Show notes
Key Insights:
* Cory Doctorow is AWESOME!
* It is depressing. We once, with the creation of the market economy, got interoperability right. But now the political economy blocks us from there being any obvious path to an equivalent lucky historical accident in our future.
* The problems in our society are not diametrically opposed: Addressing the problems of one thing doesn't necessarily create equal and opposite problems on the other side—but it does change the trade-offs, and so things become very complex and very difficult to solve.
* Always keep a trash bag in your car.
* Hexapodia!
References:
Books:
Cory Doctorow: How to Destroy Surveillance Capitalism https://www.google.com/books/edition/How_to_Destroy_Surveillance_Capitalism/W20NzgEACAAJ>
Cory Doctorow: Attack Surface https://www.google.com/books/edition/Attack_Surface/rFfEDwAAQBAJ>
Cory Doctorow: Walkaway https://www.google.com/books/edition/Walkaway/MKMsDAAAQBAJ>
Cory Doctorow: Down & Out in the Magic Kingdom https://www.google.com/books/edition/Down_and_Out_in_the_Magic_Kingdom/h8DvDwAAQBA>
Cory Doctorow: Little Brother https://www.google.com/books/edition/Little_Brother/r1zne2mZDW8C>
William Flesch:Comeuppance: Costly Signaling, Altruistic Punishment, and Other Biological Components of Fiction https://www.google.com/books/edition/Comeuppance/JSRWPYp1nNUC>
Daniel L. Rubinfeld: A Retrospective on U.S. v. Microsoft: Why Does It Resonate Today? https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0003603X20950227>
Louis Galambos & Peter Temin: The Fall of the Bell System: A Study in Prices & Politics https://www.google.com/books/edition/The_Fall_of_the_Bell_System/CXNPVjdxfAEC>
Websites:
Electronic Frontier Foundation: http://www.eff.org>
* Adversarial Interop Case Studies: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/10/adversarial-interoperability>
* Privacy without Monopoly: https://www.eff.org/wp/interoperability-and-privacy>
Cory Doctorow: Craphound http://craphound.net>
Cory Doctorow: Pluralistic https://pluralistic.net>
&, of course:
Vernor Vinge: A Fire Upon the Deep https://books.google.com/books?id=fCCWWgZ7d6UC>
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Grammatized Transcript:
Brad: Noah! What is the key insight?
Noah: Hexapodia is the key insight! Six feet!
Brad: And what is that supposed to mean?
Noah: That there is some nugget of fact that, if you grasp it correctly and place it in the proper context, will transform your view of the situation and allow you to grok it completely.
Brad: And in the context of Vernor Vinge’s amazing and mind-Bending science-fiction space-opera novel A Fire Upon the Deep?
Noah: The importance of “hexapodia” is that those sapient bushes…
Brad: …riding around on six wheeled scooters have been genetically…
Noah: …programmed to be a fifth column of spies and agents for the Great Evil.
Brad: However, here we seek different key insights than “hexapodia”. Today we seek them from the genius science-fiction author and social commentator Cory Doctorow. I think of him as—it was Patrick Nielsen Hayden, I think, who said around 2004: that he felt like he was living in the future of Scottish science fiction author, Ken MacLeod. And he wished Ken would just stop. At times I feel that way about Cory. But we are very happy to have him here. His latest book is How to Destroy Surveillance Capitalism IIRC, his latest fiction is Attack Surface. My favorite two books of his are Walkaway and—I think it was your first—Down & Out in the Magic Kingdom.
Cory: That's right. Yes. Thank you. Thank you for that very effusive introduction. I decry all claims of genius, though.
Brad: Well, we know this is a problem. When one is dealing with an author whose work one has read a lot of—by reading your books.by now I've spent forty hours of my life looking at squiggles on a page or on a screen and, through a complicated mental process, downloaded to my wetware and then run on it a program that is my image of a sub-Turing instantiation of your mind, who has then told me many very entertaining and excellent stories. So I feel like I know you very well…
Cory: There’s this infamous and very funny old auto reply that Neal Stephenson used to send to people who emailed him. It basically went: “Ah, I get it. You feel like you were next to me when we were with Hero Protagonist in Alaska fighting off the right-wing militias. But while you were there with me, I wasn't there with you. And so I understand why you want to, like, sit around and talk about our old military campaigns. But I wasn't on that campaign with you.
Brad: Yes. It was only my own imago, my created sub-Turing instantiation of your mind that was there…
Cory: Indeed. We are getting off of interoperability, which is what I think we're mostly going to talk about. But this is my cogpsy theory of why fiction works, and where the fanfic dispute comes from.
Writers have this very precious thing they say. It is: “I'm writing and I'm writing and all of a sudden the characters start telling me what they want to do.” I think that what they actually mean by that is that we all have this completely automatic process by which we try and create models of the people we encounter. Sometimes we never encounter those people. We just encounter second-hand evidence of them. Sometimes those people don't live at all. Think about the people who feel great empathy for imaginary people that cruel catfishers have invented on the internet to document their imaginary battles with cancer. They then feel deeply hurt and betrayed and confused, when this person they've come to empathize with turns out to be a figment of someone else's imagination.
I think what happens when you write is that you generate this optical link between two parts of your brain that don't normally talk to each other. There are these words that you are explicitly thinking up that show up on your screen. And then those words are being processed by your eyeballs and being turned into fodder for a model in this very naive way. And then the model gets enough flesh on the bones—so it starts telling you what it wants to do. At this point you are basically breathing your own exhaust fumes here. But it really does take what is at first a somewhat embarrassing process of putting on a puppet show for yourself: “Like, everybody, let’s go on a quest!” “That sounds great!” “Here we go!” It just becomes something where you don't feel like you're explicitly telling yourself a story.
Now the corollary of this is that it sort of explains the mystery of why we like stories, right? Why we have these completely involuntary, emotional responses to the imaginary experiences of people who never lived and died and have no consequence. The most tragic death in literature of Romeo and Juliet is as nothing next to the death of the yogurt I digested with breakfast this morning, because that yogurt was alive and now it's dead and Romeo and Juliet never lived, never died, nothing that happened to them happened. Yet you hear about the Romeo and Juliet…
Noah: …except that a human reads about Romeo and Juliet and cares…
Cory: That is where it matters, yes indeed. But the mechanism by which we care is our build this model which is then subjected to the author's torments, and then we feel empathy for the model. What that means is that the readers, when they're done, if the book hit its aesthetic marks, if it did the thing that literature does to make it aesthetically pleasing—then the reader still has a persistent model in the same way that if your granny dies, you still have a model of your granny, right? You are still there.
That is why fanfic exists. The characters continue to have imagined lives. If the characters don't go on having imagined lives, then the book never landed for you.
And that’s why authors get so pissy about fanfic. They too have this model that they didn't set out to explicitly create, but it's there. And it's important to the…
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