there are a bunch of creative workers who want to make it an infringement. There are a bunch of lawyers who have gotten creative workers to join class action suits that accuse it of being an infringement, it's kind of worth asking what it is those lawyers are smoking. And I think that they are operating on the assumption that although it's probably not an infringement that these companies did so much shady shit to acquire their corpuses that they're just going to like pay lots of money to just never have that come out during

discovery. And since they're swimming in like tens of not hundreds of billions of dollars in market capitalization, like why not, right? And by all means, right? Like take $400 million away from Sam Altman and give it to Sarah Silverman. That is like the world is a better place when that happens, for sure. But the problem is that if we actually do change copyright to make that an infringement, I don't think it makes creative workers better off.

I think that just triggers an environment in which all of the contracts we sign, say from now on, non-negotiably, whoever it is that's employing you has to acquire your right to train works as a condition of you working with them. if you don't like it, you can go pound sand. And then they'll just train models and fire you, right? And it's just a roundabout way of transferring a new exclusive bargainable right from a worker who has very little power but has been brainwashed to think that they're an LLC with an MFA and that they are bargaining business to business in the spirit of good old American enterprise

with other firms across the board boardroom table. And it's just like a roundabout way to transfer that right to them. I think that there are other ways that we can protect creative workers from this stuff. So like liability for some workers, you know, there are some workers who, if they were replaced with software and then that software killed someone, their bosses, if they had to assume the liability for it, would lose more money than they would gain by firing them. I think that the Writers Guild just showed us how labor unions can strike better bargains as well. I think by the Writers Guild saying, oh, oh, you can use as much AI as you want. You just can't fire any of us. They just killed AI for

screenwriting, right? Because like, it's not like the studios where like, oh, we want to buy a, buy AI to make our writers more efficient. They were like, we want to buy AI so we don't have to pay our writers anymore. If you have to pay the writers the same amount and then buy a $25 million site license from Sam Altman, you're not going to do it. Right. Like, no way. And then, you know, the other one is what the copyright office has just pointed us to, which is that works that are authored by an AI are not entitled to copyright in the same way that monkey selfies aren't because, you know, in the in the parlance of the absolutely degraded freaks of the world intellectual property organization, copyright inheres at the moment of

fixation of a work of human creativity. And software generated works are not eligible for a copyright. Bam, right? And so like, yeah, our bosses want to fire us. But they would rather drink a gallon of warm spit before breakfast every day until they die, then give up one millimeter of their copyright. And so if we just say, fine, you can fire as many of us as you want, but then you don't get copyright. Anyone can take your works and copy them and sell them and give them away and whatever. they're just going to be like, oh, no, we'll just pay you guys. So I think all of those are much more successful. Now, on the question of like what Google's doing here, it's an interesting gambit,

it's not the worst thing in the world for a software company to say, hey, there's like an unquantifiable form of liability that attaches to using our products and will immunize you from it unless you go to extraordinary lengths to actually bring that liability down on us. And I think the fine print on that Google thing is probably going to settle out to being, unless you like literally type into the prompt, make the most infringing Mickey Mouse image you can, that they'll probably immunize you.

But like, you know, if you just, if you just say like, you know, make me a picture of, you know, Donald Trump at a children's birthday party, and it turns out to have an uncanny resemblance to, you know, a painting by Anish Kapoor, you know, notorious litigious asshole that comes after you, then, you know, they'll just make you whole, which like, fair enough, right? If you are going to make a product that creates unquantifiable liability that is like, you need like esoteric deep knowledge of a really niche area of law to use safely, then immunizing the people who use it is not the worst thing in the world you could do.

I was wondering if it was maybe another kind of a choke point, though, of like you only start then using the AI or whatever of the company that can afford to litigate on your behalf and then everyone's just using Google and then that's the only game in town kind of thing. Well, I guess so. I mean, look, I don't know for sure because we don't really know how it's all going to play out. But this is an insurance policy and like insurance markets are imperfect. But insurance like, again, is not a terrible idea, right?

The idea of like pooling risk. You know, it's interesting. After 9-11, I think it was around 2003. I was reading the Financial Times in an airport lounge. And the thing about the Financial Times in the Wall Street Journal is that while the editorial pages are absolutely unhinged, the rest of it is like refreshingly fact-based because money talks and bullshit walks. And you can't do culture war nonsense or war on terror, you know, hysterics when you're trying to make money. And so there was this section in the middle that was like, should, should firms, should responsible executives get terrorism insurance for their firms? And they were like, yes, the reason you should do it is your shareholders don't know shit about shit.

And so they think that terrorism is a real risk, even though it's not. But insurers know the extent to which terrorism is a risk. And they know how small that risk is and they price it accordingly. So it's only going to cost you pennies. So you might as well just go ahead and buy that insurance because the risk is really low. And it'll make, you know, you're loudest, stupidest shareholders happy. Right. And like, it was very bracing to read that advice.

It's quite good to see the ruling class talking, frankly, amongst themselves, like Mitt Romney, admitting that he thinks that 40% of us should be euthanized because we don't contribute to society, you know? And I just, I just, I think that, like, it's not beyond the realm of possibility that if there were more than one platform offering image generation tools, that they would be able to insure that risk and the insurance would be within reasonable grounds. I just don't think that those insurance policies are going to be just like horrible choke points. I think they'll probably be fine. Unless we just get a bunch of crazy precedent that says this is quintillion dollar liability for one honest mistake. And then, you know, I think it's just going to become radioactive. And then I think Google will probably say, oh, yeah, no, we're not doing this anymore either, right? Like the only reason they're doing it, like, this is another thing, right?

It's the only reason they're doing it is I think they're reasonably confident that the liability risk is pretty low. Makes sense. Yeah. Okay. That was the news. Now, we are here to talk about your work, but we have talked a lot about productivity, and you are quite prolific. And you talk about some of your, like, your schedule on your podcast. And I was just curious if you could, like, walk us a little bit through, like, when you're writing nonfiction, like, these two books we're going to be talking about. I noticed they both have, like, a two-part structure that you've been kind of writing up pieces and articles and in podcasting. I mean, how would you just, how would you just? describe, like, kind of your process for writing as, like, as a ritual or as something else? And we have a lot of library school students or people who are considering going into library school as our listener base, so they probably are really interested.

So I would say that, like, the best thing that ever happened to me was when writing stopped being a ritual. It's, um, rituals require a certain luxury of choice of time, of place and, and conditions. And rituals are also metastatic. So one day it's like, oh, I'm just going to fold the laundry before I write. And the next day, it's like, I'm going to also put away the dishes before I write. And then it's like, finally you're like, I'm dancing wittershins thrice around my home, you know, with mud rubbed in my navel before I sit down and write. And I, you know, look, I think most writers start the way I did, which is they do it.

out of a whim or maybe a school assignment or something, and it just feels good and they keep doing it for a while. And it's just nice. You get inspired, you do it. And like, that's the kind of cook I am, right?

Like every now and again, I'm like, you know, I really fancy an X. And then I look, try to look for like maybe a takeout that has X. And then I'm like, you know what?

I could make X. It'd be good. And then I look up a recipe and then I go get some groceries and I make X. That's fine, right? That's cool. I have no desire to be a professional chef. It is fine for me to just be someone who enjoys cooking.

for a moment to moment. But when it's your job, right, you got to be able to write even when you don't feel like it. Because you got to make the words occur on the page. Or, you know, you're not going to pay your mortgage or your insurance premiums for your health care or whatever. And so like, that's very important. So I started writing whenever I was inspired. And then I reached a point where I really wanted to make a living writing and I was getting some writing assignments and I was selling some work. And I had to figure out how to write when I wasn't inspired. In particular, there's this transition between my first novel and my second where I went from having written the first novel while mostly living at home in Toronto where I'm from, while having a very

busy life. But being able to carve out a couple of weeks here and there to do it. I didn't have kids. I had a startup I was doing, but still, I could take vacations and stuff and just focus, bear down on the project. And then by the time I was doing the second and third books, I was the European director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which is a nonprofit I've worked for now for 22 years, including a lot of work with libraries, with Aifla and Eiffel. I helped draft the access to knowledge treaty that became the Marrakesh Treaty, which is the first treaty WIPO ever passed on the rights of information users and it safeguards the rights of people who have sensory and physical disabilities to access copyrighted works. So I was,

you know, on the road, 27 days a month. I stopped plugging in my fridge because it cost me 10 bucks a month to keep my ice keeps frozen. I was in 31 countries in three years and I had books to write. And I had this really like thunder striking realization, which is that although there were days where I felt like I was writing really well and days when I felt like I was writing really poorly. And although in retrospect, when I reviewed the work prior to submission, there were passages that were really good and passages that needed to be scrapped and rewritten, that these were not correlated, that the correlate of feeling like I was writing badly was lack of sleep, stress, anxiety, problems at work, problems in my personal life, but not the quality of the

words. And I had to find a way to sit down at the keyboard and feel the most irrefutable, intense feeling that I was about to write the worst words ever committed to hard drive by human fingers. And then just write those words anyway because maybe they were, but maybe they weren't. And even if they were, I could fix them later. And if you've ever seen the VR demo where you put a plank down on the carpet and you put the VR headset on, and then it projects an image as though you were standing on a plank, protruding from the top of the Empire State Building. And you have to walk along the plank.

And when you see videos of people doing it, they're just like in the most adivistic terror, right? They just, they, like, intellectually, they know that they're standing on a carpet, but every fiber of their being is like, you are about to die. And that's what the feeling is, right? You have the feeling, and then you just do the thing anyway. And thankfully, I'm not that bright. So it took me 10 years to realize the corollary of this, which is that on the days where I felt

very proud and satisfied because I'd written something really well, it was possible that I'd just written garbage. And then the whole thing got a little an hedonic for a while. But this ability to sit down and just do the words that you need to do that day, very, very, very important. And in particular for nonfiction, but also to a lesser extent for fiction, being a blogger really helped. So I helped start a website called Boing Boing, again, about 20, 22, 23 years ago. I left in 2020, although I'm still a co-owner of it. And it was one of the first widely read blogs.

And I wrote between five and 20 posts nearly every day for nearly 20 years, tens of thousands, probably 50,000 posts all in all. And the act of taking everything that crossed my transom that seemed of some significance, and rather than scribbling a cryptic note to myself in a notebook that I would never decipher, applying the rigor to explain what seemed important about it to a notional audience of strangers was both good discipline but also good record keeping, that what I ended up with was a literal database, right, the WordPress database that I can query that has like everything I've thought for 20 some years. And also a kind of subconscious super saturated solution of

fragmentary ideas for stories and novels and books and essays and speeches that periodically will kind of glom together and nucleate and crystallize into a whole long synthetic work. And it means that when I have an idea, generally that idea is quite complicated. It's quite mature. It has a lot of ornaments and struts and elements that kind of make it more than just like a single kind of high concept line. And then I also have all my references, just like sitting in a database, which I can just pull up by looking at my WordPress installation. And you combine both of those and you get a kind of compositional like underpinning that makes the commitment to, if you're working on a book, writing 500 words every day or a thousand words every day or

whatever much you're doing every day, makes it much more straightforward, especially when combined with that emotional outlook towards the work. Yeah, I was really glad I brought this up because this is venturing into like digital garden ideas, which we've talked about before. So taking an idea, planting a seed, tending to it, maybe it doesn't go anywhere, building it into a fully cultivated idea. Yeah, I imagine that was kind of maybe your process, but I'm really glad to hear it. Yeah, iteration, you know, you try to explain this abstract,

ridiculous, complex, and esoteric thing, like the relationship of digital rights management to competition and technological self-determination, which is like just this thing that is, you know, eye glazing on its face, right? And then you try to explain it to Normies, or even to people who've got like a dog in the fight, right, to technologists or to people interested in business, a competition or policy. And you watch where they stub their toes. And then the next time something comes up in the news that seems related, you do it again and you try to try to avoid that same tripping hazard the next time you tackle it and you do it over and over again and you develop a vocabulary and a repertoire of analogies, metaphors, phrases,

that help people grapple with these complex technical ideas. And then when it comes time to, you know, spinning them out into a longer work, uh, like a book, um, like a book, well, you've got a lot of, you know, the term stereotype comes from a thing that a typographer would pre-cast, they would cast a phrase in lead so that when it was time to use it, they could just slot it into the type-hod, right? You have these kind of these anecdotes from central casting that you can just slot in to help you develop these esoteric points at longer length. Yeah, or in my case, memorized lines from movies and folk punk songs that succinctly explain my politics. There you go.

Definitely not a diagnostic criteria of anything. That's great. Well, thank you for answering that question. Should we start with the basics of insidification? I've heard you explain it a few times. I thought I might save you the effort and go through it. So it's ultimately a rent-seeking process. First, the platforms are good to their users, then they abuse their users to make things.

better for their business customers, which are usually advertisers. Finally, they abuse the business customers to draw back all the value for themselves, and then they die. And it's an inevitable consequence arising from the combination of the ease of changing how a platform allocates value, combined with the nature of a two-sided market where a platform sits between buyers and sellers, held each hostage to each other, raking off an ever larger share of the value that passes between them. That's a great succinct definition. I would add one further nuance, which is that when an industry grows very concentrated, it becomes easy for it to capture its regulators.

And on the one hand, that frees the industry from constraint. So we see the tech industry acting as though neither labor nor consumer protection nor privacy laws apply if you're violating them with a computer. And on the other hand, it allows you to apply constraint to other people's conduct, you know, as Jay Freeman calls us felony contempt of business model. So, you know, you can spy on me with an app, but if I reverse engineer the app in order to put a privacy blocker in it, that's a felony under Section 1201 of the DMCA. And so, you know, it's, it's not a lack of regulation nor an excess of regulation, but rather too much regulation imposed on

people who do things that displease the monopoly and too little regulation applied to the monopoly itself. I immediately wanted to try and apply this to like a library world issue. And because I do scholarly communication, I thought academic journals, perfect. Sure. So in the 1940s and also overdrive. Overdrive. That's on there too. We're academic.

Well, Sadie probably does stuff with Overdrive, but Justin and I are both academic librarian, just don't have to deal with Overdrive as much. We are sorry, Sadie, who probably has to deal with it all the time. Sorry, go ahead. I interrupted. I beg your pardon. No, no, no. Yeah, I actually had something about e-books and I was like,

do I want to go down that rabbit hole in particular? I like explaining the academic journal publishing, though, because when you work with faculty all the time, you get to work with their egos as well, which is like a great side benefit. And so you get to see their little like dreams of empire and things like that. Like you were saying, like imagining that they are a CFO that is, like I help someone go over a book.

contract the other day. And I was like, you're not going to get anything out of them. But not legal advice, not legal advice. You should talk to a lawyer. But, you know, that sort of thing. But there was a, there was a large amount of, like, government funding that created a big investment in like the explosion of academic journals, which then once the government money starts going away, we start having Elsevier, Springer Nature, Wiley, Taylor, and Francis have eventually eaten all these up. And they give really nice parties to academics, which I'm really pissed that I missed out on the era of that. You get prestigious titles, you get peer respect, and you get metrics, which, of course, the metrics are proprietary. So these are, I'm seeing as the initial users, it's the academics.

Yeah. Then you become a volunteer laborer, and you tie your employment to doing free labor for the platform. And I compare that to like doing, like, if Twitter goes away, I get commissions off Twitter. I get job interviews off Twitter, that sort of thing. Even worse, because it's like, if I don't publish in the right journal, I don't get tenure and I lose my job. Business partners in this scenario are the libraries that they sell to, this free labor, and we're basically information providers. You provide information. We provide information. We being the publishers. And then clawing back value from the libraries, we're trying to do open access. So that's preventing what's called leakage. So instead of allowing us to have self-archiving in, you know, locally controlled electronic databases like our institutional repositories, everything needs to go through this little gift link.

It goes back to their page where they scrape data, which, of course, they want to use that data to sell to a new business partner, the government intelligence agencies, landlords, and law enforcement. And then they transform from publishers to cartels of data. I was hoping the last bullet point there would be, and then they die, but that didn't happen. So instead, they just became a worse, a worse pseudo-government organization that is not subject to many privacy laws. Yeah, I mean, I think you said that very well, particularly the N-WR, you talk about them being pseudo-government. I mean, I think that a lot of people assume that if the state doesn't regulate, it means you have a regulation-free environment. And instead, what you end up with is large firms or cartels that make the rules and decide who else can exist and what they can do. They end up structuring whole markets. Think of how Amazon decides literally what can be.

be sold in America. I mean, you know, if something's not available for sale on Amazon, it might as well not exist. And so, you know, maybe you worry that the FDA is cracking down too much in your favorite supplement vendor or whatever, but Amazon has far more influence over what is for sale where you live than any government regulator. And so, yeah, they become a kind of private government. And I think that your account of how the sector rose and rose is a good one. I would make explicit that the growth was largely driven through acquisition, right? There were lots of academic publishers that were merged to monopoly by investors who are prepared to funnel effectively unlimited amounts of capital to firms that are doing these roll-ups with the expectation that as you reduce competition, you increase competition, you increase. increase profitability. You know, as Peter Teal says, competition is for losers. There's a great new book by

Janus Varfakis called techno feudalism, where he elucidates an important distinction between profit and rent. And, you know, a lot of leftists get angry when you try to make this distinction. They say, well, like, profits, rents, it doesn't matter. It's all coming out of the surplus value generated by workers. And that may be so, but like this is an important fracture line in the ruling class. So if you think about the origins of the fights between profit and rent, you know, you have feudalism. And under feudalism, you have lords who own things. They own land. And you have peasants who work the land.

And the peasants are bound to the land. They are not allowed to leave. It is the law that they are hereditarily bound to the land. And they owe a rent every year to the Lord. It doesn't really matter how the crops perform. The Lord gets the same amount of rent. If the peasants next door come up with a better way to grow crops, the Lord can you know, do some praxis sharing with his peasants and he'll reap the rewards or not if

that's how he chooses to roll. But it's not like if the peasants next door are doing better, the Lord goes out of business. The Lord gets the rent no matter what. And so that is what rent is. Rent is owning a thing that people who want to do something productive need to pay you for. And profits are what capitalists get as opposed to feudalists. Prophets are when the capitalists come in and they say, kick the peasants off the land. Proletarian. them, grow sheep on that land so that we can build factories that will turn the sheep's wool into an industrial product textiles. And we will own the capital. We'll own the factory and we'll cite it on land that used to be owned by a lore that is owned by a lore that used to be worked by

peasants. And we will invest in that capital. And if the capitalist down the road has better machines, then we will go out of business. And so we'll invest. invest in machines and they'll invest in machines and will be in a race to see who can extract the most profit, not just by alienating workers from the product of their labor, but also by continually innovating in the creation and deployment of capital. You read the first chapter of the Communist Manifesto, and it's just like Marx and angles geeking out about how incredibly productive this system was, right? How innovative, imaginative, how, you know, capitalists that like that if you say to the capitalist innovator starve, they will innovate. And rents are not liable to

competition. If you own a building that has a coffee shop in it, that is to say capitalist enterprise, and the coffee shop goes out of business because a better coffee shop opens down the street, you now have a vacant unit in a block with a great new coffee shop in it. That's great. You as the landlord, the Rontier, the person who makes your money from rents, you're doing great, even if the person who is making the profits has gone out of business. And, you know, Steinbeck is reported to have said that socialism never took hold in America because Americans are all temporarily embarrassed millionaires. It's not even clear if you ever said it.

And I don't know if it's true. But the one thing that I think is absolutely true is that every capitalist is a temporarily embarrassed feudalist, right? Capitalists do not like having to make money by competing. Capitalists really want to make money by owning things that other people who are who compete use, which is why, you know, there are, I think, six trillion dollar businesses in the world. If you take out Saudi Aramco, the remaining five are just rent-seeking American companies,

Apple, Google, Facebook, Microsoft. I forget what the other one is. But, yeah, I mean, it's just rents, people who make money from their rents by owning a thing someone else has to use to do something productive. And some of them actually also do productive things, like Apple makes phones and collects rent on the app store. And the difference between a feudal society and capitalist society is not whether all the rents go away or all the profits go away. It's when profits and rents come into conflict. If profits win, then you have a capitalist society. And if rents win, you have a feudalist society.

And today you have things like the East District of Texas patent courts where patent trolls who claim to have invented things that they never really invented. They just like sketched out, you know, a way of using a computer to do a thing. And then someone at the USPTO granted them this incredibly overbroad patent can sue companies that I have no love for, you know, Apple, a Google, Samsung, whatever. They can sue them in the Eastern District of Texas and they win. They get to just collect rents from productive businesses. And so I think what you're talking about when you talk about the transformation of academic publishing and this acquisition strategy that consolidated the sector is this drive by capitalist to become Rontiers, right? to abolish competition in favor of ownership and a guaranteed income like UBI for rich people.

That is kind of upstream of all of these effects that we see on knowledge production and organization and the way that you see the alienation of creative and scholarly work by these predatory journals. And they have all the hallmarks of inshittification. They are squeezing the libraries. they're squeezing the suppliers. So they're squeezing the buyers and the sellers sitting between them. They have captured their regulators. You know,

think about how, you know, conduct that is true to the spirit of, of the academy, like the organization and promulgation of SciHub or the work that Aaron Swartz was doing when he crawled JSTOR, has, you know,

becomes not just a civil matter, but actually a jailable felony. And, you know, you have felony content to business model. You have the whole, package of insidificatory conduct wrapped up in an industry. And that industry is not how we search the web and it's not how we, you know, talk to our friends. It's like how we organize all human

knowledge and all and how we advance all human knowledge, which is a really terrifying thing. I, you know, to end that rant on maybe a positive note, the good thing about all of this is that because it is identical formally to so many other extractive arrangements, the allies that the people who are on the wrong side of this extractive arrangement

have are effectively unlimited. There are so many people. Everyone with an only fans is living through the same thing as academics who are publishing in Elsevier, as is every Uber driver, as is everyone who's trying to like syndicate

their work on Twitter. And the mass movement that is latent in that commonality is so large and unstoppable that it really feels like like it just takes some explaining about these esoteric ideas to a sufficiently large group of people to have everyone realize, oh, we are all on the same side against the Rontiers. Yeah, this reminds me a little bit of something you say in chokepoint capitalism about how like the focus on like the consumer and their prices and their experience often comes at the expense of the creators and the workers. And often like you hear horror stories and academic libraries

about, you know, Elsevere and all of these other, you know, companies make all of these electronic resources and subscriptions like so expensive. And also in public libraries, like how overdrides are fucking over everyone. And then, you know, you'll have like entitled faculty. And I don't one to like, you know, those entitled faculty are also my comrades who I'm in solidarity with, right? We are on the same side in this fight, but maybe they don't realize it yet, uh, because they're always like entitled faculty are always the ones who are like, you unsubscribe from the journal that only I care about. And we go, but the budget, right, because those prices are going up and the university, even though it always says that a university is just a library with a bunch of

buildings around it, you know, whatever the adage is. I don't care because they don't mean it because they don't actually give us more money each year as these costs go up. And so then faculty go, oh, well, then why do you need so many librarians? Isn't everything online now? And the university goes, you know what? You're right. And then they start getting rid of the tech services that deals with all of the metadata and the knowledge organization. They get rid of the electronic resources librarians and they start getting rid of reference librarians too. And so then, oh, well, we can get your journal back, but then the way that you find it, like, there's fewer and fewer librarians who actually, like, are hired now to do the work of making sure that these resources are, like,

accessible and findable and discoverable, that the user interfaces, like, aren't bullshit and makes sense and also, um, aren't in Israel. Uh, you get like all of these other, like, things where even if we have the fucking journal, people can't find it anyway, right? It's like a pain in the ass. to use. And so then we're all fucked. And so I'm hoping that maybe universities are in the find out of the fuck around and find out the process. It's like, well, what happens if you just don't have the labor to do the stuff anymore?

You're about to find out. Like, I would always like tell faculty, like, by the way, the book you want me to buy costs this much for this license and this much for this license and this much for this license. Then they go, are you fucking kidding me? And I go, nope. And then they get mad. And then we get solidarity.

Yeah. Well, and, you know, presumably having skilled library workers around who've got longitudinal experience of the journals and the bargaining that the institution is done with them is a precondition for bargaining well. Right. Like if you take everyone who's ever gone eye to eye with the publishers and, you know, put them on the breadline, the next time the publishers show up and tell you what the standard deal is. is they can just like take you to the cleaners because there's no one around who has the institutional knowledge to know what is and isn't a fair bargain.

Yeah, there's a working group for contracts via Spark. It makes me very much want to have a specialized contract negotiations librarian because they are worth their weight in gold because they can go all the cart. Okay, all day, I can do this all day. I can renegotiate this journal, this journal, this package, and we have, but I've never worked at a university that had one. And now I'm like, why don't we all?

Right, right. You know, I worked with Eiffel to stand up an NGO called Access to Information Africa. It was based in Tebi in Uganda. And it was when the U.S. trade rep and the academic publishers were working to decertify East African universities if they had photocopiers in their libraries. And, you know, Eiffel, like, its big mission is helping libraries, particularly libraries in the global South, but libraries all over, come together to negotiate deals for electronic journal access. And, you know, access to information Africa was trying to bring that expertise into East Africa

at this, like, key moment when, you know, Kenya, Uganda, all these other libraries were being, all these other universities in East Africa were being squeezed. in order to make sure that no one ever made a course pack in the library. Yeah, I hate copyright and copyright's bad. I don't hate copyright. I just think a little goes a long way. And, you know, like the right copyright is better than the wrong copyright. And it's true.

Look, there's nothing wrong with having exclusive rights regimes in the supply chain of the arts sector. There are times when they've worked to the benefit of creative workers. but like which one and under what circumstances we're kind of getting into the thesis of choke point capitalism, which is like how is it that we made copyright last longer, cover more works, have higher statutory damages, restrict more activities and have a lower bar for proving infringement. And the sectors that use copyright, the entertainment industry, has gotten bigger and more profitable. And yet the share of income going to creative workers has fallen both proportionally in real terms over that time. And the answer is that like,

bargainable rights are very sensitive to market conditions, right? If you give a creative worker more copyright in a landscape with five publishers, four studios, three labels, to ad tech companies and one company that does all the e-books and audiobooks or one company that does all the concert promotion and venues, then it's just like giving the bully kid extra lunch money, right? Like, there isn't an amount that you give that person that leads to them eating. And moreover, if you give them enough lunch money. The bullies will have enough left over after they've, you know, paid for their their wants and needs to like launch an international ad campaign saying, think of the hungry children. They need more lunch money. Right. And, and so, you know,

the, the thing that we have to attend to is not like what rights do you have, but what rights do you have in the conditions under which you bargain? And that's the, that's the dispositive element. That's the thing that's the best predictor of, of the distributional outcome of who gets how much from the, from the system. And, you know, a tenet of neoliberal economics is that it's, we shouldn't pay attention to how much of the pie you're getting. You should only pay attention to how big the pie is getting. And sure, like if your share stays at roughly a third, but fluctuates a little as the pie

doubles in size, that's fine. But if you're, if you're sure dwindles to like a homeopathic dose, it doesn't really matter how big the pie is. yeah plus they it feels like it's gotten more complicated like like i said i'm a music librarian and i get a lot of um of my i i work at a conservatory and i get a lot of students who are interested in doing like arrangements and the fucking like looks on their faces as we're like investigating things together and i'm like by the way i'm not a lawyer and i know more about music copyright than anyone in this building um and i'm confused and they're like what's going on like to the point where one student like Like one of my students that I've helped, like works at like one of the local coffee shops. And after a two hour consultation, that was only supposed to be like 30 minutes because we were just like, what the fuck is going on? He just wants to make an arrangement for viola of his like bees.

He was like, what's your, what's your coffee order? And I would get you a free one from the shop that I work at next time. I'm in the library. And I'm like, you do not have to do that. And he did anyway. No, that's very nice. That was the most fascinating thing I've ever seen in my life. just watching you get into the zone about it.

But it's like I do that. So much of my time is taken up just trying to like help students navigate this system when they just want to make like really cool work or work that like would be like useful or helpful in their careers. Right. And the sad thing is that even if they master the subject and are able to make good assessments about what they can and can't do within a kind of. reasonable set of risk parameters, it doesn't mean that any of the industrial actors they work with

in their careers will allow them to take those risks. You know, I just, my publisher who are quite reasonable and have generally had my back in many cases at McMillan, I wanted to use two stanzas from a Woody Guthrie song. So this is Woody Guthrie who wrote, this land is my land. You know, one side of the sign said private property, the other side didn't say nothing. That side was made for you and me. Woody Guthrie used to publish his songs with a thing that the bottom that said this sign that this song is copyright under seal of copyright number whatever. Write it, sing it, swing it, yodel it, dance to it. That's why we wrote it.

That's all we want you to do, right? Woody Guthrie, four lines. Early Creative Commons license. Yeah. And I had a backing opinion from the lawyers who wrote the most widely used intellectual property case book in American law schools. And I still lost the argument of my publisher. They were like, you can't.

No epigram. because they're just like, look, you know, we have, we have, if, if we ever get hit with a lawsuit and our insurance underwriter says, well, how conservative are you being? And they go and they look at this and they go, oh, well, there's no permission of the Woody Guthrie estate here. You are not being very conservative. And, you know, the publisher's insurer spends a million dollars defending a lawsuit. They're going to go back and they're going to go, well, your conduct was reckless. Even if you won this one, your conduct was reckless, and we're not going to write your policy anymore or we're going to jack your premiums. So they're just doing, you know, we talked about insurance before.

They're responding to the structure of the market. And one of the, I'm a great proponent of fair use, but one of the problems of fair use is it's fact intensive. And it's hard to judge at the outset what fair use will be. And that can be a virtue because mores change. things that wouldn't have been considered fair, become more widely considered fair, but also mores change and things that were once considered fair go back in the proprietary box. And I've lived through both, and it is very hard to handicap the chances of a specific use being found fair in a court. And you can see why no one wants to take their chances.

Yeah, yeah, like Kyle Courtney, a friend of the pod, and we've had him on before. And he's always, like, I have taken a lot of his, like, copyright first responders, like, courses and fair use courses and everything. He always buys me expensive scotch at conferences. Oh, very nice. Yeah. And he's like, you know, fair use is always about risk. Yeah. Copyright is always about risk.

And librarians, we have to be more comfortable taking higher risks, which I agree with, but we might be comfortable taking them. But then the institutions we work for, like, no, you don't. And then we can't do it. we would be willing to risk because they are more conservative than we are. And so then you just, then it doesn't even matter. Right. That was one of my critiques, again, of the internet archive, taking the risk for making the emergency temporary access was, look, it could go badly. And, you know, I realize that I've probably more or less been proven wrong on this, which is rare. That's fine. No one seems to be stopping their controlled digital lending.

But I know if I go, I want to control digital lending. And if our legal counsel has heard about this case, that's just a pain. My whole beef about the Internet Archive case was it just affected me personally. It made my slightly more annoying. Well, look, I understand why they did it. I am in great fear that they're going to lose. I don't think anyone knows for sure how that's going to work out. And it's not just the one CDL case.

It's also the 78's case where they're going after Brewster Care personally. And losing the internet archive would be a blow to information and the free fare and open internet that it's hard to articulate just how bad it would be. And so, yeah, I'm worried about it too. I mean, I understand why they took a risk. And I am generally the person saying take risks, take risks. But boy, when you fuck around and then you find out, it can feel, like maybe you shouldn't have fucked around.

Thank you. Jesus. Finally, someone's validating me. Well, to be clear, I think that they're in the right and I hope they win. I just don't know if they're going to. I was just mad that they lied about one fact about it because I was like, yeah, you take that risk. This is fair use.

I'm in your corner. And then they're like, by the way, we haven't been verifying the things that we said we were. And I was like, God damn it. Well, they had another problem, which is that after the, Patriot Act passed. Brewster went in and ripped out all the analytics so that he couldn't had no patron records because this was when the ALA and everyone really worried that they were going to come for patron records. And so he just literally doesn't have any record of what has happened. You know, like he knows if someone's checked out a book, but after they checked it out,

he doesn't know that they checked it out. It's just, it all disappears. And so when the publishers in the writers group started arguing about the substitutive effect that this was having, He didn't know what people were borrowing and he didn't know how they were using it. And they very cautiously implemented a few little bits and pieces of analytics so that they could say fairly authoritatively like, look, almost everything is out of print. People's checkouts are for under 30 minutes. They go and they get, you know, a page from a book and they look it up and then they put the book back. And this is clearly not substitutive. No one is like, oh, I really need to reference that quote.

I'm going to go buy the book new. And so it's not substitutive, but it took them so long to be able to say that authoritatively for the good reason that they didn't want to spy on their users. But it's just this very bad combination of factors. And the other thing is that publishing was full of people who were losing their minds at the time. Remember, publishing's in New York, right?

These are all people who all they heard for months was sirens, where there were like refrigerator trucks. full of corpses on their blocks, right? They freaked the fuck out. There were massive layoffs in their businesses. They were talking about mass graves in Central Park if they ran into space to bury

people in New York. So these people were like absolutely freaking out. And then this comes along and they hear these scare stories about the archive eroding their revenue and they just lose it. Yeah, it's a confluence of a lot of things. I didn't.

Didn't consider. You mentioned earlier, SciHub, and we've been talking a little bit about, like, contracts. And one of the things to talk about in the InternetCon is competitive compatibility and interop. And one thing that can, one possibility of increasing interop so that there aren't such massive tie-ins of particular platforms. And like we mentioned, academic publishing. It made me think of countries where Syhub is more or less not, like, pirates themselves, are not prosecuted. People kind of go, well, you know, this, I know a case is going through India right now where

it's like, does this really actually violate our copyright law? Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. But also that trade agreements fuck this up immensely. And I thought of the Diego Gomez case where he pirated a master's thesis and was facing like jail time. And then you mentioned, as I was listening to the audiobooks, I took that note about Diego Gomez.

And then right after I mentioned that, that the trade agreement caused that terrible law, you mentioned that the anti-circumvention case or no soybean trade. Yeah, although that was Central America, not South America, but yes. Right. Yeah. Yeah, it's true. I mean, the U.S. trade representative has been patient zero in a global epidemic of terrible copyright laws. and these bilateral and multilateral trade agreements are how some of the worst ideas become kind of enshrined in law. And the industrial actors who benefit from them, you know, the large firms who benefit from them, they are quite upfront and unashamed about saying like, look, we structure this deal so that we force, you know, we first we get America to pass the law, then we get another country to pass the law.

and we get them in a trade deal that says that America can't rescind the law because they have passed it as well. And the more countries we do that with, the more barriers there are to any kind of democratic reform because the democratic reform comes at the price of trade deals with lots and lots of countries. And so they really see this as a way of putting democracy in chains, right? of moving, creating like a one-way ratchet where you make a policy, but you can never unmake that policy because there's too many penalties associated with unmaking it. And interoperability, you know, the power of firms or individuals or tinkerers or cooperatives to modify the services that they use to make them more suited to their needs.

That is a really important piece of the history of how technology is developed, you know, back to Marx and Engels saying that the praises of capitalist creativity in the first chapter of the manifesto, this idea that you can remake things, that you can take the things that exist and use them as the substrate for something new has allowed all kinds of actors for profit, non-profit, individual, and collective to remodel the world that they live in, to, you know, as I say in the subtitle the book sees the means of computation. And, you know, the more subaltern you are, the less in the room you are when choices are being made about how the technology will work, the more this stuff is important to you. Because, you know, when your needs, your reality, you know, to use a cliche, your lived experience is not in consideration when the product is being designed, then you rub up against hard realities that the product doesn't accommodate.

And so that's true whether you have a sensory or physical disability. It's true whether you have a familial situation that is not contemplated by the system. I spent years at one point in my career fighting something called DVBCM, which was a standard for digital television in Europe, Latin America, and Asia, that was going to define what a family was so that you could share your movies and your videos within your family unit. And it had like all this flexi. I mean, yes, as bad as you imagine, right? So it had flexibilities like if you own a luxury minivan with seatback video and a houseboat, and a villa in France. All of these can be incorporated

into a single family's set of gadgets. But when I said, what if you're like a mom who lives in Manila and a dad who's an itiner and agricultural worker and a son who's building a stadium in Qatar and a daughter who's going in nursing school or working as a nurse in California? They were like, well, that's an edge case. And, you know, I think it goes without saying

that there are a lot more people whose families look like that than have houseboats in villas and France. And, you know, that this, this, idea that you have people making calls about things as foundational as like whether someone is or isn't in your family as far as your systems are concerned, who are so far removed from your everyday reality really militates not just for making those people better and smarter, right? Yeah, sure, they should be more careful. But also for having the humility to say that no matter how good and how smart and how inclusive we are, we're not going to include everyone. That, you know, particularly when I was working on, rights of people with disabilities. You know, you think about what it means to be print impaired and you're like, okay, well, we're going to get everyone who has a vision impairment.

We're going to think about people of cognitive impairments, you know, people who are dyslexic and need audiobooks. What about people who are paralyzed and can't turn pages, right? And the list just kind of goes on and on and on about how different people's needs are, how distinctive people's needs are. And, you know, as my friend Liz Henry, who's a disability advocate says, we're only temporarily able-bodied, right? Like all of us are going to have some kind of disability eventually. So this stuff is pretty important, right?

It really kind of bears down on your own future. And the point of all of this is that without interoperability, you are stuck trying to find the people who made it and begging them to adapt it for your needs. And the one group of people who can never, ever do that and who cannot ever do that, and who cannot ever, be in the room when the product is designed is people who don't exist yet who have problems that don't exist yet. And infrastructure casts a long shadow. The things that we build are going to lurk in our substrates for generations, if not centuries. And if those things are not built with the expectation that the people who encounter them are going to need to adapt them to their needs, that you cannot foresee because the circumstances just have never existed on this earth yet,

but they will someday, then those people are going to curse your memory. Yeah. That just makes me think of Log for Jay that happened a couple of years ago or basically the one brick software got kicked out from underneath everybody. And, you know, the classic XKCD comic to go with that. Yeah. See also left pad. Yeah. But the thing that that makes me think of is just like anybody who works with technology

in any way, like, I'm not a software developer. I don't do a lot of code. I just help maintain the infrastructure that one library system uses, right? And even I can see how far that infrastructure shadow is. Like, even just getting regular updates from Microsoft, it's like this thing that happened 18 years ago is still haunting cisadmins for generations. So why can't we then turn around and apply that to, the people who are using the technology, right?

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I was making Dewey Decimal jokes earlier, but think about like the long shadow fucking Dewey Decimal cast in your library. I mean, leaving aside the fact that he was a sexual predator, right? Like just the bad ideas he had about, you know, organization of information and the extent to which we're just stuck with it. I mean, Library of Congress isn't much better because that's based on Thomas Jefferson's

personal library. And so like his bullshit is also baked into that one. Yeah. No matter where you go. Yeah. And you know, the virtue of all of those systems is at least you can drill down into the decimal points. Like it is embarrassing that, you know, sex of Christianity that are like so indistinguishable as to be nearly identical have entire like whole digits assigned to them. But religions that have a billion adherents are buried seven decimals deep.

But at least it's like infinitely divisible. Right. You know, like, at least you can just keep drilling down and adding stuff to it. It is extensible at least to that extent. I was always bad at Dewey. Yeah. Well, I helped a monastery moved their library at one time. And so it was like A, B, BS, BS, BS, BS, BS, BS, BS, BS, BS, and then in like a C through Z.

So it was great. What was BS? Bible studies. Oh, wow. Amazing. That's great. So, yeah, I learned a lot of BS that day. That's very funny.

Yeah, I am kind of curious. I want to ask you, with Interop, you're saying, like, smaller countries should allow interop immunity. But we just talked about these bad trade agreements. I mean, do you see the U.S. retaliating or at least taking time? Would it take a long time to retaliate the trade deals? So, you know, there's more flexibility in the anti-circumvention regimes in some of these trade agreements than you would think. So like for example, Chile has very broad exemptions for a circumvention that doesn't result in infringement. And so like you, you know, Chile could I think hypothetically just make like bypass devices to allow independent mechanics to diagnose cars without like any risk, which is a thing that no one in America can make. And I think, you know, the world would beat a path to their door. You could just sell like a billion of those. And I also think there are a bunch of countries where, especially now that we're moving to

a more multipolar world, that U.S. just can't smack around the way that they used to. There's always the like, well, we're going to withdraw U.S. aid from your country. And they're like, oh, really? Because someone just asked us if we'd be interested in a little Chinese Belt and Road over here. And they'd be like, oh, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, let's not be too hasty. So there's some of that as well. And, you know, I don't understand why countries that are just like off the map, like Iran and and North Korea aren't just like making circumvention tools.

Like North Korea is going to like steal $500 million from Axi Infinity. Why aren't they like just making, you know, ripping tools for, for, you know, stream rippers and whatever, you know, something, something that like there's a giant market for that people would actually enjoy? I wanted to title back to libraries because that's sort of our thing here, no matter how far off the beaten path we get. We've got it. We're a little contractually obligated. And talking about like the contracts and particularly in InternetCon, you talk about the possibility of using, removing NDAs at the state level, removing, which is something I'm already involved in is everyone who negotiates these journal packages with Elsevier and everyone else just says we're getting rid of the NDAs.

We're figuring out how to do it because we all want to know what everyone's paying and what the terms are. Sure. And if you're a public institution, they'll say, okay, you can leave the NDA in, but someone is going to FOIA it. Yeah. So you can leave it in if you want, but we're going to FOIA it. But I was really interested, too, and like, what should our strategy be besides removing NDAs and maybe adding these interop requirements into standards? Say libraries as a consortia help you build a standard that works between X Libris and another ILS. I can't think of anyone.

Sierra or whatever. Does Sierra still exist? I don't know. But you've got to not use your copyright or IP in any way to prevent enterop. What kind of strategy forms? Yeah. I mean, I think that this is, it's a thing that I think we could actually maybe direct some of that crazy energy at library boards and in the state houses where people are like,

oh, these libraries, they're wasting the public's money. They're doing things that are, you know, not in the public interest with the public coffers. I think that there is such a strong argument on both polls of the political spectrum to be made for binding covenants among government contractors not to aggress against interoperators. Like just basically like, look, if we buy a thing from you with public money and then we decide to pay someone else to make it better, you can't stop them. Right. Like we just like if we're going to buy like a car for our motor pool from you, you can't make us not choose the mechanic of our choosing or not use the parts of our choosing. Like it's not not because like you don't deserve to earn a living, but because our job as custodians of the public interest spending the public's money is to spend that money wisely. And I talk in the book about how Lincoln only bought rifles and ammo from armorers that used interoperable tooling and ammunition sizes.

because like you're the commander in chief, it is embarrassing to go out to the battlefield and say like, sorry, boys, wars canceled this week. Like our sole supplier is not making bullets, right? And I think that like you could easily see Josh Hawley standing up and saying like, why are we spending government money on stuff that government can't choose its own repair people for, can't source parts for,

can't extend, can't maintain with the suppliers of its choosing? how is it good for us to allow these Beltway bandits to pick the public's pocket? And I could see AOC making that same speech, right? And I think that individual librarians are going to struggle to tell their software vendors interoperability or go home. But as a movement for prudent public administration of public funds and a cash-strapped environment, this makes a lot of sense. The other thing that libraries are, I think, capable of doing,

doing is forming consortia to develop some of that tooling internally, less so when it's tied to content, but as an alternative, like if you can get the ability to export the content into another CMS, another database, another whatever, there's a lot of potential there. And, you know, when Leonard Richardson was working in the New York Public Library under Tony Aggie, he was commissioned to build a new front end to all of the digital collection systems, so overdrive and so on. And he built a thing that reduce the number of clicks to check out media from like 13 to 2, but it's also a front end that incorporates like the entire internet archive, as well as LiverVox,

as well as overdrive and sits as a layer on top of it and integrates all of them. They, you know, stuck all that code on GitHub under a free and open source license, but it's the kind of thing that more formally consortia of libraries could just contribute to and develop. It's exactly the kind of thing that free and open source software works for really well is maintaining public goods among public institutions for a public purpose. And there are libraries all over the world that would contribute to it as well. I think it's just a

matter of getting the right momentum. I mean, Tony Aggie is still at NYPL. Leonard's been cut loose. I think he's looking for a job if anyone's looking to hire him. But there's, you know, scope for throwing together some of these big library systems. And there's even umbrella organizations like Eiffel and of course, ALA and the state LAs that could work. on this. Boy, we'll put the fear of God into the digital tool providers, too. Really would. Yeah. And don't underestimate the extent to which the e-lending shenanigans are not about publisher hostility to libraries. I think that people in publishing are personally extremely sympathetic to libraries, including senior execs. They're all like the people of the book,

right? They all have like, you know, giant piles of damp swollen books next to the toilet, right? Like we know these people. They're us, right? But they are, you know, they have these commercial imperatives and a lot of what they're freaked out about is like KKR owning this intermediary, you know, overdrive that they are aggressively trying to use to like do to lending what Amazon did to buying and just make it something where the publishers are kind of frozen out. I think the publisher's response to it is ghastly. I think this idea that you can buy fiat to clear an end to sort. circulation of materials by slapping a Yula on them, you know, when, when libraries are like older than, you know, copyright, printing, book binding,

commerce, you know, like, it's just, it's just, it is outrageous for the publishers to just say, well, you can no longer own a book and circulate it. It's, it's always going to be on a license basis. So it's not like anyone ever went to publishing and then woke up and said, what do you mean? Libraries do that, right? Like everybody knew what the deal was with libraries before they ever got involved in publishing. You can't, you can't just like, the pretense of shock that libraries exist is just very thin. But it's, there is a lot of that animus as inter-industrial or inter-industry. And the industry they're angry about is not libraries. It's giant software tech companies, the owned by private equity funds. And so, you know, if you could,

if you could scare the shit at a KKR, you could win over a lot of publishers. Great. I think that's a really good place to end it. Do you have anything you want to plug before we go? Yeah, I should mention, you know, I said I write when I'm anxious, so I wrote nine books during lockdown. And this book that we've been talking about, the internet con, that came out in September, but this book, The Lost Cause, comes out in February, or no, sorry, November in like two weeks as we're recording this. And it's a post-green New Deal, pre-apocalyptic novel set in a world dominated by library socialism, a world of circulating abundance where everything is available, but you don't have to own it. It's like the Great Reset, but run by nice people. And there's a hardcore reactionary

movement of white nationalist militias and sea-going Neil Stevenson LARPing, billionaire anarcho-capitalist wreckers who are trying to roll back the progress of the Green New Deal and snatch defeat from the jaws of victory and put us back in a position where all the wildfires, floods, plagues, and so on are just being ignored instead of addressed head-on. And so it's a fun book. It's gotten great reviews so far from Naomi Klein and Bill McKibben and Ken Stanley Robinson. And once again, it's called The Lost Cause, comes out of November the 14th. Sounds awesome.

It'll be in the notes. So people can, I don't know if the pre-order numbers are really important, but yeah. They're important. How do your libraries get it? Yeah, and make sure your libraries get it. Looks that get run over a scanner on day one are really important for a book's fortune. So yes, by all means, pre-orders matter. And libraries, hey, if you want to get electronic versions without a license agreement or any encumbrance,

I sell them direct at crapphound.com slash shop. And so you can get e-books and audiobooks without encumbrance. You need to be able to side load into your management system. but, you know, there you go. Great. Thank you so much for coming on. Oh, thanks for having me. It's lovely to chat. This is great. Yeah, thanks.

Good night.