TRASHFUTURE - Stolen Likes Acknowledgement feat. Cory Doctorow

Episode Date: October 13, 2020

Blogger, information freedom activist, and sci-fi writer Cory Doctorow joins the gang to discuss the outcome of US anti trust hearings, what's so empty about the idea of "surveillance capitalism, and a start up that was genuinely conceived of by a precocious nine year old. Also, the UK government rolled out an RPG character maker to get everyone back employed during the pandemic, so this podcast is brought to you by a sports agent, a hotel porter, and three boxers! Check out Cory's book via his Kickstarter link - we will update these links when the audiobook is released! https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/doctorow/attack-surface-audiobook-for-the-third-little-brother-book If you want access to our Patreon bonus episodes and powerful Discord server, sign up here: https://www.patreon.com/trashfuture We support the London Renters Union, which helps people defeat their slumlords and avoid eviction. If you want to support them as well, you can here: https://londonrentersunion.org/donate Here's a central location to donate to bail funds across the US to help people held under America's utterly inhumane system: https://secure.givelively.org/donate/the-bail-project If you want one of our *fine* new shirts, designed by Matt Lubchansky, then e-mail trashfuturepodcast [at] gmail [dot] com. £15 for patrons, £20 for non-patrons, plus shipping. *WEB DESIGN ALERT* Tom Allen is a friend of the show (and the designer behind GYDS dot com). 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, welcome back again to this free episode of TF. It's me, Riley, and I am having a beer in the studio. It is a dongle from a brewery that just seems to be called, oh no, it's called ABK. I'm having an ABK dongle. We have two beers here with my friend in the basement, who would like to hang out with our family. And with me is Milo. Yeah, yeah. It's me, you're young.

It is. Nate's on the boards. Hello, it's Nate. I drink tea. I drink tea. I don't have a beer. I don't want to drink alcohol. I want to be normal.

You sound incredibly Austrian. How come when you both guys both speak German, you sound like... That's just how German is. That's just how it sounds. I mean, I'm doing it intentionally, obviously. I can sound normal in German. Nate's is deeply like Christoph Waltz. No, I have my handy for long.

You stole my hammer. Also, we have Alice. It's welcome to German future. We also have Alice. Yes. Welcome to... Welcome to... Wouldn't it be moods or something like that?

Willkommen nach Konnisch beti. Yes, we've Alice and shifting back to English now. Let's turn on the automatic translator for all of you guys that translates the German to English. We'll be speaking fluent German for the whole of this. We've got a deep fake translator doing our voices. It was a start-up that only live translates podcasts. It is worth $500 million and it's owned by SoftBag. We also are rejoined by returning champion, activist, science fiction writer, Kori Doctorow.

Kori, how's it going? No, for Smachty Schatzi. As a hilarious aside, before we end German chat, so my wife lived in Switzerland for a while. She's pretty accustomed to Swiss German, which I'm not. I live in Germany as a kid, but Swiss German to me is baby talk. And she played me a video from a Swiss channel and the narration was in Hochdeutsch, in weirdly accented Hochdeutsch, but I still understand it.

But then when they started interviewing people, it was just like... Watching SFI's will absolutely melt your brain. I watched the fucking weather report on SFI's, right? And the guy was doing just regular Hochdeutsch for the weather, but then doing the folksy asides about, you know, it's going to be like, oh, it's going to be a cold one tonight. Entirely in the like, I have a mouthful of cheese, which I'm chewing. Swiss German.

It is cheese, not gold. I grew up going to a secular socialist Yiddish school. And so I speak terrible Yiddish, which means that I speak even worse German. But exceptional Swiss. I lived in Crown Heights in Brooklyn and being around lots of Hasidic people and Orthodox people, I heard people speak Yiddish from time to time. I'm like, I can kind of listen in on their conversations, but kind of not understand a word.

And it's always just like, it's the same sort of variance. Like it's German, but it's just like, I don't know, if you autotune German to the wrong notes is the best way to describe it. But hey, all of what you've all been saying, all of your German prowess has been taken into Rishi Sunak's great big computer and he spat out a bunch of job recommendations for you, because unfortunately the official guidance from the Chancellor appears to be that no job in the creative industry is viable

and everyone should just give up and retrain as something else. Yeah, we should give up on having arts and entertainment. We can't afford it anymore. And everyone worked at a startup. We made the goats from Fallout 3. We have like an RPG character creator where you are asked a series of questions and then it just signs you your class. I've been assigned a Keller Putzer.

You want to say what it actually is. Premium TF subscribers will recognize that the government has created a version of Nick Gross's Find Your Grind app in order to solve the pandemic unemployment crisis because there aren't any jobs, but everyone just needs to get skills. And then if we all close our eyes and we all learn COBOL or whatever with COBOL, what is it, the 80s, then a job will appear in front of us. I do like that after we started posting about this, it immediately fell down, like the server fell down.

So the trash future bump is real. Too many people are trying to retrain. That's the problem. So A, just leaving aside, what a fucking dismal division of what life can be that is. Again, the same thing of looking at children of men and being like, yep, I'll have that please. Sounds like a good society. Let's do it.

Let's take the remaining art, put it in the Battersea Power Station, and then the rest of the country can be trudging in cages. You've been reassigned to train Riot Guard. Speaking in my capacity as a dystopian science fiction writer, it is warnings, not suggestions. They finally automated your job. They just took it away from you. No one's writing dystopia anymore because it's just happening. Oh, no, Corey, you've got Al Murray, the pub landlord syndrome where you're writing dystopian fiction

and then someone's going like, this is a very interesting paper. Someone's written on how we should reorganize society. But we've all taken the quiz, which again, seems to be giving recommendations in terms of dystopian science fiction more in line with the insane computer that runs paranoia because it told me that I should be a resort representative. Oh, you'd love that. A hotel porter. You would also love that.

I'm Riley, or a sports agent. The toilets are over here in this guy's mouse. You would love all of those things. Yeah. I mean, I like hotels. I don't necessarily like hotel portering, I'm not sure. But you would teach the fucking Waldorf Astoria like a stores department how to do agile. That's right.

And also, I could be a stunt performer or a museum assistant. Cool. I got told to be a paramedic, which is cool. I would 100% do that job, except in Britain, you have to go to university to be a paramedic. It's a three-year degree. It becomes a bike paramedic. So it's just one of those things where it's like, cool. I definitely think it's like 27,000 pounds.

That's in London. And it's 27,000 pounds to go to school. And then the salary is between, let's say 25 and 30,000. And I would be almost 40 before I finished school and was starting like, yeah. Sounds good. Sounds good. I told you, insane computer from the role-playing game Paranoia. I got police officer and Royal Marines officer.

Who's the cop? Yes. Yeah. I was also suggested that I should become a soldier and I'm like, I have done that. I don't think I would like to do it in Britain. I've already, hilariously, deep friends of the show will know the story maybe that randomly when I was in infantry school are we had a visiting NCO from the British army as our sergeant major for the first sergeant for the company.

Listen up, lads. So legitimately, I was getting yelled at by like a Sandhurst instructor and I was just like, what the fuck is going, why is that guy's hat weird? Why is he carrying a stick? And then randomly like on a machine gun range, I guess I popped up too high when I was trying to fix my light machine gun I was using in that training exercise. And I hear this voice go, are you bulletproof, sir? It's cool.

What about more of that? Don't you want more of that? I definitely want more of that in my life. Yeah, exactly. He then fixed the saw by hitting the charging handle with his helmet until it fucking budged. Was his head bulletproof? And then he said to me, now sergeant mages, we're fucking bulletproof. And I was just like, I don't know what's going on.

Yeah. You could be either sort of tens of thousands of pounds in debt for a job that doesn't pay very much. I mean, you know what their solution to this, of course, is make the paramedic qualification, just you pay a thousand pounds, fill out a short form, take a box that says, I know how to do a paramedic stuff. I'm not lying. And then, you know, off you go, try your best.

Believe in yourself. Here's a copy of the secret. You could help hit that all paramedic calls are answered with an eight minutes metric where famously they just said, yes, we'll do that by refusing to send paramedics to people who are more than eight minutes away and also sending paramedics on bicycles who don't have any of the equipment they need to treat people. Paramedic on a bicycle just comes up and is like, oh boy. Just showing up and like sucking your teeth.

Just like. It's just bad gas. Don't like that. I thought you've had a right. Clamp him. He gets the order for the regular paramedics started by just miming what they would be doing. Due to like the British state's psychotic insistence on like defunding everything, including the police who like keep them in power.

Like, I know they really are. They do like playing on hard. They're playing like kaplunk with their own not being guillotined. Like, oh, how many police officers can we cut before there's a violent revolution? Applying that same process. I apply to be a police officer and then I simply get to drive around in the car. Just like slide across two lanes of traffic, go up to a guy doing a crime and be like, you don't want to do that.

I'm halfway through taking this test. And I've just had two questions back to back, which are, do you agree or disagree? I like to get to the center of the issue. And this one is, I like working with facts. I like working with facts. I love working with vague fictions. It's going to come up like coal miner.

Corey, what did you speck as while Milo keeps going through the character creator? Let me start by saying that I have a control here because I took one of these tests in my final year of secondary school, which was my seventh year of secondary school. And it advised that I could become a geriatric nutritionist. So that's your, that's your like, still time. Yeah. Oh, sorry, nutritionist for geriatrics.

I am nearly 50. So I got an actor, which seems like not a great choice. If you want to get out of the arts. Also, there's a lot of travel related stuff like you guys, hotel room attendant, travel agency manager, tourist guide. I don't know what future they're training me for. Also boxer though. And I like boxer.

Everyone got boxer. You're just fucking jacked, Corey. No, I actually, I looked at this because a lot of people were posting the results they got. A lot of people got boxer. I want to know. It's just like someone has gone, some boxing promoter like Dave, Corey's brother has gone. Listen, mate.

Do me a favor. We're right short of bare knuckle boxes here. If you could just, we need, we need a bit of fresh meat. People keep getting brain injuries and quitting the game. 50 quid to get boxer moved up the list. I want to know why I got Royal Marines officer. Why the Marines? Alice, that's the most you think ever.

Come on. It knows that you like Alice. It knows that you like to be festooned. That's true. I love being festooned. It's somehow worked out that I had once lived in Hackney because I recommended Micro Brewer. I was disappointed that I didn't get like leather apron fashioner or mustache wax creator. I like to make very small beers.

Milo, what do you got? I'm at 80%. Speedrun. I like doing things in a careful order. No, haphazard, fiction, sex, careful order, podcasting, never. I like to follow rules and processes. Do you do strongly disagree for everything? I feel restricted when I have to follow a routine.

Strongly agree. I like to see the results of the work I do. Agree. That's a nice thing to have. I like to see your honest vodka. I like to get involved in making things strongly. Strongly agree. Absolutely.

92%. I enjoy getting involved in practical tasks. Strongly agree. Do those practical tasks include bombing a hospital in the Yemen? I like working with my hands or tools. Do they involve being punched in the head for several minutes? That's getting involved with an activity, baby. I enjoy planning a task more than actually doing it.

Strongly disagree. It's just the error. Your accent says otherwise. Yeah. Assessment complete. See results. Okay. All right.

What you told us, your answers show that you're a creative person and enjoy coming up with new ways of doing things. You're motivated, set yourself personal goals and are comfortable competing with other people. You're sociable and find it easy to understand people. You're a practical person and enjoy getting things done. Why did they replace the economy with a cosmopolitan quiz? 10 job categories that might suit you. Right. Hang on.

Okay. Which category should I pick? So it says creative and media, construction and trades or sports and leisure. Creative and media because that's what you currently do. Okay. Answer five more questions. All right. Are you comfortable with talking through things with other people so that they understand for sure?

No. Why not? I can't agree with the rest of these. Yeah. Are you comfortable with working with a team with other people? Are you comfortable doing a variety of tasks in a job and open to things changing? Hmm. Okay.

I mean, I'm a podcaster. So are you good at thinking of new ways to do something without being told? Yes. I would say you are. Usually. You normally make me realize... It is my career's advice. I'm doing something completely wrong the hard way and miles away.

Are you able to read well? Me can read good. Okay. All right. See results. Drama. What are you going to be? All right.

Job roles that might suit you. Actor. Uh-huh. Copy editor. Commissioning editor. Yes. Give me that job and I will take spitting image off the fucking air. Give me that pissing job.

I will commission so much dank shit on the BBC. The people of Britain are not ready for it. Just an hour of just fucking come town, 9 p.m. BBC one. Bring back the wombals. The biggest commissioning flex of like recent years, which was Graham Norton announcing publicly that he would not work for Channel 4 anymore until they re-ed the transphobic episode of the it crowd. That wasn't Graham Norton.

That was Graham Leonard here. Did I say Graham Norton? Fuck. Graham Norton. This is what happens when you pour me to record in the middle of dinner. Wait, I answered two more questions and got soldier. Hell yeah. Hell yeah.

Every commissioning editor is two questions away from taking up arms. So just take part in peacekeeping missions supporting humanitarian efforts or fighting in combat zones around the world. And nothing else. This is the dialectic between me and Nate, right? Which is that Nate was an army officer and wishes he wasn't. And I am not an army officer and kind of in a weird way wish I had been for the simple life, you know?

Yeah. Just sitting around mumbling Russian sometimes. For the simple life. To declare war on that TV show. Knowing Milo as well as I do, I realized he would actually been really good except for all the times when you're told to do something incredibly stupid and you have no way to say no. He would absolutely melt down.

My wife's the exact same way. So it's just, no, it's not good. It's dumb. I'm with you. I'm with you on my... I'm exactly with you though. Like I'm exactly... I don't...

I want to be an army officer, but then like West Germany in the 90s, where my only job is to like steal jeeps. I now would like to turn your attention to a... I've been worried recently like that. I keep finding startups that are like kind of similar to one another. I'm like, oh, it's another way for you to spy on your employees. Oh, it's another thing that's just payday loans that are like legal because it's a tech company. It's another Wi-Fi enabled dick cage.

Yeah, I would say that before. It's just another Wi-Fi enabled dick cage that had a crucial security flaw and now people can't get to their dick. The news for which was broken by another Wi-Fi enabled sex toy. I learned about this through like an actually quite well written tech journalism thread by buttplug.io. So needless to say, we will be talking about that in the future. However, today...

I love it when Romanian hackers email me to tell me they know exactly what I haven't been wanking to. So today, we are talking about a... Because I had given up hope on this segment in general. However, today, we are talking about a company that has renewed my hope that there are other kinds of tech companies out there. Because this is a startup that I swear to God, if I didn't know who it was conceived by, I would say was conceived by a precocious six-year-old over the course of a 30-minute

drive with a parent who's half-listening. Awesome. Is that not also the vibe of this podcast? It is called Cooler Screens. Oh, fuck off. And here's the thing. I mean it, fuck off. I don't want funny yuck-em-up guesses because I want serious guesses.

What do you think Cooler Screens actually does? I'm going to start with the man across from me. Is it like some kind of system to stop your computer monitor from getting hot? No, Nate. It's a service that you pay monthly to get cool backgrounds designed by cool people on all your screens. Close, but not in the way I can know what you're thinking of. It's that's the ballpark, but it's like different.

Spotify except to look like you have taste when it comes to your wallpaper. No. Corey, hit me next. Cooler Screens. What does it do? I think it uses machine learning to try and create subliminal messages that train your brain. It does do that, but it does it in a very specific way.

It does that in the form of the 90s swoosh as a desktop wallpaper. I want to say what kind of, what do we mean by cooler? It goes through, it changes the font on your devices to the cool S. Specifically, what do we mean? Every letter is S. We're going to do this one more time and we're going to make it more specific. What do they mean by cooler? Okay, we're going to find out.

Does it put leather jackets on stuff? Is it temperature cooler? Does it something to fix the temperature of your screens? Cooler is enough. It locks you. We're going to say it's first tagline is a cooler way to shop. Yeah. It locks you in the solitary confinement thing from the Great Escape.

Oh, yeah. It gives you a baseball. It's also been funded to the tune of $100 million. This is an idea that has been seriously well funded. Screen. Is it personal device screens or is it like advertising? I didn't think of that. Yeah.

Cooler platform. Cooler screens technology platform was designed and built from the ground up to deliver on the company's vision for consumer experience parentheses CX. Cory, I'm going to throw across to you. With all of this information, do you have any closer to what cooler screens does? So I'm just thinking about all the Callum McLuhanites I know and assuming that this has something to do with like, you know, when you're in a hot medium, you don't make rational consumer decisions, you can offer to your consumers the chance to have a cool head when

they buy things so they won't face buyers or morse. No, that's too smart. Sorry, this is a stupider company than that. I love it when companies describe themselves as doing something from the ground up as if that isn't how everything is done apart from like high altitude bombing of cities. Here at Wheel ReInventors, we like to do everything from the ground up. That's right. I'm going to do another one.

A cooler approach to privacy. We believe consumers can experience the benefits of a digital technology. Is this going to be blind again? Close. We've done a soft bank. We finished with them. We finished with wire cards. So what we're doing now is a deep dive into the curtain and blind industry.

That's right. You're not going to know what hit him. This is just carpet somehow. The benefits of a digital technology without compromising their personal information, and I'm going to do the next one right now. Cooler company. We dream and deliver. We're technologists, designers, merchants, and dreamers who created cooler screens to

bring the power of digital to, and this is the big hint here, bricks and mortar retail. Six months later, Interpol Financial Crimes arrests everyone involved in this due to a cockamamie series of frauds. Fuck, I know what this is. I know what this is. Milo, you seem to know what it is. This is when the fridge is in a supermarket that have a glass door. They replace the door with a screen that's exactly the same as if it was just glass.

Oh my God. Because it displays what's behind it. I was thinking that. I was thinking that. Yes. Yes, it rules so hard. He fucking got it. This is like something Kafka would come up with.

He's fucking signifier and signified all at one fucking place. I love it. I fucking shit. Milo changed your name to MiloDina. I am investing. I've knocked this one into the top corner from the halfway line. Also, don't forget, its valuation is not public, but it has been invested in up to the tune of $100 million, which means it's probably not that far up from being a unicorn.

Amazing. Awesome. I want to know if you can have little flies crawling around on the food inside the fridge on the screen. You actually. Who's in this fridge? Mike Pence. Oh my God.

Oh my God. Is this a Remaniacs? Damn. I say that Donald Trump he's done for now. So they say bringing the power of digital to the cooler. Yeah, we can change the coffee. I fucking love digital as a noun. And yes, Alice, I was absolutely about to make that joke.

Is it too much? Am I over egging the pudding to use a Milo expression? The pudding. The pudding can never be over egg when it comes to Fee Fee jokes. Bringing the power. They've brought the power of digital to lots of things over the years, but I feel like the cooler aisle was one thing. I would love to do it for just like an ad, like for things that it has genuinely helped

me with like bringing the power of digital to child pornography, genuinely revolutionized the game. But like, you know, You know what this actually is? More for child pornography than it did for coolers. What this actually is though in practical terms, like and your mandatory Simpsons reference is moon pie. What a time to be alive.

Cooler screens replaces the old glass cooler doors with new. You old. I hate it. Oh, glass. I've been using that since the Roman times. Fuck that. With new digital smart screens that seamlessly integrate into the existing retail environment. Awesome.

The retail. When you open the door, it's just juicero slurry packets. So like it's a pair and then you open it up and it's like a foil packet of pear slurry. I was in the kitchen at the office space here and I found I saw a huge like bulk size container of fuel powder. So I'm kind of vibing with this right now. But to me, it's like, wouldn't it make more sense just just just dream with me for a second here?

Wouldn't it just make more sense to use this sort of thing to like do real time inventory as opposed to just like a cool screen like I would rather if I was running a grocery store, I think I would rather know what's on the shelf and what's moving fast versus slow versus having blade runner the shopping experience. Yeah. Well, that's the thing. It's like all of these companies where they come up with the first idea, right? And they never think what problems is it causing?

They come up with the first idea and then they say, okay, well, now we're going to solve all the problems that this caused. So they're like, okay, we have replaced all the glass doors. And by the way, these are like increasingly in every Walgreens. So they're going to be inescapable. Some people listening will have seen them. It's a recent rollout, but I'd like Walgreens is out there. No, no, no, no.

I'm just envisioning the Walgreens and ride aids and stuff I've been in in my life back in America. And so what you're saying is that basically the back, the perimeter cooler cases where they'll have stuff like frozen and chilled stuff, those doors are going to be replaced by screens. Yes. And then what are the screens going to do? Well, they're going to show the thing.

But I'd like to assume that it will know what the inventory is. I think you've got it backwards. I think that there are underpaid at risk, mask wearing, low wage employees who have to open the fridge periodically and barcode all of the stuff inside it. So the screen refreshes. I don't think the screen knows what's in there. Yeah. The screen doesn't know what's in there.

Yeah. So you can't see it easily. We have never considered the screen on the on the fridge. Does it? Does it truly know what is in the fridge? It reminds me of that app from the app store in like 2010. All it did was like, it looked like a cool 3D rendered gem, but the app cost like $1,000. People were like, thought it was something interesting and bought it.

And then they read the description because they apparently spend money like idiots. And it said like, people will know how rich you are because you have this app. Like it's basically that, just for freezer screens as opposed to... So they say, well, they say it's... Well, because all of these ideas, right? It's someone has an idea and then they realize that if they can create enough sort of cretinations and structure around that idea, then they can get millions and millions of dollars. That's what happened here.

What if we replace cooler glass doors with screens that show a display? Okay. Well, how can we make that desirable for anyone and solve the myriad of problems it's going to cause? And instead of just saying, no, let's not do that, they say, well, time to get engineering. So here's a little bit more information. Yes. They are being rolled out in Walgreens across the country in a number of Canadian retailers such as Loblaws and Zares.

Is anything in Canada real? Those aren't real names. Loblaws. Yeah. He's more branched out from the law block. Yeah. That's my local grocery store where I was like living in Toronto. Yeah.

I bought a lot of gumballs in the Loblaws machine growing up in Toronto. Oh, that's for sure. Bob Loblaws Grubshop. Buying gumballs in the Loblaws is a fully like bung-a-bob for Big Ben. It's a Brian Adams B-side is what that is. So their main technology partner is Foxconn. Oh, awesome. Isn't that a Nintendo thing?

What's going to happen is you will have like a suicide note that will have a screen in it that can like dispense suicide prevention advice to you. Now we know what they're going to build at that factory in Wisconsin, right? Like we all said, it was just a scam. Who needs giant flat panels anymore? And now we know. Yeah. Every Walgreen.

That's the real shame is that, you know, all of the growth in suicides in America, the benefits haven't gone to American workers because it's all being produced overseas. You know, they've been outsourcing it to China for years. And even though American consumers are the primary purchasers of suicide, it's all made in China. So also, it will not surprise you to learn that the reason this is in every Walgreens is that the co-founder was until recently the CEO of Walgreens. What a useful coincidence.

Concerned. Oh, wow. That means they're coming to Boots as well, by the way. Oh, nice. Yeah. Because Walgreens owns Boots. I love that the screen has to explain what a meal deal is. The shaky hands meme, the flat screens and like people on Twitter with locked accounts

and it's coming to Boots. So here is their pitch to the consumer, right? You're Joe Sexback, you're Joe Average. Consumers can now instantly and easily access the most applicable and up-to-date information offerings and promotions in store just like online. Cool. Like glass. They're up-to-date information on what's inside something like if you had a glass door

that you could see it through. That's what that is. This allows the company to put a little badge on the new products that says new. You know what this is. Wow. In the absolute final form of like the treadmill of Simulacra, this is going to kill off glass door, the company, because now it won't be a metaphor that anyone understands anymore. It'll be like the little floppy disk icon for save.

Yeah. Exactly. Now they can turn the glass door into like Fanny Craddock starts talking to you and is like, you want a Twix, don't you filthy little boy? That comes into it. Oh, Christ. As a result, cooler screens modernizes the in-store shopping experience, but also improves information access, relevance and transparency, which I think is an ironic third thing to

say. One thing about glasses, not transparent. We hate that. And again, they do it again in the next sentence with this improved visibility again. Consumers are more confident that they are making purchase decisions that fit their budgets, and health preferences again. Unlikely you could do just by looking at like a little thing that says the price and then the thing.

Isn't this... Because inevitably some zoomers are going to like hack the freezer doors in Walgreens and start playing Fortnite on them. Yeah. They're going to be able to do that. Or like you just go and get like a drink and it's just says all of this stuff is just says go, game of P, like... It's the only fridge I go to.

It's got all the advertising library and it's got all the advertising library and fonts, but instead of giving you offers that just says who what playing with they were or something like that. Isn't this also a massive waste of energy? Yep. Cool. Yes. It's a waste of energy, both like of electricity and also of our psychological energy thinking

about it. And also like the thing is sometimes like this question is asked to me like, why shouldn't anyone care? This is all just rich people scamming one another. And it's like, yeah, that is a fair point. But the thing that makes your actual life much worse because now when you're in boots, you have to like look at a fucking screen to go get your gamer girl P. Yeah.

Well, it's a combination of things, right? It's that, but it's also that, you know, like these, these are still the productive resources of society and we're directing them to this because of marketing and it's useless. But anyway, so here's their pitch more importantly to brands and retailers. That's for the actual money. The consumers pitch is like... Are you, are you tired of your retail space being all Vantablack and Obesity and Glass for some reason?

This is a problem that many people have. So their, their, their pitch to consumers is basically like, maybe you could see some new information that wasn't available on the box, perhaps. Which is, you know, basically like we need a pitch to consumers. We can't not have one, right? One take five minutes. Here's their pitch to brands and retailers and that's where the money is. So with cooler screens, brands can for the first time engage...

Wait, wait, wait. Can I make a prediction? Please. Is there a Bluetooth tracker in there that's trying to identify you when you look at the screen? No, there isn't. Yes. I think there, yeah.

No, there isn't yet. And that actually does come up later. Why aren't I on their advisory board? Yeah, that's right. Brands can for the first time engage with consumers in store. I've never been able to do that before. You're right. Stop on the box.

The stop comes in a box. You're right. Stop on it. Yeah, but this is, but Milo, Milo, this is a screen. It's just like this is, I feel like we are like this, but this startup is a child and we are its mum are telling it that we have food at home and it's going like, but I want the lime green thing. It says, they'll increase sales in market share by delivering the right offerings and

messages at the right time in the right place to the right audience. This is sensing it essentially what Corey is saying, right? Which is that the next logical step for this and the only way it makes sense is micro targeting. You have some way of knowing who is looking at the fridge and then you tailor the fridge to be like, oh, this is this person likes Game of Go, Pete. And then you just change the fridge. The fridge is just like, if you drink enough Red Bull, your dick falls off.

An actual monster energy. I saw a presentation of an actual non-horrible startup that was a nonprofit that was repurposing grocery store eye trackers to make really cheap eye trackers for people who are paralyzed, which are right now very, very expensive. And they've mass produced grocery store eye trackers, which are a horror thing so much that the economies of scale have kicked in and people who are paralyzed can now enjoy them. That's actually good. Surveillance capitalism.

But also on one hand, what's weird is. An entirely accidentally and that's very important. Yeah. And I would also say, weirdly, I had zero idea there were such things as grocery store eye trackers. Yeah. When you're looking at the candy bars. Yeah.

They're figuring out whether you grab a candy bar after looking at the candy bar as a weird dwell time is and all of that stuff. Yeah. The good news is that they probably don't derive anything useful from it because the so-called data science they do in the back end is just pure garbage. No, they know so much about what kinds of gamer girl pee I've been doing. I wonder if they have microphones too to track me saying a strong fill out every time I see a brand.

I don't. So here's the real pitch though. With cooler screens, retailers can now enter the digital media business, tapping a massive growth opportunity to show ads. Everybody's a data farm. Yeah. And they actually said. I'm just a simple country data farmer.

What they actually say is we're identity blind. They're trying to make a whole feature of this that it respects privacy. They talk about like the data protection cycle, all this stuff. And they say our cooler screens never seek to identify individuals and never gathers or uses personal identifiable information. It's not actually true that they'll just get owned by the next people who will, but like it isn't. But it's also, it's also funny where if that's true, they're basically just saying that

privacy is a feature of a billboard. Yeah. Yeah. Cool. Like we've just built this penopticon, but we're not going to look out from the central tower. Yeah. Privacy is a feature of a billboard unless you're on the billboard.

In this case. Grandpa, was there a time when the eyes on the potatoes weren't watching us? But also like think about what this means, right? Because the actual ads are like these 30 second commercials that play across banks of like 10 coolers or whatever, which means now no one can see what's inside them. It's a mystery. Hey, do you want to buy it? Do you want to make shopping a baffling or a deal?

Absolutely. There has been a fiasco. Yeah. So they offer brands access to millions of consumers with contextually relevant messages. So for example, if it's hot outside, then the all of the coolers will play a message saying, you know, beat the heat with gamer girl P. Yeah. Oh, beat the heat.

That's right. Just like that. The only way to make this better is to have like all the screens are continually playing ads so you can't see what's behind the but also all of the stuff on the shelves is on a continually moving conveyor belt. A total list of just a craps toss the dice. We've just made all shopping into the generation game. Yeah.

It's on my car. It's reading potato waffles and you're going to enjoy it. So the you can also you have ads that are affected by like the weather or the news they say. Oh, I love when it's effective. I see 9 11 this happened. You asked me said, would you like like a can of gamer girl pay? You get an animation of a fucking Boeing 747 flying across all of the cabinets in the store

like crashing into a huge skyscraper at the other end. A second wave of freshness. I think what this is missing is the frozen treat glory hole feature where you just get down on your knees, swipe your Apple watch and it fires a frozen confection directly into your gob. Oh, awesome. It's so cool. Having a bad day of the next catastrophe and just being like, did you remember the time

before the event? Have a Mars bar. Why are you holding your asshole up to the Mars bar? I think it's interactive. Like, can you touch them? Because that's not yet. Okay. Good.

That's a good stuff. It was supposed to be touch screens, but then they didn't. They couldn't figure out how to do it. So they gave up. I hate that. Good. Just in time for the massive pandemic where we shouldn't be touching stuff. Yeah.

It was going to be touch screens, but then people kept using their hands to do 9 11 using the memorial twin towers graphic on the screen. Like what kind of news could they, could they'll be coming up on those just like COVID infected COVID infections, like reach new heights every day. Unemployment is spiking. Have a fan. The screen is now worth 15 billion dollars. The president is actually manic tweeting.

Would you like a Red Bull? Oh man, the Trump speech yesterday. I was absolutely losing my mind and just like, listen, the medicine they've got now. It's incredible. We're going to give it to you. The seniors. I'm a senior too. Yeah.

Because you're vulnerable. They say that you're vulnerable, but you're not. But you are. Yeah. He switched. Now he's like, I'm actually very young. Yeah. He's gone younger.

Yeah. We are watching Earth's coolest man like devolve into steroid psychosis and I'm loving every minute of it. Personally, I'm very excited for Trump's 29th birthday. I'm just not going to say which one it is. Yeah. I'm waiting for the come down. I'm waiting for the wave of anger and depression in about like a day and a half.

That should be right now. Trump right now. He's still talking to you in the smoking area. You should go for dinner. My balls folks have become very small. He's going to nuke Tajikistan. I mean, and that would be cool. Let's be real.

All right. But let's get all the Tajikistan nationalists in my mentions. Take back what you said about Tajikistan. Do not say you are on Tajikistan. You are in Tajikistan. So anyway, that he remembered to take us five HTTP before he took his steroids. Otherwise, the crash is going to be terrible. Yeah.

It's just he's eating. But he's eating bananas and watching Rick reruns of 30 Rocks. I know it's lame, but it makes it. Taking trip advice from Tom Asher. Every like everything we know about his health. He's incredibly unhealthy. He has awful habits. He's never going to stop having them.

It's going to hit him like a fucking cinder block. Luckily, all the party chairs and leaders in both chambers and the Supreme Court and all of their major donors are young and healthy. Yeah. I mean, the only one who's actually like taking it seriously is Mitch McConnell because he's the only one who has like an actual political program. He's like, no, I'm not going to go like sit next to those disease carriers. You fucking crazy.

He actually has said that. He's like, I refuse to go to my house. I was thinking about that. He's like, yeah, because he's the only one who's not like, you know, an oinking George Mason ideal, like hooting chud. He understands what he's doing. I don't know if looking like a big owl made of sausage is a risk factor for coronavirus. But if so, Mitch McConnell really needs to be isolated.

I mean, I actually knew somebody who had worked with horrible, horrible rich people in New York and who actually had gone to a meeting with Mitch McConnell for a fundraiser thing because one of this guy's clients was a horrible rich person. And the guy tried to make small talk with Mitch McConnell at dinner and sort of like, hey, man. So like, where do you into? He's like this. And he's like networking.

He's like, just say whatever you want to say to me. I don't care. You're going to give me money, right? All right. Talk. Like that's genuinely how much of a fucking just craving piece of shit he is. He doesn't care about anything besides what he wants when he will not tell you. Yeah, he wants to build.

He wants to build an extra extra like mansion on top of his speedboat. And that's what he's realized. I was going to do it. He's not even into anything that understandable. Like the things that Mitch McConnell are into is like dark satanic shit. We cannot legally say for certain that he's my imagination. He is into things which are. Imagine the contents of his fridge displayed on a fucking flat screen.

It's a hot day outside. Would you like some child blood? We do not know if that is an inspiration. To me, there is something kind of there's something kind of hilarious about that. Even though he's such a reprehensible person that then when seated across from someone who's so rich, they can bend reality to their whim. He's like, I'm not going to respect you. Just fucking say whatever you want.

I don't care. This is also the thing I like about Trump. Like his willingness to absolutely be a gigantic piece of shit to everyone around him. Because all the people around him suck. Yeah. It's like in a way he is doing practice because he's horrible to the world's worst people. But hey, speaking of this, you know, Coda, hey, is that a clown horn because we're pulling into the circus.

Yes, that's right. It's time for us to talk about. We're going back to the U.S. We're going back to a combination of the anti-monopoly hearing with ripped Chad Greg Stooby that we talked about a couple of months ago. Hey, you still around? You don't got to miss him. Greg Stooby and I have been we've been estranged for some time.

Yeah. Anyway, so basically that commission has now published its report to catch people up. That commission was a. It was going to investigate who was who killed JFK. That's right. It was the wall commission. It was a stature. No, there's no not enough lax on these here Facebook posts and we're going to get to the

bottom of it. Angulation of engagement. I really like the idea of fucking Jim Garrison getting on the plane with that with the Walter Matthew character in JFK just being like and the Walter Matthew character just being like 20 lax on a post by Greg Stooby. Now we are saying the Marines that that talk of full draws means is no good. That sounds genuinely sounds to me like apparently the Republicans are being led by like a bunch of escaped conservatives who've lived in Brazil for six generations.

Like, I mean, I just like the movie JFK. I'm just here to talk about the film JFK by Oliver Stone. Yeah. Y'all can talk about whatever you want. I'm going to be talking about the film JFK and a Brazilian accent. The enigma machine strikes again. I like the part in the film where they get shot. My linear rides again.

Basically, what happens is Jim Cicilline and Pramila Jayapal were the two like Democratic like Congress people who were like leading on this. And because of the Democrat controlled House, the Democrat controlled report that there are some Republicans on the committee. Those include Greg Stooby and Jim Jordan and Matt Gatz and people that we've talked about and know and love. And to be honest, miss. Anyway, their report has again, by the standards of the Democratic Party, been good in terms

of what an antitrust report can be. Basically, they recommend aggressive and actually quite, and I use this word with no hint of irony, forensic activities to actually reduce the power of the Silicon Valley Giants. And again, they're not recommending just, we recommend that Mark Zuckerberg takes an unconscious bias training or whatever. They're actually recommending things that will materially reduce the actual power of all of these behemoths over American society generally. They simply do not believe you.

The Democrats are doing something like actually legislatively coherent. In fairness, Pramila Jayapal is somebody that's like equivalent to a sort of Zara Sultana character in the U.S. in the sense that like, here's someone who absolutely is right on all the issues, but 99% of her colleagues are complete idiots. Yeah. Basically, and Jim Siciline is another guy who's like, he's a Democratic representative longstanding. I don't know, his record is mixed, but on this particular issue, he's pretty good.

And so like, the Democratic Party has actually managed to see Silicon Valley and Big Tech as an adversary, which that's new. That's new as of 2018 because Obama Democrats never did that. Obama Democrats saw Silicon Valley as part of the endless onward march of prosperity that needs to basically not be hampered by the government. Don't give me hope between this and like, if they flip the Senate having Bernie as finance chairman, don't give me hope that things might get better. Don't do that.

Oh, well, no, don't worry. I'm about to undermine that. Thank you. 10 years of climate. Before I go on any further, I want to throw to you. What are your first inclinations about this kind of development? So I think I'm a little more positive about this stuff than you guys are. I mean, I don't think that market solve all of our problems or that markets are a long-term

solution. But one of the things markets do do is like, pillage each other's margins, right? There's a thing that VCs like to do, which is make money. And if there's someone out there who's making a lot of money, they'd like to get a piece of it. And one of the things we know about from the tech industry is that anything that the big tech companies are into is termed by investors as the kill zone and they won't invest in it.

So you have these companies with like double digit year on your growth and tens of billions of dollars in profit and no one will invest in it. And that's got lots of problems, you know, on the one hand for like the network being pretty stagnant. And in terms of the U.S. position relative to other countries, it's not good. I mean, you know, back in the 80s, there was this idea that if we broke up AT&T, it would deliver the electronics industry to Japan, who are these ex-fascists who just copied American stuff.

And we needed our national champion. Yeah, exactly, right? And then, you know, it turns out that AT&T is like major occupation. The thing they like to do with their monopoly was prevent modems, right? So, so breaking up AT&T turned out to be pretty freaking good for American tech. And, you know, A pocket of big modem. Yeah, that's right.

Yeah. Yeah, exactly. So, you know, I think that that we could do a lot here. And I think the other thing that's very exciting about the idea of dispelling the kind of doctrine of Robert Bork, who is Ronald Reagan's court sorcerer, who said that the only time we should use anti-monopoly law is if you can absolutely prove that two companies are conspiring to make prices go up tomorrow. And if that's not happening, you can do whatever you want.

And there are a lot of industries now that are concentrated in ways that let them distort policy much more than historically they've been able to, you know, whether that's finance or logistics or, you know, pro wrestling, that all of these industries have like collapsed down to two or three or five companies. And, you know, some of the companies that are like behind this anti-big tech, Jeremiah, are themselves super concentrated, right? That the entertainment industry and the telecoms industry are definitely funding some of this energy and they're making this bizarre bet that like Congress will reinvigorate antitrust,

break up Google and Facebook and then like go like Comcast, that looks fine to me. Why would we do anything about Comcast? Disney Fox? That's great. A rare case, a rare good case of the I never thought leopards would eat my face. No shit, right? So, there's all of that. And, you know, when you look at the tech companies, the way that they grew is by doing things

that antitrust used to prohibit, right? They buy their competitors, they merge with their major competitors, they create vertical monopolies. Like Google is the one and a half products company. They in-house, they made a search engine and a hotmail clone. And everything else that they've done that's successful, they bought from someone else and everything they tried to do in-house failed. So, I think that there's like... Are you saying that people following my Google Wave account are no longer reading my waves?

And, you know, the most hilarious... I hate it when people don't read my waves. I mean, look at Alphabet, right? So, I think that one of the reasons that Alphabet exists and exists in addition to like dodging taxes is to create fracture lines for eventual antitrust enforcement. Because they are like galaxy brain enough to want to do that. And they want like antitrust enforcers to come along and go, well, I mean, why would we separate the search from advertising when Google has made it so easy for us to break off the company

that makes the Wi-Fi balloons and that other company that makes unsuccessful smart cities. Surely those are the things that are holding back competition for Google. And, you know, the thing is that's a good strategy compared to Facebook, which leaked a memo this week with their antitrust strategy, which was when we bought Insta and WhatsApp, you didn't tell us that we couldn't and the EU told us that we could do it, provided we didn't do some stuff that we actually ended up doing later, like, you know, that we lied about. And also, like, you know, the fact that you didn't ask us if we were buying them for anti-competitive reasons, which Zuck later admitted and is now in the record that he

bought Insta because he wanted to stop people from leaving Facebook for a rival. So, he bought the rival they were defecting to, which is radioactively illegal. He said, like, just because you didn't ask me if I was doing this for a crime reason and just because I committed fraud is no reason to unwind this merger. We spent so much money integrating these companies now. Think of how much money we would lose if you didn't want us to do crimes or fraud. You should have just denied us the merger altogether, which, you know, that makes Google strategy, that makes Alphabet look like a brilliant fucking move

in terms of controlling the eventual antitrust enforcement. And also, I mean, the weird handshake meme between me and Mark Zuckerberg is like, yes, they should have denied you the right to play Instagram. It's the classic thing of, officer, I was too drunk to know what the legal blood alcohol limit was. How could I possibly be held responsible? Well, I was thinking about another story, and, Cory, I don't know if you're familiar with this, but I imagine you are. When Chatnuga, Tennessee decided to create municipal broadband and offer basically fiber to the premises and basically gigabit internet available everywhere,

the hardest part of that wasn't, as I understand it, wasn't the technical implications of doing that in a city like Chatnuga. It was endless legal bullshit from both Democrats and Republican representatives trying to stop them from interfering with, I think, either Time Warner or Comcast's monopoly on shitty broadband and even in places where Time Warner or Comcast refused to provide broadband service to more rural locales within the general area of governance or neighboring counties. They were like, no, we're going to get a court injunction to stop you from doing this

because we might someday, if we get around to it. This stuff is my bread and butter. The broadband policy actually makes tech policy look really good by comparison. So the frontier collapsed at the start of the plague. They were one of the monopolists here. Wow, that's been around for a while. The current plague, the current plague. The guy which plague we're on sometimes.

They dumped dogs. They did an enron, right? They were like, we don't even want to pay lawyers to redact shit before we put it in the public domain. So we know what they were doing. So one of the things that they did was they booked one million households where there was no competitive offering as an asset on their balance sheet because they could under-maintain and overcharge for that broadband.

But the best part, and you'll love this because you love the wonky finance stuff, they did a projection that said that they could make $800 million by rolling out 100 gigabit fiber to 3 million households. But they decided not to do it because the C-suite was paid entirely in stock and the major analysts that control their share price will downrank any company that makes a CapEx investment that amortizes over more than five years and the amortization was 10 years. So they were like, I don't need $800 million for my shareholders

because that would be bad for my compensation this year. And it's hilarious except there are now 3 million households in America who are on DSL that is dipped in gutta percha and wrapped in newspaper and draped over shrubs. And that's how their kids are getting their education. That's how they're getting their telemedicine. Awesome. I mean, it is terrible.

And by contrast, muni fiber is wild. So there's a county Jackson County that they call Silicon Holler and they're one of the Appalachian counties that still has a rural telephone co-op from the New Deal era. And they decided that they were going to pull fiber to every household in the county. It's the poorest majority white county in America. They got a mule called Olbub to pull the fiber through the mountain passes.

They raised the median wage to $25 an hour doing like remote support and teaching English to rich Chinese kids. There's an entire cohort of little emperors who now speak English with thick Appalachian accents, which is awesome. Awesome. And, you know, like the Alec, right? The, you know, the American Legislative Exchange Committee, they promulgate these anti-muni broadband laws

and the talking points they hand to these dim-bulb far-right dingbats about why it's bad for cities to provide fiber is that would be government-controlled communications. And what they totally don't get is that the First Amendment prohibits speech-based discrimination, which means that if you had 100 gigabit fiber in your town, you could stick a server in the basement that was on 100 gigabit pipe and you could run eight-con off of it and they couldn't shut you down just because it was full of right-wing

nut-based conspiracy theories, because that would be, that would violate the First Amendment. Like, unlike your ISP, unlike your CDN, your city cannot practice speech-based prohibitions. And so, like, if you want nut job right-wing speech platforms, your shortest path to glory is to have the government provide your fiber. I'm worried about silencing it. It's a listening.

Matt Gertz. Well, yeah. Listen to this. I found a way to be depressed about the Democrats, which is like... Oh, don't worry. I have reasons they're in the notes, but what are yours? Hey, it's me, your cousin Marvin.

Marvin Hitler. You know that new idea you've been talking about? Well, listen to this. My reason for being depressed, right, is aside from the whole 10 years of liveable climate left thing, is we are going backwards once again. I would characterize this as it's an extremely good legislative package. It's also the finest antitrust law the 1910s can give us.

Like, if you kind of like write in, you know, yes, maybe we shouldn't have these enormous monopolies. Also, Serbs no longer allowed to touch your uncooked meat. They do have some sui genera stuff. The interop stuff in there, which is not getting enough attention, is actually super important, because there are like major barriers to that. Yeah. But so basically, just moving on a little bit, right?

I think I want to sort of also note here that antitrust is good. It's good to do. But it's also an extraordinarily limited goal for a socialist to have, because it's about taming the excesses of the market, so that its abuses are not as bad, and that its outcomes are not as, you might say, oriented to executive compensation, the way you describe it. We're talking about phony capitalism over there.

Yeah, yeah. This is because the whole point, right, is that, if you want to go back to your marks, it's that capitalism is fundamentally contradictory, but the main contradiction, the tendency of the rate of profit to fall, essentially is something that happens over a long time, and anti-monopoly is something that pushes the clock back by 10 minutes, but it doesn't change the operation of the clock.

It's the same clock. It's just what you're doing is you're solving today's problem, but the thing is, they broke up the oil monopolies and trying to break up the telephone monopolies and trying to break up Microsoft, which ended up in a settlement, and Bill Gates is richer than he's ever been. Because you haven't changed the clock, you've just moved it back,

you've made things better, but they're going to get worse again in a way that you can't necessarily predict, and so that's what I mean, right? As someone who doesn't live in America, not American, I don't like to say you should do X or Y, but my thinking here is, if you're thinking about voting for the Democratic Party in terms of harm reduction,

you're going to do a harm reduction vote for Biden, this is the kind of thing that counts as that, because it is a specific... And again, this is harm reduction, as far as I'm concerned. This is moving back the clock, this is making things not as bad, but you're not taking the clock apart, you're not building a new kind of machine. It is essentially, it seems like this is the first Democratic policy I've seen

that looks actually like it would meet the minimum threshold for what harm reduction is. Vote for Marianne Williamson and let's do some fucking Darlie shit on the clock. Let's get some melting fucking clocks. I think you're right though. I think this is like the best you can expect from the Democratic Party as it currently exists,

because like, no matter how left-wing a Democrat you elect, you're never going to get something out of a congressional subcommittee that's like, yeah, first of all, we take these 50 guys and we hang them, you know? Yeah. Now, you talk to a Republican, you might just get that. That's why I keep making that joke about why it's easier to do entryism into the Republican Party or the conservatives.

It's because they're already primed for that kind of revolutionary shit. So the other thing that's good about this is that it gets us away from the dim bulb Democrat critique of Big Tech, which is like, you know, Google built a mind control rate to sell you fidget spinners and Robert Mercer stole it to make your uncle racist. Which, you know... They didn't do that. Why do I have all these fidget spinners? Why am I racist on his own?

Yeah. Why do all these fidget spinners have gollywags on them? You know, they like just failed to notice that everyone who ever claimed to be able to do mind control was either kidding themselves or you or both. And, you know, it's the same problem with the tech industry itself, that the main strain of the tech industry's critique of itself is, oh my God, we built mind control rates. What can we do now?

As opposed to like, our bosses are... You know, this is the part where you're right about it being just like standard oil. Our bosses are common or garden sociopath mediocrities who've done exactly the same shit that fucking Carnegie did and Mellon did and Rockefeller did. And mostly what we need to nerf them is the same stuff that we did to nerf those other industries back in the day. Like Henry Clay Frick.

They want to think that they're... They want to think they're suffragies. That was a really deep cut, which is also what Henry Clay Frick said. Yeah, so I just think that there is another explanation for how Google makes us believe and correct things, which is it's the place where we go to ask all of our questions. And so if the answer is wrong, then we might believe something false. It's not because they have used machine learning

to sort us into big five personality types to figure out how to get us to believe wrong things. And you know, that dominance rather than mind control narrative is one that we're really at a crossroads on because if you believe it's mind control, then you have to believe that breaking up the companies or pluralizing their power would be a terrible idea. It's like if there's a comet hurtling towards the earth,

you're like, we should blow it up and they're out there going, no, no, no, that'll make a meteor shower. It's going to wipe out all the cities individually. And, you know, we just need to get on that comet and steer it instead of trying to break it up. And if you actually are like, no, these guys are just not as smart as they think they are. They're not doing what they think they can do.

They're kidding themselves. They're also kidding the advertisers who buy their stuff. They lie all the time. They lie in their sales literature too. You know, like the argument that goes like, oh, Google lied when they said Street View vans wouldn't steal our Wi-Fi data. And Facebook lied when it said it wouldn't use data from Instagram to mix it with data from FB.

And, you know, look at how much these guys lie and look at how truthful they are in their patent filings in sales literature. It has such an internal inconsistency that we're really struggling with at the moment. And additionally, right, if you want a contemporary example, an even more contemporary example of that is that the Information Commissioner's office here

found formally that Cambridge Analytica is no different from a normal ad agency. It's just a normal ad agency that happened to be the subject of like a FBPE liberal conspiracy theory that like Dominic Cummings tricked the country into Brexit with memes. Yeah, well, I mean, it's also like the conspiracy theory that Cambridge Analytica themselves pedal, right?

Which is like, oh, yeah, we're geniuses. And it's like, no, you just won't tell the people in Britain love racism. I could have told you that. It's pretty fucking like every headline writer at the fucking Daily Mail has known that for 40 years. It's not fucking difficult. And to bring it to your bread and butter,

you know, finance scams, this is the same finance scam as P and hedge funds, which is like, I promise you I can outperform the footsie, right? And no, they can't, right? All they're doing is losing money for rich people. But the proof that they're really good at it that we hold up is that rich people give them their money. And since rich people are by definition smart,

if they're giving them money, then the thing that they're giving money to must work. And you know, there's a totally different possibility, which is that they're running a con on rich people too. Well, it's the, it's the classic sort of, I get liberal assumption that is essentially that if every, if all of the outcomes in the world are the product of, you know, free economic transactions

that people actually wanted to do, you know, then therefore at every moment, you know, everything in the world is the product of rational economic actors expressing their preferences. And so this is the best of all possible. And those personal traits make a difference. So you have Spengali Dominic Cummings, or you have like chess master Vladimir Putin or whatever.

Yeah. But additionally that the, and that the, and that what politics should do to tech is make sure it doesn't distort those preferences so that the world is always the best possible world, which means no machine learning dark magic, which again is horse shit. Yeah.

Yeah. So just in case we were going to get too pleased about what the Democrats were actually managing to apparently do by being serious about one thing one time for once. The Republicans on the committee are of course kicking up a big fuss and doing the classic one too, where Matt Gatz, Jim Jordan and Jim Jordan,

I haven't heard from Stuby, I'm sorry, have basically said, They're going to boycott from signing this report. They're not going to sign this report because it doesn't contain like a stolen likes acknowledgement for them at the beginning of it. Stolen likes acknowledgement. That's a very good bit.

You should, you should use that again. So, and I meant that genuinely. Like just beginning, beginning the Republican National Convention with a stolen likes acknowledgement because Don Juniors, TikToks haven't been getting the engagement they deserve. Genuinely though, this is why it's to Facebook's advantage to like

make Greg Stuby furious about not seeing like videos about hydroxychlorine or whatever is that like him caring about that is the only thing from massive antitrust problem. And in this case, right? It's I think when we talk about this last, Nate, you made the point, like none of these conspiracies are new.

Like the John Birch Society, like it's money didn't come from nowhere. You know, but in this case, what we're looking at is, is that it's not that they necessarily, they've invented conspiracies, but what they've done is they've vertically integrated Google and the John Birch Society in the form of YouTube.

I badly want to like propose the existence of like a dark unit at Facebook whose only role is to do the actual persecution of conservatives that they think is happening in order to get them not to vote for antitrust legislation. Like Facebook bounces what? Yeah, like there is purely like some black hat Facebook freak logging in to delete Greg Stuby's likes.

I mean, this was inevitable, right? Like once, you know, there was this moment where, you know, Alex Jones fans and Tucker Carlson fans were waking up and going, wait a second, you mean that it's not just like anti pipeline activists that get excluded from Facebook? This is an outrage. And suddenly like got FDR gospel

and we're calling for breakups and antitrust and interventions in the market and whatever. And you know, eventually some of their paymasters are going to wake up and go, you know, this ends with them breaking up oil, right? Like you can't do this. This is the thing I kind of think there's almost and I'm not sure if anyone is quite smart enough to do this,

but there's like a way you can almost like judo style use the momentum of conservatives against them because especially in the U.S. They're mad about things for such insane reasons that they're often mad about the same things that you're mad about, but for just some completely absurd like Q and on reasons. So like you get them really mad about Facebook

and then use it just to sneak in massive antitrust legislation because they're mad about like, I deleted my picture of all my sons. That's the historic populist move, right? That's where populists have both one ground and you know, brought great shame upon themselves is finding those natural coalitions. But yeah, so to conclude what the Republicans are doing,

yeah, it's like, yeah, on the conspiracy, on the platforms they're trying to regulate, they're learning the conspiracies that are about like the stolen likes. And so they're being like, we're not going to sign anything. And then Ken Buck strolls into the room, another Republican, and says, I can get those, you know, who has, I can get Yosemite Sam to sign whatever you want

if you defang it completely. So now he's released a report called the third way, which is between some dumb bullshit Matt Gatz invented to get mad at. Why do I hear the words the third way and immediately think, oh yeah, the fix is in? Yeah. Well, I mean, an effect because you'd be right, right?

So it's that if the Republicans are going to sign onto it, it's like a bunch of them are sort of super insane and are just going to, are just saying like, we're mad about an invented problem that can't possibly be solved unless Alice, that bit you did is true, which maybe it is. In which case, like Ken Buck just sends an email and like Greg Stuby's likes come back.

They all come back. I can make the likes come back, Greg. So yeah, Ken Buck basically waters down the actual recommendations enough such that they become pointless. So like that, for example, like the interoperability and data portability is taken out of his report, which Corey, you said was quite important and we should talk about before we go on to like why

this is a labor issue. All of these things are removed, right? And so if anything is going to pass in the house because there are enough recalcitrant Democrats, it will probably need some Republicans, which means the only viable version of this bill unless there's like an insane blue wave in 2020 and Mr. Nothing will fundamentally change Joe Biden.

You know, just he fucking said he decides to sign off. Yeah, at the inauguration. There is one thing about Biden and I'm not a particularly big fan of Biden and obviously we don't have to rehash harm mitigation things. Obviously he's better than Trump, but Biden really fucking hates the tech industry and even when he was still kind of lucid,

he really hates tech because I remember reading a thing where he basically was kind of hitting at them during, I want to say during their recession, like when he was vice president, where basically there was some testimony or something along those lines where he basically told Facebook, he's like, you do realize that you talk about being like these great fucking job creators for the entire country

and you employ less people across or fewer people in your entire industry than the number of people who lost jobs just in the car industry last month. Like it strikes me that I'm not trying to, like I said, not trying to do hagiography of Joe Biden, but more along the lines, like there is an extent to which when it's going after tech, I do think that you might see some,

some more, whereas like when it comes to, for example, after oil companies or going after the defense industry, like it's even a harder sell for both Biden and your mainstream Democrats. He finds his son's Instagram stories confusing. He doesn't like it. Yeah, because his son's Instagram stories are all about like getting married to someone he met earlier that morning

and then trying to get to crack. Jill, how do I delete this? The problem with Biden's anti-tech activism is that it's lacking any kind of underlying understanding of the issues. He tends to fall with these easy solutions that are not going to fix anything. Like, you know, reforming the Communications Decency Act,

which is the thing that immunizes platforms for bad speech acts on the platform. And there's this kind of, you know, thin liberal critique of this that just goes like, why should they make money from hate? And what they don't realize is that if you think Mark Zuckerberg is really bad at moderating speech, then saying you have to moderate more speech

and you should always err on the side of caution is not going to end up with the people you like having more of their speech promulgated on platforms that Mark Zuckerberg owns. And it's also going to mean that anyone who wants to compete with Mark Zuckerberg is going to need to start with like a couple hundred million dollars to hire and train a bunch of moderators

to censor speech just like yours. Yeah. You can only post on Facebook now if your post has the words, yes, queen in it. That's going to be the rule. So essentially, right, it is, I think it's, you should, one should not necessarily hold out too much hope that the report as it is is going to be

the document that creates whatever law happens. But it seems as though, again, it seems like it's taking it seriously, because remember, there's meaningful transformation in America. And again, don't forget, antitrust is a harm reduction. Meaning, but meaningful like positive political action in America, the first obstacle it faces is that the Democrats suck.

And then it has hundreds subsequently to them. Yeah, I would agree. The first one. A whole fucking Rube Goldberg machine of problem. And it just, it seems like they've gotten this one thing sort of right. Can I be the voice of hope here? I've got hope here.

So I actually just, I published a book about this in August. She's got the coronavirus. Get her out. With one zero called How to Destroy Surveillance Capitalism. That's kind of like it's monopolies, not mind control in the long. But the end of it is my hope message,

which is that it's true that tech is like a powerful adversary and the Dems kind of suck at this stuff. But what we do have is a bunch of people who are laboring under harms for market concentration in labor. And as purchasers and as human beings on earth, whose planet is being destroyed by monopolies. And, you know, back before we had the term ecology, you had a thousand issues like owls or the ozone layer,

but they weren't a movement. And the term ecology turned a thousand issues into one movement with a thousand ways to get involved. In the same way that other big frames, right, like the frames about class and so on can gather a bunch of people who think they have disparate issues and under a single umbrella. And I think that pluralism and self-determination,

which is one of the reasons I think interoperability is so important because, you know, it's not that we need to fetishize competition for its own sake, but rather the idea that you have to take what you're given in terms of how the things that you live your life with work and you can't modify them or ask someone else to modify them to make them suit your idiosyncratic needs and use cases is really bad for us.

And I think that there are a lot of people who are pissed off about monopoly in lots of domains. They don't know it, right? They think that they're pissed off that their favorite wrestlers are begging on GoFundMe for money to die with dignity in their fifties because there's only one wrestling league left and they've been reclassified as contractors and lost their medical insurance.

But really they're pissed off at the absence of anti-monopoly enforcement. And with that kind of movement, right, then maybe we can see some action. Maybe that's how we get around this problem. And I mean, I think like the thinking about this as a issue that you hope a politician will solve, this is about as like, all of those problems sort of stack up

where, okay, well, this is like extrapolating this is a labor issue because first the Democrats have to not suck, which I've never seen that really before for quite a while. And then they have to get it through Republicans, then it's committee, blah, blah, blah. But if you want to look at things that have made tech companies do less awful things in recent history without

having to go through the Rube Goldberg machine that starts with the Democrats not sucking, it tends to be labor action. If you look at, again, the programmers that work together to refuse to work with ICE and so on, it's these kinds of things that I think are going to be things that give us the more durable change, right? Did it deliberately to annoy Matt Iglesias.

That's right. And, you know, also the last couple of, or at least my last thought on this before I turn over back to you, Corey, for a little more discussion of a maybe more recent book. It's also that I personally, and again, I think I might get some disagreement here from our guest, I personally think that monopolism isn't necessarily

that bad depending on who has it, right? I personally would quite like if the state has a monopoly on, say, the power generation or whatever. And I don't necessarily want to have five different social networks and nine different search engines and so on, but I just, it's what I don't like. It's not that it's a monopoly, it's that it's a private monopoly.

So I think that the idea of, I think socialists have to not forget that the goal isn't, for us anyway, isn't better competition. No, it's to be more like Mitch McConnell of all people and be a dead-eyed psycho who has a political goal and knows how to exercise power in service of it. And also can turn his head 180 degrees. And practice turning your head more and more every day.

And in this case, anti-monopolism moves towards the goal of, I guess you could say, light-side Mitch McConnell. But I think we have to, for our part anyway, have to remember that that's not the end goal. That's harm reduction on the way to the end goal. But basically, Corey, you've also written in your most recent book, Attack Surface, about how, which is a fiction book, but fiction can be a powerful way

to transmit these messages, about how workers can simply decline to engage in the sort of more terrific abuses that monopolies enable. Yeah, so Attack Surface is the third little brother book. And those were these YA novels I wrote in the last decade. Well, last decade and the decade before, a little brother in homeland. And it's a standalone sequel about a young woman who appears

at the beginning and the end of those other two books. She's a kind of antagonist in those books. She's a surveillance contractor. We meet her first as a DHS employee spying on insurgent movements in the U.S. and then as a Beltway Bandit trying to disrupt militias in Iraq and a forward operations base. And then finally, as a surveillance contractor

for a company a lot like the NSO Group, trying to put down color revolutions in the former Soviet Union. And along the way, she's trying to figure out how to look in the mirror and feel like a good person. And, you know, I think a lot of us who got involved with technology started off by being intoxicated by the sense of autonomy and self-determination you get when you figure out how to get a computer to do something

well and forever or you get on a network and you find people who have ideas that you've never been able to express and make communities with them. And yet her job is taking that away from them. And she, her whole life is engaged in this compartmentalization to try and make herself feel good about herself and doing self-destructive shit like teaching the dissidents that she's spying on how to resist the surveillance tools

that she's installing in the National Telco Center. This goes very badly for her. Her job as an ex-German surveillance colonel who's now in industry as an executive, she ends up leaving the country and going back to San Francisco where she finds to her horror that her childhood best friend who's now a Black Lives Matter activist is being targeted with the same cyber weapons

that she's been building. And it's about her moral reckoning with herself. You know, as you say, we had these amazing labor moments in the last year. We had 20,000 people walk out of Google. We had all of the refusals to build facial recognition or work with ICE. And, you know, trying to figure out the story

that those people tell themselves when they go to work and they do their thing is, I think, a big part of how we change who builds what and what they end up building. And Little Brother and Homeland were significant for me because of all of the people who came up to me after I published them to say, like, the reason I'm a cryptographer, the reason I'm a security researcher,

the reason I'm a human rights activist or a cyber lawyer is because I read these books and they made me, on the one hand, very excited about the possibilities of technology and on the other, very frightened about what happens if they fall into the wrong hands, if the wrong people get to decide how the tools work. And I'm hoping that this book reaches a similar kind of audience, people who are currently in the industry,

people who know how to build this stuff, people who talk themselves into thinking that it's inevitable that they do it and who, frankly, like, there's only five big companies that'll hire them or small companies that are hoping to be bought by those big five companies and so feel that they're corralled into it and to realize that they have far more in common

with the users that they're taking autonomy away from than they do with their bosses. Well, if you are a tech worker and you are feeling some questions about whether or not what you're doing is worthwhile, moral, or conducive to the long-term survival of the human race, might I recommend that you... That it isn't.

Might I say that, A, you're probably right, but B, why not read a tax service anyway? Yeah. And if you like audio, you know, I won't allow DRM on any of my books and so Macmillan didn't want my audio rights because Amazon owns the only audiobook store, like 95% of the market's in Audible and they require DRM.

So I kept the rights and I made my own audiobook paid union scale to Amber Benson from Buffy to come and record it. And we've released it as a DRM free download. It'll be out on the 13th of October in every audiobook store except Audible. It's an Audible exclusive. It's exclusive of Audible.

That's right. Well, the funny thing I have version read by Yerk van de Klerk. That's right. It was the best of times down at the technology factory. Some workers were on one side of the factory. The other workers were on the other side with a sin wall between them.

So if you want a version of a tax service read by Jerk van de Klerk, that's available on only one audiobook store and you have to find out what it is. Also the rest of the Johannes vonck and the clog head shirts, they're also there in every size. So get hunting.

Yeah, go find it. It's one of the bunkers in Albania. Yeah, exactly. It's one of the bunkers of Albania. You have to find out which one. You'll know it because it has a gloss screen on the door. Bunker screen. Yeah, exactly.

That's what we call it. All right. So, hey, I also noticed that we are going super long. So, Corey, I want to thank you very much for coming back on this show. I really enjoyed it, guys. You're so much fun and I love the show and I listen all week

and I don't know how you put out as much audio as you do. And as someone who lived in London for 13 years, I'm really enjoying Britonology. Oh, thank you. Thank you. That means a lot because we didn't think it was going to be a hit and the fact that it has been has blown our minds.

Who doesn't love a little bit of Britonology? Personally, I think that the next Britonology you have out might have your handsomest guest ever. All right. You look fan-declugged. Johannes vonk himself. Johannes vonk and his clogged heads. Yeah, apart from Mohammed, RIP.

So, hey, anyway, in other words, sub to the Patreon. We have various links in the in the episode notes. You know what it is. Yeah, support Balefun. Support the London Raiders Union. There's links in the show notes for those as well. Yeah, I am absurdly.

I'm so mad that Marcus Brown is still in jail. I know. De-incarcerate comrade Marcus Brown. Yeah. Fund the expedition to find what oil drum Jan Marsalek is currently decomposing in. We will return his remains to an Austrian basement where they belong.

And, you know, the theme song. It's Here We Go by Jinsang. Listen early, listen often. And don't forget, check out Hell of a Way to Die. Well, there's your problem. The whole 10K post. 10K post. The YouTube zone.

Yeah. Our Twitch stream, the YouTube. I'm getting all of them in. Oh, the YouTube zone is so good. The Twitch stream now is just us watching YouTube videos. It's so good. It's so much fun. It's better than it's ever been, baby.

Yeah. So, with all of that in mind, I want to thank you for listening. Thank Cory again for being here. Thank my wonderful and handsome co-hosts and very pretty co-hosts for being all where they are and all who they are. And see you later.

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