TRASHFUTURE - Amazon Billing Amazon for Amazon feat. Cory Doctorow and Rebecca Giblin

Episode Date: October 4, 2022

Cory Doctorow and Rebecca Giblin come on to discuss their new book “Chokepoint Capitalism,” which details how large companies have identified critical bottlenecks in the creative Labour process to suck the value and life out of them like vampires, and what can and has been done about it. Also, a startup! U.K. economic implosion to be discussed in this week’s bonus. Buy Rebecca and Cory’s book here! https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/710957/chokepoint-capitalism-by-cory-doctorow-and-rebecca-giblin/ If you’re looking for a UK strike fund to donate to, here’s one we’ve supported: https://www.rmt.org.uk/about/national-dispute-fund/ If you want access to our Patreon bonus episodes, early releases of free episodes, and powerful Discord server, sign up here: https://www.patreon.com/trashfuture *MILO ALERT* Here are links to see Milo’s upcoming standup shows: https://www.miloedwards.co.uk/live-shows *AUSTRALIA ALERT* We are going to tour Australia in November, and there are tickets available for shows in Sydney: https://musicboozeco.oztix.com.au/outlet/event/3213de46-cef7-49c4-abcb-c9bdf4bcb61f and Brisbane https://www.eventbrite.com.au/e/trashfuture-live-in-brisbane-additional-show-tickets-396915263237 and Canberra: https://au.patronbase.com/_StreetTheatre/Productions/TFLP/Performances *WEB DESIGN ALERT* Tom Allen is a friend of the show (and the designer behind our website). If you need web design help, reach out to him here:  https://www.tomallen.media/ Trashfuture are: Riley (@raaleh), Milo (@Milo_Edwards), Hussein (@HKesvani), Nate (@inthesedeserts), and Alice (@AliceAvizandum)

Hello and welcome to this episode of TF. It's a free one. It's the free one. I preempted Milo's awful habits of doing. I wish he was back on vacation. What you did really was you teed me up. And I'm here in studio with Milo saying we have Alice and joining us very special guests from very far away in a room that appears to be full of computer detritus like a hacker's bedroom from the 1990s. It is, of course, it is Corey Doctorow and Rebecca Giblin, the authors of Choke Point Capitalism, Corey Returning Champion, Rebecca, first time challenger. Welcome to the show. Thank you very much. It's a delight to be here. And we are dialing in from the 1990s

from a hacker's bedroom. Two of them enter, only one of them may leave. Will Corey retain his champion's belt or will Rebecca the challenger take it off him? Or will Rebecca win the champion's belt that gets you access to the free well drinks and free filter coffee and assorted danishes in the trash huge allowance? Yeah. Don't even challenge me like that. Like it was very, very close last night to ending up in an arm wrestling tournament in Soho House. So anything can happen. I mean, I love that. That's got to be the easiest arm wrestling tournament in history. I love these. I've got notoriously skinny arms. No, I had it. I had it, but they're all talk. Yeah, I bet. I really love this new remake of Over the

Top, where Sylvester Stallone, when he turns his cap backwards, it does save supreme on both sides. But no, we are going to be talking to Over the Top, the arm wrestling movie. You know, Over the God, damn it. Doesn't all fill a stone. However, we're going to be talking about self by arm wrestling. We are going to be talking to Corey and Rebecca about their new book, which is all about copyright and how these kinds of things that are these legal principles can be used and abused to suck away the power and revenue of creators of All Stripes by middlemen who suck and often promote NFTs. Does this mean that we're going to have to stop doing the patent pending joke that we like to do now? Corey, does that mean we're going to have

to stop doing that joke? I mean, Rebecca's the law professor. I think this is one for her. Well, I actually think you made the book sound way more boring than it actually is, which was not a huge thing to say this afternoon. I feel like we're establishing quite an adversarial relationship. I don't want to read it after the introduction that it got. The book is about all of these grifts, right? Like the fact that we've got these big businesses that have captured creative labor markets from everything, from music, recording, streaming, live performance, ticketing, music publishing, books like physical, e, audio, even Hollywood talent agencies and like so many other different areas, but they're all playing from the same

playbook and they're all pretending they're not doing it. So we get into all of those stories. We persuade you the problem is not that there's not enough copyright. It's not that artists are not working hard enough. It's that we've got these huge businesses who are creating these hourglass shaped markets where they get to have audiences at one side, creators at the other, and themselves like squatting predatorily at the neck. And then we don't stop there though. Like we just really like violently did not want to write yet another one of those chapter 11 books where you've got like 10 chapters talking about how shit everything is. And then, oh look, we're out of time, but here's some hand wavy stuff like vote harder at the end. So the whole

second half of the book is like, well, sure, they're creating these choke points, but here are a whole bunch of really detailed, hopeful things that we could do about how we widen them out. A chapter 11 book actually sounds like a lot of the books we have on this show where you go bankrupt at the end because it's been sold very well. I'm sure it will not be the fate of this book. Now, to be clear, please don't armrest us. We mean the books we read to make fun of, not the books we interview the authors of. We're talking books, you know, books written by Torian. Great moments and trash future diplomacy continues. It just rolls on. The charm offensive just continues. Of course, it wouldn't be the show if I didn't pick a startup

to talk about. Also, British listeners may be wondering, hey, Britain seems to be imploding. Are you going to talk about that? And the answer was, we did on the previous episode and we will in the next episode. We'll talk about it in the next week where a decade has happened. Exactly. We're talking about, we're talking guilt. How much will Torian Rebekah's book cost in pounds? No idea. Absolutely none. Well, this is a famous Einstein quote. I don't know what this week's podcast will be recorded with, but next week's podcast will be recorded with sticks and stones. Yeah, that's right. You drum the, you bake some indents in the stick with the stone and then you feed that into a computer made of like reeds and stuff. That's where we're

going in the UK. I've been thinking that the studio has been made of more wet leaves than last time. Recording the podcast directly into the mouth of a pelican who goes, it's a living. But the podcast, the startup today, it's, I'll tell you right now, it's been invested in by Andreessen Horowitz and it's called, yeah, the guy wrote Stormbreaker. It's called Arpeggie. Just for me that one. Arpeggie. Yeah. And I'm going to throw it to our guests first. Rebekah, having never been on the show, you get first guest, Arpeggie. What do you think it does? Look, all I can think about now is pelicans, but warmer. Okay. Okay. Look, Arpeggie for sure. It's a new dishwasher technology, but it's on the blockchain and the wolves are involved in some

way, just to make it smarter. So you do have the blockchain element correct, but I'm afraid that's the only correct element. Corey, please take this home. They're procedurally generating every four bar phrase in a, in a 12 note or an eight note scale. And then they register each one of them as an NFT and claim that that means they now own the copyright to all conceivable melodies. Oh, you are so close. Yeah. Arpeggie is saying, look, we all hate polyphony because you hear polyphony and you're like, there's too many notes at once. How am I going to know what all those notes are? So you feed in chords to Arpeggie and then it plays each note individually and then it's on the blockchain summit. Again, Corey has gotten it very so close. If you can't copyright or attempt

purports to copyright individual notes or chords, it's got to be like pieces of music, right? Like compositions. Yeah. I think Alice has got it, I'm afraid. If your songs aren't earning for you on the blockchain, what are you even doing in the music industry? That's right. I was going to go to Hussein next, I'm afraid, but Alice, pipped you to the post. Yeah, mine was also just like a completely irrelevant, although it could be quite a fun idea. Okay. Do you want to hear it? Okay, well, welcome to the pit zone. If Mark Andreessen is listening to, what if you had a gig economy service where a guy would just show up in like read sections of the gulag. Oh, Arpeggie. That's right. Well, because I realized that,

oh shit, they sort of sound similar, but they don't. And also I don't know how to pronounce. So it's thin as a service. It's a gig economy, but it's a literal gig. So here's the thing. Arpeggie is called Your Place to Make Music, because the one thing that you all missed, but I'm not going to hold this against you, is that it's a kind of crappy, stripped down version of Ableton that's blockchain enabled. So it's a digital audio workstation. Next Clockheads album made exclusively on Arpeggie. When it says it's a free in-browser, so you know it's good if it's an in-browser digital audio workstation, powered by the blockchain, so that whenever you make some kind of sound,

if you're the presumably if the first person to make it, it will be, you will have an on-chain attribution that you made that sound. Sort of an imperative tool. It's quite harsh industrial noise music here. The only way you can make money off of it is if it's a sound no one's ever made before. Well, I'm intrigued here. There's a kind of hellraiser flavor to that. I'm going to evoke sounds from you that no human ears have heard before. Yeah, so many British sex noises. This is like so when I was a baby writer, I would meet these grifters who would give writing advice, and they would say things like, as soon as you write it, you must put it in an envelope and fed access to yourself, but never open it. And that way, when someone steals your precious idea,

you can prove because everyone knows that you can't counterfeit a FedEx envelope. And this is as if they were selling you the FedEx envelopes, right? You just take all of that and add $100 per FedEx envelope price tag to mint the FedEx envelope. I just think this is hopelessly derivative by Andrew St. again, because I actually delivered a paper in London at a conference called Geeky in about 2017 that was entirely in the form of dystopic short fiction. And the first sentence sort of began, you know, the person, the work in the studio, they're making the music and they're doing it on a hover piano, which is how you know it's the future. And it was exactly this, right? You had to like, you had to put all of your music through this. So like, what happens in a world

where you've got perfect copyright enforcement, you've got to put all your new compositions through this machine, and then the computer says yes or no, which is actually something George Harrison legit asked for in the 70s after he was found to have unconsciously infringed my sweet lord. He was just like, what I want is a computer that will do exactly that. Mail that idea to yourself in an envelope because You know, the funny thing is, right, is we all remember the show Silicon Valley. That was the initial purpose of the company that Silicon Valley is about is for, is for musicians to play their songs into this recording thing. And then it would compress

the file and check it to see if it was violating copyright. I feel like this can get grimo right. Turn it in with music. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. We've got to go in the opposite direction. We've got like discipline and punish here. We have to have the hover piano that like gives you a little shock anytime you play something that's copyrighted. You know, I actually consulted on the final season of Silicon Valley. And if only I'd had you guys in the writer's room with me, we could have had the shocking disciplinary technology piano. We could have done. Well, what this has made me think of is a friend of mine who is talking to me about animal crossing. And she was saying that in animal crossing I've never played it. There's a dynamic where you

can... Well, I'm sure you haven't played it, Milo. Yeah. This game I was just hearing about animal crossing that you play. Cause I'm a red blooded man. I've never, I don't even know what an animal crossing is. But she was saying you can compose a theme tune for your animal crossing island. She was saying that you can compose a theme tune. She was saying that. Yeah. And what she said to me was the mechanic kind of sucks though, because they only give you 12 notes. And I was like, well, I hate to break this to you. Where's the J? We're going to invent the 13th note. That's the new startup. So that's the brown note. Yeah. So basically, right? So when we say sounds, what we mean is like

tracks or snippets. And it's been invested in not just by Andreessen Horowitz, but by Steve Aoki, the disco fries and other various... The disco fries. American style EDM. Is that one of the things they tried to rename French fries after 9-11? It was actually, it was in the backlash, the disco backlash. So how does it work? This is from their FAQs. Cause again, the hint is, if you're looking for a startup to say something stupid, look at what cues they think are FA. This would not be my FAQ. My cue that I would A them is, does it work? Oh, I'm sure it does. Well, these things, I'm sure they work technically. It's just, with blockchain companies, there's always this massive set of social assumptions about how this

will then integrate with wider society that they just never really think through. But, so they say, how does it work? Over the years, music has become increasingly single player. Arpeggio's goal is to... I'm sorry, what? We want musical ver dance. Let's go. What if multiple people were making, doing music at the same time? That'd be interesting. Why don't we do that? We've invented the orchestra. Anyway, single player music. Let's go. Arpeggio's goal is to automate the trust in digital collaboration so artists can be more connected than ever. And again, the idea of doing this is with some kind of an ownership claim on

any melody you could possibly make, so that it's just more transactional, which all of these weird crypto people seems to think is the same thing as more connected and trusting. Yeah. Cause I think there would have been so much more trust actually, Corey, when we were writing this book together, right? Cause that was really one of the big challenges, you know, we're working on this, you know, we're writing in each other's sentences. If only that had been on the blockchain. We needed more tokens is what she's saying, right? If every time I fixed a typo, I got a little cookie that fell out of my browser and into my wallet. I just would have trusted that a lot more. And the people who stole all the things

in my wallets would have gotten all those cookies and think of all the good they could have done. I'm just, I'm just intrigued by the idea that copyright is about trust here. That's, that's interesting to me. But I'm intrigued by the idea that this is about copyright, right? Because like, I'll tell you the next paragraph is when they go into it. They say, arpeggio allows musicians to share their music for reuse and attribution when their sound is used. In the traditional music industry, i.e. the one that doesn't involve an append only database for squares, whether they're all doing like big band music, you can append, you can append or take away from databases in the traditional music industry.

Compliantly using someone else's song or sound requires payment and legal clearance, but with arpeggio, any sound you hear is yours to create with. Now, I just like, it goes back to one of these things where a lot of the NFT people start with a, they look at the traditional music industry, for example, and they'll say, wow, this sucks. But then their answer is just more transactions, which seems odd. Yeah. I mean, it's bizarre world creative commons, right? It's like, it's creative commons, except that it just sets up these constant token flows every time you play a note. And so like, you have to think to yourself, like, you know, I was in this solo and I was going to do two bars

of that song. I like, but I figured that the price would be a little too high. I'm only going to do one bar. So to be, to be clear, it's more like songs and snippets. So, but it means if you want to remix someone else's song or use a snippet in your song, then you can, you can pay them. But the Corey, what you bring up is probably like, not far from the truth, because what if you just make a song on chain that's mostly similar to someone else's with prior attribution? You may now have to pay them for the privilege using again, whatever fake currency that they invent, and probably becomes wildly speculative. Yeah, like the British pound, for example. Yeah. Oh, God, you got it. I wouldn't even want to touch that shitcoin. So,

I mean, they have to recall all of those coins so that they could put Charles's face on them. No wonder there's a currency crisis. So they call this the, we'll move off the arpeggio in a moment, but they call this the audio relationship protocol, or ARP, if you get what they did there. When a song is made with arpeggio, the song is registered back into the protocol with full audio and authorship information, which includes the creator of the song, and also all references to the sounds the song used, creating news connections between the song authors and sample contributors of that song, sample contributors to those songs, et cetera. So imagine if we could just perfectly attribute everything and separate it all with a transaction for the benefit of the

listener, both Rebecca and Corey are shaking their heads. They're just like making music, like it just makes it sound really boring. Like that's kind of, the secret ingredient of pop music, of all music, is theft. And you want to take that away, that's all away from artists? What they want to take away is the joy, right? Like if I've ever written a song with someone, I've done it literally once, right? But it's like super fun and it's collaborative. You're trying different things out, you're playing, well, this is how we were doing it. Like how joyless would it be to be like, well, I did that bit, let's register that, and then you put that in. Let's just stop for a second, record all the paperwork. It seems like another example of just like crypto

people who just have no idea how to exist in normal society. So they're sort of like, how they kind of interpret the way that people were, even stuff like ARP or, there's just the line about using digital trust and connecting musicians to each other using the blockchain. And it's just kind of like, do you know people in real life? Do you have friends who aren't part of the crypto community? And I can imagine a lot of cases based on my very limited interactions of crypto people that perhaps they don't. All of these people's favorite band is Imagine Dragons. And ironically, that's the only music you could create using this platform. Can I recommend some actual good things for people who want to understand how this stuff

really does work? So the first is a graphic novel by James Boyle and Jessica Jenkins, Jennifer Jenkins, who run the Duke Center for the Public Domain. That's a history of music and copyright called Theft, A History of Music. Alice, you don't know how right you are. Like, it is an amazing law primer on the history of music and copyright. It's absolutely fantastic. There's a short story by Spider Robinson that won the Hugo Award called Melancholy Elephants. That's basically Paul McCartney's widow begging a senator not to extend copyright, because she realizes that all the melodies now exist. And if we just keep extending copyright, then we'll be able to make them again. Those are both like two actual good resources for

people who want to understand why this is dumb. Yeah, and that story's available freely online. And that's actually that was the inspo for my dystopic short fiction. And Spider needs your help. His finances are on the rock. So if you, he's got a Patreon. The story sounds really interesting. I'm going to read it like after we finish the recording. But I was thinking about this while we were talking, just like the idea of like making something. And just like the process of making things and anyone who's like sort of, I'm sure like, you know, from what I've read of like the article and also what I will read of the book, you sort of cover this where the process of actually like making something often does involve

like imitation repetition and like the way we get new stuff is by trying to learn how like the old stuff is sort of made and, you know, and so on. And it sort of feels like these technologies and these kind of like, especially these very obtuse technologies that reduce everything to transactional measures are also sort of ignore just like the actual how the creative process actually works. Because again, like in, you know, for people, like for people in this room, and I guess like most of the listeners as well, it's fairly obvious, like blockchain is not a creative enterprise in spite of how much they would like to present themselves as being like, you know, the creative element of, you know, of the internet, like it clearly isn't. And like,

so what you end up, and I don't know, like to me, every time they kind of come up with like, they're fucking like good projects or like, you know, interesting projects and stuff that they spam your Twitter feed with, it all just feels as if like, you're trying to present yourself as being cookie and creative, but you're just like very bad salespeople. Yeah, yeah, I mean, and a third resource that you just that that you just made me recall, Jonathan Lethem wrote this incredible essay in Harper's called the ecstasy of influence that is also open access and spoiler alert after this incredibly well argued essay about how everything that you do is made of the things that you love. He reveals that every sentence

in the essay comes from someone else's essay. And it's very, very good. Eventually, podcasting will reach a point where all of the riffs have been done. Yeah, what if an Italian guy was ex-nationality will have gone through all of it? Yeah, we'll have done single Trump and everything. I reach my drops and I find that all of the buttons have been removed. I mean, I can certainly imagine like sometime in the near future at AI, like some company will try to like create an AI system where it'll be like, what if you could combine your favorite hosts from your different favorite different podcasts and put them together and it sounds

seamless? In which case, we'll have all sort of like have Riley, Nick Mullen, Justin Rosniak was on every episode of this show. Mark Marin and like that woman who does call her daddy. Yeah, we've been replaced by the voice of James O. Jones. That's now like AI. So, I want to move on to talking about this, talking about the book, but I want to do that via another Andreessen Horowitz thing, which I think is very interesting, because Andreessen, I mean, Andreessen Horowitz is like... Everything you do is made of what you love, and what you love is Andreessen Horowitz pictures. Absolutely true. Andreessen Horowitz pictures in books written by Tory MPs.

Every time you bring them up, I'm thinking about the Alex Ryder series. Not a lot of people read the Andreessen Horowitz stuff, but everyone who does starts a podcast. So, Andreessen Horowitz has looked at one of the problems of copyright attribution in NFTs, right? And they have come up with a new... I know this one. So, you know about the Can't Be Evil license, Corey and Rebecca. You're doing again the same gesture of head in hands every time I talk about something Andreessen Horowitz does. Rebecca and Corey have actually choreographed this.

No, this is a special NFT despair. We've been on the road for like a week, 10 days now, and done a bunch of events, and a bunch of interviews, and NFTs come out, and we were really polite about it at the start, and now it's just the despair collapse. I mean, as I'm at pains to note, 98% of all conversations involving blockchain are non-consensual. That's very true. So, then this is... But this is just, I think, a weigh-in, right? Because what they've done is they've tried to take a Creative Commons license and then reinterpret it for a blockchain. And the reason I think this is interesting is because, once again, they're trying to take

a social problem. That's the problem that we're going to be exploring, the social problem of copyright, and solve it with a bunch of technical methods of issuing and exchanging attributions and licensed uses of things more exactly. Sexy. And I think that what makes that interesting to me, right, is they say, okay, this is what they say on their pitch, is many people buy NFTs to own an avatar, an artwork, or any number of other creative outputs. But the reality is, they usually can't be sure of what they're getting, as it's typically stored off-chain.

And so, you may think that you've bought... You may think that you've purchased an Ape. An Exclusion Ape. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I thought this Ape was doing the pussy-eating gesture, but actually, it's doing the masturbating gesture. But then you realize, wait a minute, I can't make a cartoon where my board Ape stars in it, which is such a fucking great idea, because I don't have the necessary copyright protections. And Andreessen Horowitz said, what if we had more copyright? What if our decentralized,

weird, anarcho-capitalist vision of the internet had more copyright? It's only decentralized in the form of the boring authorities, the cool authorities like Andreessen Horowitz, they don't count. So I guess I want to get into this conversation about copyright is just to talk about, what is copyright as a kind of social construct, more than just a legal thing? First, I want to say is that, yeah, we definitely talk a bit about copyright when we talk about how these big businesses have captured creative labor markets, but we talk about a whole bunch of different legal structures as well. But in terms of copyright, it gets sold to us as being

about two things. The first thing is, we need copyright in order to incentivize investments in knowledge and culture. We want to get the stuff made, and we want to ensure that it's available ongoing. And no one can argue with that. And if you don't have just the fact that the first copy you make of a thing like a book, it can be really, really expensive because someone's got to sit down for a couple of years and write it, and then you've got the editors, and you've got all of this labor, and it's expensive. But the second copy can be virtually free, especially if we're talking about even a physical book might be $3 or $4 to print, but an e-book is an infinitesimal fractional of a cent, even to distribute it as well.

So you need some kind of thing in order to stop people from just freeriding on those investments. So all of that makes a lot of sense. But the other explanation we're given is a really interesting one. This is where the social stuff comes in, I think, is because we're also told that copyright is about recognizing and rewarding creators. So it's different to patents. They didn't talk about that. They only talk about incentives when it comes to patents. But copyright is special. It's about this other thing as well. But we're being sold a bill of goods here because while it's about, even if it is about incentives and rewards, what we see is copyright structures that see businesses taking not just the minimum necessary to incentivize their investments

and then kindly leaving the creators with their recognition and rewards, they take everything they can get. To the point that a standard form Hollywood contract takes rights throughout the universe at large. So even if a lucrative extraterrestrial market does emerge, it's still not going to be the creators who get rich. People want to spend a confidential to on Mars. And so this is what's happening. Like a lot of the time in the copyright discourse, something that really frustrates us is the lobbyists come out like, we need more creators. No, we need more copyright because do you hate creators? That's why you don't want more copyright. But it's bullshit, right? Because it's like giving more copyright is like giving a school.

Your kids being shaken down the school gate for their lunch money, right? Do you solve that by giving them more lunch money? No. I mean, this doesn't really happen, I don't think in Australia. We didn't have lunch money in the same way. I think you send armed guards with them. What's the normal solution? The normal solution, speaking as the father of an American high school student, is that's right. It involves a handgun. And to further that little analogy, if the bullies came out and said, God, will no one think of the plight of the starving school children, we really need to give them more lunch money. It'd be pretty transparent that this is not what they're talking about. The thing about copyright is it's not well understood. It's not well understood

by creators. It's not well understood by their audiences. It's also not well understood by people who work in the industry. In fact, this morning, I got an email from a guy who's a recovering screenwriter with some accomplishments who wrote a novel and he says it's a great novel, but it's set in a Disney theme park and he paid a lawyer for a legal opinion about whether or not it was fine. And the lawyer said it was fine because it was fair use, but he needs to get an insurer to insure it so that he can get a publisher. And I'm reading all this. I'm like, this is not even wrong. It's not fair use to set a story in a Disney theme park because it's not a copyright issue to set a story in a Disney theme park.

Any more than mentioning that your character is aided a KFC is a copyright violation. Maybe there's this very dim kind of trademark question that you could dispense with, but anyway, this guy paid 10 grand to a lawyer to give him an opinion because he correctly assumed that publishers and insurers would not want to publish the book because they were worried about it, even though this has no point of contact with the actual laws it's written, or even the jurisprudence. It's literally just a bunch of made up folk beliefs, which is an important part of how copyright works is it's got this penumbra of incorrect assumptions, which is why you go to YouTube videos and underneath it says,

no copyright, which I think they think means I am not asserting a copyright and provided I don't assert a copyright. I'm okay. And you saw this back to fucking crypto. You saw this with a Jodorowsky Dune book where those people were like, we must buy the Jodorowsky Dune book in order to have the rights to make a movie from it. And then a whole bunch of other people were like, even if you buy the Jodorowsky Dune book, you can't make a movie from it without their permission. And the actual truth is like way more interesting, which is that there are a whole bunch of limitations to copyright that lets you adapt whole creative works with all of their plot elements, their characters and their dialogue without permission, like The Wind Done Gone, which is a book that

tells the story of Gone with the Wind from the perspective of enslaved Africans, which the Margaret Mitchell estate suit over, and which the Supreme Court said, no, even though it includes dialogue, all the set and setting and all the characters and the plot, it's still fair. And so they're all wrong. It seems like it's more of use as a sort of an intimidation tactic, as far as anything else. This idea that Disney can send in infinity lawyers to make your life hell while you try and get your transformative work published. Well, I mean, Disney has been doing this over and over. The Disney must pay campaign that Corey's been really involved with around getting Alan Dean Foster paid. I don't know if you're familiar with that one, but this is

this wild legal theory that they came up with. They acquired Lucasfilm and all of these other movie studios. And as part of that, they got the rights to a bunch of novelizations of key sci-fi properties like Alien, Star Wars, whatever. And then they stopped paying the authors. And then the authors were asking for their money and Disney comes back and is like, well, we've acquired the rights to your works, but not the liabilities, not the responsibilities. Sorry, sorry, you're confused about that, but we didn't have to pay you anymore. We acquired the right to your house, but not the liability to pay you for it. It's a remarkable thing. The first half of this book is we try to make it lighthearted, but somewhat eye-watering dissection after dissection of how

a bunch of different scams work. It's in the template of some of the things you guys do when you pick apart Baroque financial scams and so on. And a lot of the times, when you get to the very root of it, how is it that they're able to do that specific fuckery? What is the generally accepted accounting practice basis for, for example, assessing a breakage fee on royalties derived from digital sales, where a breakage fee is the percentage deducted from your royalties to account for the shellac records broken between the warehouse and the old-timey record store in the horse-drawn carriage? How are they taking breakage out of your MP3s? And the GAAP basis for that is, fuck you, that's why. And so much of the time, fuck you, that's why is the basis for

all of these. And we try to get into some of the, in the second half of the book, we try to get into solutions that address, fuck you, that's why. And I know every time I call it a solution, I'm worried if Danny is going to show up and slap me. But the other day, he was talking about the final solution. In the last chapter, there's this, we offer the final solution. I was like, oh shit, and it's Russia's shana too. That's not good. And then he sat it on the third way. And I was like, can we offer a third way? It was just like, everything is bad. Then he started pointing it something up in the corner of the room. It was a whole lot. Very unfortunate. Well, you see the problem with those times is that they're all copyrighted.

Sorry. Some people in Argentina. So the second half of the book is like, it's devoted to like explaining how how systemic interventions could address this. Never individual ones. We actually had an editor say, oh, I can't publish this because none of the solutions are individually really oriented. They're all, they're all systemic. Like, I just want to know how, how I should personally recycle so that climate change ends. And, and, you know, we had some bad news from, but like, one of them, so here's a fuckery in a solution Stalin. If you have a royalty arrangement with your publisher or studio label, you generally have

the right to audit your royalty statements. And when you do, like either out of your own pocket or through your professional association, you'll often find discrepancies. We cited some research of a firm that does this for record labels and been doing it for decades. They found they've done tens of thousands of audits. And in all of those, this is going to baffle you, but in all of them, except one, the error was in the favor of the label and not the musician. And I know this is like some incredibly localized probability storm resulted in this incredibly unlikely thing. But, but, um, it's weird how they got the same auditors as wirecard and Green Sill. You go to the room where they do the royalties at Warner Brothers and they're just

shaving a poodle. This was, this was actually the audit firm who had found in favor of the artist. So like they, they, they were, they seemed to be like actual decent, decent people. It's just the record labels own internal audits were being conducted by Lex Green Sill. Three Lex Green Sills in a trench coat. So, so, um, so when you find the errors and we'd like talk to one source who had a six figure error in their favor, right? When you find them and you say, you owe me this money, they're like, no, you're wrong. And you're going to have to sue us. And of course that's very expensive. But then because they're good natured slobs, they say, I tell you what, just to make things square between us, we will pay you, but you got to sign a nondisclosure

agreement. We don't want everyone to get the wrong idea here, which means that if you find six figures, you can't tell the other people whose money they've stolen. Hey, there's some money buried over there with your name on it. Go dig it up. Now, all of these contracts because of monopoly are consummated in California, New York and Washington state and contract is a creature of state law. And so if we just amended state law with short bills that said as a matter of public policy, uh, anti, uh, nondisclosure is not enforceable when it relates to audits that reveal material errors, uh, in royalty statements, which is literally like a one paragraph bill. You pass it in three states, suddenly millions of dollars fall out of this machine and directly

onto artists of all kinds all around the world, more money than 40 years of copyright term extensions, which these same artists groups have fought and fought for and spilled so much blood and treasure for, they could instead direct their attention to things that make material improvements instead of existing entirely in the realm of ideas, which is to say copyright term extension, which is just the right to be angry at people for doing things they were going to do anyway, as opposed to the right to have more groceries to feed your family. And while we're doing that as well, there's some other things we could throw in there because like these contracts also like prohibit you like really routinely prohibit you from using the same

auditor that's already auditing that firm. Like, you know, the person who knows where the bodies are buried, right? And also stops them from like looking at some of the information, which is where the bodies are buried. You can investigate everything about the murder scene, except the body, the weapon. You can investigate what's in the kitchen cupboard. Maybe that's got a clue for you into the detective who's searching my house. Like, could you just do me one favor, which is don't dig up that corner of the garden. That would be that would be a real solid dig dig away the rest of it. What I'd love to see though is like if if these bills managed to like get to a sort of like state state assemblies instead, it's just like, what kinds of justifications

centrist Democrats and Republicans would come up with proposing them. We can't we can't ask pertinent questions. That would scare away investment. Exactly. I've actually I've just thought of an example of MP3 breakage. Okay. Well, I wish to listen to a rendition of of Norm on call by Lincoln, Lincoln Park and JC. Well, I found myself on on Lamwa and I found it perfectly comely looking copy of this here pop record. And it was labeled Lincoln Park and I'm on car.exe. Now, to my surprise, I found my computer had become quite unusable. I need to provide a key for Gen Z to understand that joke. I gotta say, I miss the other fictional kernel that my

dad told me. But but so bring it to JGA cast of being sued by KFC for copyright. Bring it back in a little bit, right? Rebecca, you were talking about some of the some of the other things that could be done by any kind of reasonable society. Yeah, also transparency rights, like, you know, we started talking about that. That's a big one. And we're seeing in Europe with the digital single market directive. They there was some really dumb shit in that. But there was also some good stuff. And that includes transparency rights. So all member states have got to give artists and performers new transparency rights over how their works are being used, what revenues are coming in and how

they get paid. But they've also got, you know, new rights to fair and proportionate remuneration for their work, which could serve as some kind of minimum wage for for creative labor, if implemented well, and also use it or lose it rights. So if you've assigned your copyright, and the, you know, as is nearly always the case, the rights holder, you've assigned it to loser's interest after a short period, and it's no longer available, then you can get those rights back and be able to exploit it. So these are ways that we can actually, actually focus on those things that copyright, we're told copyright is about, that is about, if we do revert rights to authors in that kind of circumstance, yes, we help reward them like, because they've got

new ways of getting paid, but also we're facilitating access to knowledge and culture. So these are both the things that it's supposed to be about. Because it seems right, like this, this thing, I mean, we talked actually, like initially, the question was about copyright, but we've talked touched on so many of these different kinds of choke points from like the extreme expense of bringing a claim in the legal system, the domination of, say, audits and information by these giant firms and so on and so on. But I think the thing, the interesting thing about copyright and the reason I ask about it specifically, and the reason I'm interested in it, is that so many of the things that allow

it to be so easily abused are its technical elements and the way it is socially perceived. The way that it is socially perceived, as you said, Cory, we're giving the example of the guy who is terrified that Disney's going to jam lawyers up his ass because he like mentions the theme park in his, in his novel, right? That's how it's socially perceived is this terrifying thing. What is this, one man, one lawyer? But also, I can't gape. At the same time, at the same time, how if you just, because it is designed to be sort of so technical and finicky and all this stuff, it is something that actually is, again, among many other solutions, sort of a problem that can be solved with these kinds of, again, as you say,

technical legal changes combined, of course, with things like collective action, which would be required to push for them anyway, right? Yeah. I mean, I want to bring a kind of leftist perspective here. On this show? No, I don't know. And so there's this, you know, there's this like ideological story about copyright that exists totally in the realm of ideas about, you know, oh, it's an exclusive right and it's yours and it's your patrimony and you can hand it down and all of this other stuff. And whenever that the industrial interests that exploit creative laborers are talking about copyright,

they lean really hard into this stuff, right? They're like, yeah, we need more copyright. Just like as a kind of axiom, because the more copyright you have, the more protection you will have for your integrity. Stuff someone from starting garbage future or whatever. Yeah, exactly, right. And just, and you know, all of this stuff that's supposed to help you. But then when copyright contours are proposed, that produce material effects in the world, that change the distributional outcomes of the revenues derived from creative labor, suddenly the studios and the labels and the publishers change sides. It's no longer about ideology. It becomes they just they sort of scramble for and often don't even try very hard

to have an explanation for why it is that something that that would protect your integrity or would protect your living or what have you shouldn't be shouldn't be allowed. So in the 1976 Copyright Act, they included in the US, they included a thing called a termination right, which is the right after 30 years, 35 years to say, I don't care what my contract said, I'm going to like file some paperwork with the copyright office and get my copyright back. And so like a lot of creators that started their careers don't have a lot of negotiating power. They signed bad deals 35 years later for that tiny minority of creators whose works are very commercially viable. A termination right is the right to to bring it back and then resell it to someone else on

better terms. Stephen King terminated his first half dozen novels and Dean Coots did and the women who wrote the babysitter's clubs of course as well. Yeah, the women who wrote the babysitter's club, the women who wrote Sweet Valley High terminated all of those. So, you know, they those are books that are still commercially viable. They didn't get a great deal on them when they first did them and now they've got them. And, you know, like the industry hates termination rights. Every time they're proposed, you know, when it came up in Canada and Brian Adams was out there stumping for it, the Canadian industry was just like, oh, this is this is, you know, some kind of weird communism. Like, don't you know about the sanctity of contract? Why should you be able to break a

contract of like squatting on this like this deal that we made with someone who's like impoverished at the time, you know. And the thing is the story that if I give you more years of copyright or if I give you more scope of copyright or if I create more statutory damages or lower evidentiary burdens, the story that that will make you the creator rich is missing a middle piece. I know it's hacky to reference the magic underpants gnomes, but like it's missing. It's step two, right? Like step one, more copyright, step three, profit. What's the thing that happens in the middle? And when you produce like a thing that has a causal relationship between material improvements in artists' lives and a policy, they're like, we just can't do that, right? All we can do is the

nonsensical ideological thing, not the materially important causal thing. And they do say it out loud sometimes. Like, I found the transcripts from the, there's sort of like this real cozy kind of closed room arrangements where they were hammering out the deal around termination rights. The original idea was it would be after 25 years and it would be automatic. And the white men in suits who got into this room smoking cigars, nearly all representing the big content industries. And then there was sort of this one guy who was representing the author's guild. And so, you know, despite all this rhetoric where they were going on, you know, outside about the importance

of protecting, you know, artists' rights, in the room, they're just like, oh, no absolute, like, freedom of contract. You can't possibly interfere with freedom of contract. And the author's guild guy, Owen Cart, pointed out that, well, actually at this exact moment that you're saying this, you're having this big fight with the booksellers and you want to mandate that they sell your books for a certain price and you're lobbying really hard for that. And he said the most amazing thing. He's just like, each of us will object to certain interferences and support other interferences, depending on whether we're the owner of the ox who was gored or whether we want to go someone else's ox. And that's exactly what's going on here. Sometimes you're the ox,

sometimes you're the guy doing the goreing. And you know, I think this is... Herman goreing? So, whatever, that's also copyrighted. But that's why... You got another copywriter from Argentina. Another one. And that's one of the reasons, right, where all the way at the beginning, why I wanted to talk about some of that crypto NFT stuff, because ultimately, right, that philosophy of we just need more copyright, more transactions, and that is like transparently moronic to anyone with half a brain, right? That's ultimately the same approach that these large companies take, right,

which is we just need more. And the more you have, the freer you'll be somehow. And the freer the markets, the freer the people. I want to talk a little bit about what happens when these companies do get lots of copyrights. And music is a great example, right? So, you've got these three record labels that now control almost 70% of the global recorded music industry, right? They own three music publishers that control almost 60% of the global recorded music, like songwrites. Now, we don't need these companies in the same way that we're used to, right? Because with the advent of digital technologies in the internet,

we've got so many different options. And the fact of that has meant that the contracts that are offered these days are actually quite a lot better. And they got these rights not just from investing in records, but also through buying up lots of other companies, often at higher sale rates during that sort of Napster War crisis. But when they've got these rights, which, you know, they last for almost a century, they use those to control the future of the industry. So while we don't need these organizations in the same way, or musicians don't need them in the same way that they used to, they get stuck with these organizations shaping the future of music in ways that benefit them and not everybody else. And so, you know, lots of us rail against

the streaming industry, because we understand that that doesn't pay particularly well. One of the reasons for that is that it was shaped by the three major record labels in order to suit them best, right? And the incentives are completely bogged, particularly at the time that they were doing this. They had everything arranged so that under the contracts, so first of all, they have to pay out remarkably little to their artists, especially on these older contracts. So because of the way the economics of the industry have changed, like we don't have to be making these really expensive shellac records and everything, royalty rates have been able to creep right up. So it's not uncommon now to get like a 25%

royalty, but a lot of the backlist is being paid out on 4%, 6%, 10% royalties. And of that, nothing is actually getting paid out except on a balance sheet, right? There's just some money being moved around on a spreadsheet because of this scam called recruitment. So with record deals, not only do you maybe have a low royalty rate, but nearly all the costs of making the record get totted up to you, right? And so say it's cost $150,000 to make your record, to pay the four bandmates for the year or so that they take off to write and record it, for some cost of touring, all of the cost of recording, right? It's going to take about $3 million in revenues, right, before they've paid off that notional debt that's been totted up to them and they ever

actually get anything. And the people we spoke to said maybe 5% of bands ever actually earned that out. And meanwhile, there are coffers of gold going to the recording agencies. So it's sort of scam upon scam upon scam. And then you've got these other people who are sort of protecting their center cures in terms of where the streaming money is going. You've got in each country, you might have one or more collecting society, and they each maintain their own creaky database about which song needs to be, the recording needs to be paid to who and the song revenues need to be paid to who, which is enormously expensive. And there's massive amounts of money being sucked up here in order to protect those organizations.

And then meanwhile, in those contracts that when Sony and Universal and Warner set up this streaming system, they had this unattributable money hustle where even though they had to pay out only the tiniest amount to artists anyway, they like to make it sure they would never have to pay anything. And so they structured the deals so that they would maximize what's called unattributable revenue, which you know, maybe you got in advance and you made it really, really. The hearing the phrase unattributable revenue has given me goose bumps. What if we put it on the blockchain? It rains pennies from heaven.

Please go on. So you've got this unattributable money hustle that they had where they would and record labels have done this for absolute decades, but they really started taking the piss with streaming. So the contract said, well, if there's revenue that comes in, but it's not attributable to any use of any particular record, then it goes into this black box and the label just gets to keep it. They don't have to pay it out to anyone. And then what they would do then is when as a condition of letting these companies stream their works when they were starting out, they were just like, all right, so we're going to

charge you an enormous advance that you're not possibly going to earn out, right? And then like a bit of a lower royalty rate, you know, nudge, nudge, do you like that deal streaming company? And this way we don't actually have to share any of the bus. So to make that clear, it's like a millionth of a cent to stream, but you owe us a million dollars a month, which means that all the streams that you play add up to only a few thousand dollars. And then the rest of that money comes in as unattributable. And so again, I think I figured it out. It's that all of these companies are run by Wahabists who are trying to eliminate all music. I thought you were going to say all usery, but yes, all

music too. Again, it was transparency that like fixed this because there was a, everyone sort of suspected it was going on, but you know, commercial and confidence, you can't talk about what's actually what's actually happening. What's like documentation and confidentiality basically is similar. And then Verge got hold of a leaked contract between Sony and Spotify in about 2007 and showed what was going on. And there were like all kinds of unattributable revenues that were suddenly happened to be these big parts of the contract. And after, again, after this came out, then musicians were able to mobilize against the enemy and like, and do something about it. And like the majors did reluctantly change the practices around that. But it's just scam after

scam after scam. Record companies coming in like, listen, buddy, we own everything from the big bumper to Cliff Richard. And you want to play our music, you're going to do it our way. It's Dr. Patient Confidentiality. The doctor is Harold Shipman. So you're suggesting that if you tried to call the cops on Harold Shipman, they'd send you to jail for breaching Dr. Patient Confidentiality. And unattributable pensioners. We don't know where they came from. We don't know where they went. You know, it's neither here nor there, but there was a big spread in one of the news sites today about all the states that exempt priests from mandatory reporting. And then what that means is that it is actually a breach of their duty of

confidentiality that when Kid Fiddler confesses and then they turn them into the police, that actually is against the rules. Oh, fantastic. This also harks back to the episode that we did with Dan Beckner about Spotify back in the day, friend of the show, where we also unearthed that the record labels own the streaming services. But they did. They sold off most of those holdings, but yeah. The Universal still got theirs, which is a huge, huge money spinner. And they refused like for years and years and years to say whether they were actually going to share the proceeds of that, because that's unattributable, right? With their artists. I think they were really hoping the issue would go away. It didn't go away. But actually, thanks to Taylor Swift,

we actually, Taylor Swift did a good thing for creators. The two others, Warner and Sony, again, after years, they reluctantly announced that they would share it and they were doing it in a dumb way. So Warner said, okay, we'll share it, but it's all going to get offset against your recruitment debts, right? Those imaginary amounts. It's all going on your permanent record. And so no one really... Just for the violent femmes. It's only them where it goes down on their permanent record. And Sony paid it out, didn't offset it against the illusory debts, but they paid it out at really low rates. And Universal's like, we're not going to say. But then when Taylor Swift signed to them, and she's actually got some bargaining power,

as part of that deal, apparently, she got them to also agree that they would pay it out on a non-recupert basis. So we don't know the royalties yet, but at least people are going to get some money in their pocket. So one of the weird conflicts of the studios being shareholders in pre-IPO Spotify is that the less money they took out of the firm in the form of royalties, the greater its profits looked on its balance sheet when it went IPO. And the more those shares popped that they were holding. And so it's a weird kind of insider trading that they were doing, where they could control the cost basis of a firm that they were a shareholder in, and they could artificially improve it by agreeing to take less money so that then

they could take money out of suckers who poured into the stock when it went public. But then this also drove down the prices that other people could negotiate because they had sort of most favored nation clauses as well. So when the independents who had either no equity or a very tiny amount of equity in this, and when they went back to the negotiating table to do their own royalties, they found there was a new lower ceiling because the majors had agreed to a lower price for theirs in order to drive up their shareholdings, no one else got lower rates too, but didn't have that offset. I mean, rising tide lifted all boats.

What we're suggesting more or less is that a butterfly sort of cooks the books in the Amazon, and then no, no bands in Europe can have dinner. Oh, no, Amazon's a completely different story. We could spend another half hour on them. This is a guy that every big company is basically, when you get down to it, when you strip away all the layers of the onion at the core of it, there are some guys shaving a poodle. You know, you said that in the last week's episode, and then I heard someone else talking about it. It wasn't a poodle. Wasn't it a poodle?

It was like a Pomeranian. Oh, was it? These details matter. Why are you shaving a Pomeranian would take much less time. It's a much smaller dog. You know, your overhead's a lower. But it's sort of funnier, though, as well. Like, you have just like a little hand raiser. That's right.

What I'm learning from this is that it's just, it's theft at both ends of the music industry, except it's the artist doing the cool kind of theft where you sample stuff, and then it's, you know, music producers and music companies doing the bad kind of theft where you steal from the artist. When we do it, it's the progress of the useful arts. When you do it, it's piracy. Exactly. I mean, that's always been in that mix. I mean, what transformative use is provided by, you know, Warner or Universal or whatever?

Well, they do a lot of reboots. Yeah. And we all thank them for that. Can we talk about Amazon? Sure. We've got time. Because I know, it's my first time back in the States for a while. For some reason, I haven't been traveling much from Melbourne, Australia, for the last couple of years. But I was really shocked to be back in New York the other week and see just like every package

being delivered now has got prime tape on it. And probably, you know, you're seeing the same thing in a lot of places. But this is like a really good way of understanding what's going on, because the Amazon Play is what all of these companies are doing, right? And they talk about it. They love to boast about their flywheel. Do you want to talk about the flywheel? Yeah, sure. They've got this idea that, you know, we are able to bring in a bunch of suppliers and negotiate favorable terms and then customers pour in to buy the things from those suppliers. That incentivizes suppliers to come in and to offer us even more favorable turns and so on. They call it, you know, a virtuous cycle. But it's just as easily viewed as a vicious cycle,

of course, because another way of putting it is we suppress wages of our suppliers and we suppress payouts of our suppliers. We use those artificially low prices, initially, that were subsidized from our shareholders, who allowed us to take a loss for many years, and then subsequently by forcing suppliers into unfavorable terms that are ultimately unsustainable. That also excludes new market entrants, because who the hell can afford to sell these products at lower than cost, because they don't have the street providing them with the money to subsidize it. So we then can acquire a monopoly. We can mobilize that monopoly to habituate our customers to using our service, to bind our service in with other things they do,

like where they buy their groceries, to offer them primes so that they're $150 in the hole at the start of every year, and they can only recoup that by only ordering from Amazon instead of shopping around. And then we can use the fact that those customers aren't and can't leave our silo to extract even better pricing from our suppliers. On the audiobook side, on the publishing side, that's pretty terrible. On the hard good side, it's even worse, because one of the things Amazon then does is it's like, oh, hey, we figured out which of these products is selling really well. So we, and we also, because you use fulfillment by Amazon, because that's the only way to get front page listing on an Amazon search, we get the way bills from your manufacturer. So we know

who makes your product, and now they're making it for us instead of you, and we're selling that product now, and you can go pound sand. With creators, it's a similar kind of vicious cycle. It has some slightly different characteristics, and it has some specific technical wrinkles that are relevant to Trash Future. Does that mean that Amazon is going to start using AI to generate the erotic pamphlets that seem to comprise 90% of the Kindle marketplace? Well, I mean, there's no good reason they shouldn't, right? I think I heard that they already were. You can buy on Amazon.com. Yeah, I mean, so basically, Amazon is inviting you to play a game of Monopoly. They already have hotels on every property, and you are the shoe.

That's right. Okay, fantastic. So with tech, there's these technological wrinkles, right? So you can use DRM on digital products that you sell from Amazon, irrespective of which supplier they come from. So audiobooks is the one where it's mandatory. They have Audible, Audible's 90% of the market. They won't let you sell on Audible unless you put their DRM on it. And thanks to Section 12.1 of the DMCA here in the US, Article 6 of the European Copyright Directive and its implementations in the UK and the EU and other laws around the world, it's against the law to remove the DRM. Even if the rights holder authorizes you to do that, which means that if I as the seller, you know, the person whose copyrighted works are being sold on Amazon, wants to get a better deal,

Amazon has some spectacularly bad deals. There's a scandal called hashtag Audible Gate that involves north of $100 million and wage theft from independent audiobook creators. If I want to get a bigger deal somewhere else and maybe not have my pocket picked, I have to bet that you are willing to jettison your whole Audible collection or maintain two separate silos for your audiobooks if you're going to follow me, right? And so that's not going to happen. And so my audience is now chained forever to Amazon's platform. So Amazon can extract more and more concessions from me and treat me in ways that are really unethical. And I just have to suck it up and take it. Yeah. So that's what all these companies are doing. That was what we

realized was the common factor after we finished looking at all of these different industries. Well, the playbook is clearly, you do everything you can to lock in your customers, right? And then you use that to lock in your suppliers, use the profits to eliminate competition, whether it's by stopping new entrants from coming in or like Amazon did once, spend $200 million in a single month to just wipe out a diaper company, right? Which might seem like an expensive way to corner. Having a big Amazon loitering munition drone, you know, just coming in through the roof. It might seem expensive, right? To like, you know, sell more nappies, but it's like really cheap as a signal to send people like, don't like stay off our turf.

But in that fact, when they saw the Amazon drone turn up, they were shit in their pants. Have I got to use you if you're listening to this? Please carry on. I mean, once you've done all of that, right, then you just get to squeeze and squeeze and squeeze your workers and suppliers until they're getting just a really unsustainable share. At least Al Capone wasn't talking about going to fucking space. At least he was contending to like... Yeah, big sort of like Tommy Gunn, Chicago type. I think you're all missing what shape it would be, which is one of those,

one of those like, you know, 19, late 1920s, early 1930s, boxy cars, you know, that's that has the windows that you crank up and down. I think that's what he would have. You know, I was born in the 70s, and we had windows that cranked up and down. Yeah, I don't know about that. You're children. Even I as a child, I think, has been. I clearly just have been in London of cars. Yeah, you like to expose your sort of little lord form to a right childhood and adolescence,

where you're like... Well, I was carrying around in a litter, there were only curtains. I was in Ibiza in July, and I had to unlock a car for someone, and I just couldn't work how to do it. And I came back and I'm really sorry, I don't know man. And they're just like, you put the key in the lock, and you turn it. That's how they get you. I was like trying to find the bit to beep. That's how they get you. They've locked you into them.

But. So looking for a big car. But we talk, we talk of Amazon, and specifically of Audible. And of Audible is essentially, as you say, right? Realizing that because it has, it benefits from all these network effects, it is largely able to just write terms to people where they can say, do you want to be an author? Well, here's basically the contract to be an author. This quite like, this desirable profession that a lot of people want,

which basically means that we as Amazon can be responsible, largely for like, the increased proletarianization of most authors. And then this weird long tale of books that are written by people who don't really want to be authors, but just, again, use an AI to write relatively similar, short, templatable stories. The dinosaur that was gay, a short story. Or in some cases, I've seen. And talk about a weird long tale.

I saw this as like a pro business tip on LinkedIn at some point, where they were like, how to make money easily using like Amazon, as you mentioned, like the sort of like self publishing service. And they were like, yeah, I signed the contract, I did like all the contracting stuff. And then I subcontracted my writing work to someone via Fiverr. So I got someone else to kind of like, also write this very bad book. Grim.

And most of them are sort of like, nonfiction, business-y books and stuff, right? So it's like fairly simple to write. Most of it is just kind of like, replications of things. Using the word blockchain. Chapter one, by low, chapter two, so high. Yeah, it's like, you know, 10 chapters have been allowed. You know, and then on the 11th one, I'll buy that. Everything they teach you in Harvard Business School.

So this is very much like an established sort of part of the whole like self-publishing ecosystem, which like is sort of marketed as like, here's like a really quick way of making money. And yeah, it is kind of... I'm going to write a 1000 volume series on Amazon that's called What Everything They Don't Teach You at Harvard Business School. It's going to be like chapter one, digging a fox hole. You've never been to Harvard Business School, clearly. Yeah.

So what they were doing with that, you know, one of the reasons you can actually make a little bit of money there is because Amazon changed the rules so that you could get up to 70% of the royalties. But the reason they did that is because you remember that quote from Bezos, who's told the team who was working on the Kindle to act as if you're putting everybody who's making physical books out of a job, right? And what they were trying to do is get revenge against the publishers who were not willing to be kind of, who were trying to resist being shaken down at the time that those ebooks first

came out. And so they're paying what is a relatively generous royalty in order to weaken the traditional publishing industry. But it's not that they're doing it and that's going to be sustained, you know, once everybody is locked in. And we've seen that play out just a few days ago with the Twitch play with Amazon. So Amazon, you know, owns Twitch and Twitch is, you know, Gen Z TV. And some great YouTube stream.

They also like the official dirt. She has like 20 trillion followers. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. So they've got this generous 50-50 split, right? Which is not generous at all. Holy shit, they take half your money. But it turns out that they had a secret deal with their A-listers where it was a 70-30 split.

And then last week, the president of Twitch was like, oh, my conscience has got the best of me. I finally have to admit that we're secretly paying, you know, the really popular people 70%. And to be fair to everyone, we're cutting their wages to a 50-50 split. It's better, what are you complaining about? And, you know, he kind of anticipates this reaction. She was like, you might be asking yourself, why don't we just pay them all? And it's just not sustainable. Our bandwidth bills are too high, except they buy their bandwidth from Amazon.

Me is charging me too much money. Amazon is charging Amazon so much money to run its business via Amazon that it can't afford to pay its labor force. Oh my God, this is Russian style of business. I briefly worked for a tutoring company in Moscow, where I was like taking them to task about the rates they were paying tutors versus the rates they were paying the clients. Which like the rates for tutors were okay, but the fact they were charging the clients so much meant that the clients were being completely insane about like what they expected from you in terms of their kids.

And I was like, this is this is deranged. Like you have like a no overhead business. Like you have a small office and then you have three guys who work there and they just go, you go teach that kid. Like this is not, you do not need this much money. And then eventually the guy who was like managing the office just explained it. He was like, look, you got to understand that like the wife of the guy who owns the company like takes a lot of money out of the business. And like that's a big overhead for us.

And I'm like, that do you want any impression that that is a legitimate business expense that I should be subsidizing? Yeah, that's you. It's a charges me a lot of money. Yeah, you got to minimize externalities in business, except for that guy's wife. That's like so many things, right? The sort of wild Russian experience is just the thing stripped down to its essence. Is it a crime to be a wife guy?

And you answer me in this instance, yes. But you know, I think in a higher and a more moral sense above the sort of your petty tax code and things of that nature. One of the things I sort of wanted to discuss before we end here, because I see we're sort of slightly coming to time as well. Right, because we've talked about a lot of the dissecting of what it is that they do. We've also talked about the ways in which people resist it. And we've mostly talked about this as a, I get rightly so, with the respect to

the wages of the creators versus what is taken by capital, the middlemen, whatever you want to call it. But I think I just want, yeah, exactly. Look, Bezos' wife takes a lot out of the business. I just, but I want to end on how, not just how this depresses the the sort of lives of people doing this stuff, but also just how it frequently makes the art much worse as well. You know, when so much of the effort is either sort of creating these complex systems that lend

themselves to, when I say gaming, I don't mean gaming like as in Twitch, but like gaming that system and creating art that's not meant to be consumed, but that's meant to either tick several data boxes, or that's meant to be favorably sucked up in sort of the audible algorithm, or things such as this. So I just want to sort of pose that to you. How do you feel this has affected the actual product? So I think that, you know, I am reluctant to make qualitative judgments about the art, at least that I experienced.

I want to, you know, start by saying that, like, I don't feel like I have a lack of great books to read or great TV to watch. There is some terrible TV and terrible books, but like I have a shelf there of books by people who have asked me to read them for reviews or blurbs, and each one of them is better than the last. That's the shelf that I kept, and it's like four years of reading. And a whole other shelf of unibomber manifestos. Which actually gives you a better read.

And so that the, but I will say that like, this is, this is my little weird jargony bit, that Como is InfoSec, that Content Moderation is Information Security. And so if you have a rule that says like, we are going to promote X and downrank Y, that rule will be quickly found out by the people who want to spam or do bad things, or who are, you know, churning out AI written books about Harvard Business School or whatever. The enemy knows the system. Yeah, and then the people who aren't in this, you know, who aren't gamers, right, who are there to like, just to make art.

Those people, their vocation is not figuring out what the rules are. Their vocation is making the thing. And so oftentimes you either end up with these parasitic relationships where in order to succeed, you have to hire someone else whose job it is to be the algorithm whisperer, or you have to be a spammer, right? And it's just much harder to gain purchase. And you know, the irony here is that the argument for these Baroque content moderation systems is that they are going to somehow resolve the problem of low quality and they just contribute

to it. And that's true like up and down the stack. Like it's true when we're talking about anti-harassment algorithms, like the distinction between the thing that Facebook calls harassment and the thing that's almost the thing that Facebook calls harassment is indistinguishable if you're on the receiving end of it. But if you're like a fucking Facebook lawyer who spends every hour that God sends, you know, masturbating furiously over the Turner Diaries and working out Facebook rules,

then you can be a complete bastard to people on Facebook and never cross the line. And moreover, you can go to other people into crossing the line and then narc them out, chapter and verse, and say, oh, I think you'll find that Facebook has a rule against that and get them silenced. And I think that that is like the overall problem of allowing all of our forums for culture and speech to be concentrated into a few hands that are run by mediocre donkeys, no better or worse than you or me, and then have them having no public accountability and no competition. All right, they're better than you.

I know I'm below a donkey, damn it, Dr. Ho. But we are seeing like, you know, we've had this 40, 50 years of increasing corporate concentration where all of these these content companies are getting bigger, swallowing up the other ones, and they're all doing it in the name of efficiencies, right? And so they've got way fewer editors, you've got way fewer salespeople, you know, in Penguin Random House might have just a couple people selling the world rights for all of its all of its books, right, in the New York office now. What they want to do then is they want to publish fewer books that sell more copies, right?

And like in their universe, everyone will just read the by 10 copies of the same one book every year, and like that will be like save all of the trouble for everyone. Unabomber manifesto. The consequence of that, like as it trickles down, is like we see more and more homogeneity, and like less risk taking, you know, over the top, I hadn't heard of it. But maybe, you know, if it had been really successful, even more over the top, the arm wrestling success story, and like over the top again, you know, like, yeah, yeah, right. And you know, what we're seeing, and like what we're going to get, I think, if we,

it's not that people are going to stop creating amazing stuff, you know, although they may have less capacity to do so, particularly in countries that do not have any kind of social safety net and universal health care, because, you know, they die. But what we see is that there are fewer and fewer people able to actually devote their lives to creative labor in a professional way. So only the most commercial are going to be able to do that. And is that the world that we want to live in? Well, lots of people are saying yes. If you weigh it by amount of money, lots of people are saying yes.

Yeah, exactly. If you're doing old school. There's a Hollywood executive right now in the hills, just up the brooch, like working on this arm wrestling thing, sounds like it's really got. That soon, you know, Corey could have written the next great, you know, sci-fi tale with a political message, and someone's like, Corey, we love the book. Have you considered calling it stepfather, I'm stuck in the dryer? It's really going to help with the sales. Lath of heaven to the stepfather, I'm stuck in the lathe.

Someone imagined in their dreams that I was stuck in the dryer, and now it's happening. It's like a very bad photoshop, like cover of like a shirtless guy on like a beach, holding a laundry, yeah, holding a washing machine. You joke about all of this. If you want to read something completely batshit, Sarah Jiang wrote an incredible piece about something called Cockygate, which was a conspiracy of Kindle unlimited supernatural romance and romance authors who would get together and pick a hashtag that they would try and push. And then they would all write novellas about her, short stories that sold on Kindle as 99 cent novels and were in the KUP program,

and could make a lot of money. So they would like do these coordinated runs, like it's like trying to goose Twitter trending topics. And they would just pick a word like werewolves and werewolves having sex with, I don't know, like were porcupines or something. And they would all write it and they would make it a mini trend. But one of them created a series of romance novels about these brothers called The Cocky Brothers. Disguise who loves Mastic. And she trademarked the word cocky in connection with romance novels and then went after her co-conspirators. But it turned out it was because she was having a good run with this cocky brother thing and then he tried to make it the group hashtag. And she was like, no, I don't want

that to be the group hashtag. That's my thing. And so this was her revenge. And she brought in the USPTO as kind of her like, you know, you and whose army, which then sparked all of these other batshit trademark claims. So there was a guy outside of Austin who's a self-published fantasy writer who trademarked any fantasy novel cover with a guy holding a sword on the cover. And so I saw this trademark application land and I filed an objection. But then I got on with the General Counsel McMillan who published me and they filed an objection. So his trademark didn't issue. But this stuff begets the weirdest. I mean, artists are weird and crazy. Anyways, writers are weird and crazy. We just had our event in LA and our interlocutor was David Goodman who

ran the writer strike against the big fortallen agencies, which is this kind of pit of private equity owned monopolists who were screwing their clients. And he said, you know, in order to win, we were going to have to all fire our agents. And they thought there was no way that we were going to do that. But they weren't banking on one important factor, which is that writers are crazy. And so we all fired our agents, right? We're crazy enough without adding in all of this other stuff of just like, you know, it's like being in the in the behaviorism box where someone just reaches out and prods you with a cattle prod at random intervals to see what you'll go off and do. And that's that's what it's like to be, you know, a creator inside the algorithmic prison.

It's it's it's gross. I mean, I love to press the little button and I love to receive a little treat from the thing. Yeah. So I just I noticed that we're slightly coming to time here. So I just want to say number one, Corey and Rebecca, thank you so much for coming on and hanging out with us today. It was a delight. I always know it's a good conversation when I'm like, wow, I made so many notes and used five percent of them. We didn't even get into all that over the top three stuff. The musical. I didn't even get to do my picture over the top three yet. Hugh Jackman singing like the title number man at arms. Yeah. Yeah. And I think what we've all learned here today is that the only way that it's only through collective action, through careful

litigation and legal transformation and real political engagement that we will get the master in commander cinematic universe made the MCCU. Yeah, that's right. So once again, Rebecca and Corey, thank you so much for coming on. The book is called Choke Point Capitalism. Where can people find it? Well, it comes out in the UK on November 15 and Australia there and New Zealand. I wish on the price will be. It's out in the US now and in Canada. It's called Choke Point Capitalism and you can get it everywhere. Books are sold. However, you can't get the audiobook on Audible. The only chapter that you can get on Audible is the chapter that explains how Audible steals from authors. That is an Audible exclusive that we put up on Audible. There's also a Spotify

exclusive that explains how Spotify's funny accounting works. That is the only part of the audiobook you can get on Spotify. Amazing. And it's also it's a very clever title because choking is very big right now. So I think algorithmically speaking. What was the interview I was in? Was it yesterday? I said they sort of choked that one out and I was like, Oh, no, no. It works up this a little further. Yeah. That is our struggle to find the final solution. That's copyrighted too. I'm so sorry. Anyway, thank you so much for listening as well. Our listeners, there's a Patreon. It is $5 a month. You can listen to more of this. If you want some number of pounds, if you want, there's going to be a lot more of the talking

about the generalized state failure of Britain in this upcoming bonus episode. We also have a live show. There are still tickets for it. Question mark, Milo? Yeah. 18th of October. There are still tickets. Buy tickets to that. Come to the live show. If you're a $10 subscriber, you get a discount. The discount code is on the Patreon text for $10. Go through your emails. It's in there. It's in there somewhere. And then of course, if you are in Australia, we still have tickets for Sydney and Britain. Are you there? We still have tickets for Sydney, Canberra and Brisbane. Yeah. Yeah. Brisbane, Sydney, Canberra, Melbourne. There will be a Britonology live show also on the 19th of November. The tickets are not yet

on sale. They may be on sale by the time this goes out. So look for those. Look for those maybe. So can I put in a Britonology request? Oh, yeah, please. I want an Adrian Mole episode. Oh, that has been mooted. It's in our list of potential topics. Unfortunately, it's not something I know anything about. And Nate obviously doesn't know anything about it. So we might need a ringer for that one. You have to get Adrian more. We're going to have to get Adrian more. Yeah. Anyway, so once again, a thank you to our guests. A thank you to our listeners. A thank you to our patrons and for all those of you who are going to come see us in London and then Australia. Oh, also come see me. Oh, right. There's my, London. 12th of October, London's

sold the fuck out. You're too late. If you don't have tickets now, you're not going to Cambridge, 25th of October. Many tickets available. Come to that. From London. From London. Get the train. Those work. It's reasonable. Why not? Well, wait, they don't really work that well. No, no, not really. No. Okay. All right. We need to let ourselves and our guests go. So we're going to see you on the bonus episode. Bye. Bye.