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    Arts

    Podcast – Cory Doctorow’s craphound.com

    Cory Doctorow’s Literary Works

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    Latest Episodes:
    Gopher: When Adversarial Interoperability Burrowed Under the Gatekeepers’ Fortresses Feb 24, 2020
    Show notes

    For my latest podcast, I read my latest EFF Deeplinks post, Gopher: When Adversarial Interoperability Burrowed Under the Gatekeepers’ Fortresses.

    It’s the latest installment in my case histories of “adversarial interoperability” — once the main force that kept tech competitive. Today, I tell the story of Gopher, the web’s immediate predecessor, which burrowed under the mainframe systems’ guardians and created a menu-driven interface to campus resources, then the whole internet. Gopher ruled until browser vendors swallowed Gopherspace whole, incorporating it by turning gopher:// into a way to access anything on any Gopher server. Gopher served as the booster rocket that helped the web attain a stable orbit. But the tools that Gopher used to crack open the silos, and the moves that the web pulled to crack open Gopher, are radioactively illegal today.

    If you wanted do to Facebook what Gopher did to the mainframes, you would be pulverized by the relentless grinding of software patents, terms of service, anticircumvention law, bullshit theories about APIs being copyrightable. Big Tech blames “network effects” for its monopolies — but that’s a counsel of despair. If impersonal forces (and not anticompetitive bullying) are what keeps tech big then there’s no point in trying to make it small. Big Tech’s critics swallow this line, demanding that Big Tech be given state-like duties to police user conduct — duties that require billions and total control to perform, guaranteeing tech monopolists perpetual dominance. But the lesson of Gopher is that adversarial interoperability is judo for network effects.

    When Apple’s App Store launched in 2008, it was widely hailed as a breakthrough in computing, a “curated experience” that would transform the chaos of locating and assessing software and replace it with a reliable one-stop-shop where every app would come pre-tested and with a trusted seal of approval.

    But app stores are as old as consumer computing. From the moment that timeshare computers started to appear in research institutions, college campuses, and large corporations, the systems’ administrators saw the “curation” of software choices as a key part of their duties.

    And from the very start, users chafed against these limitations, and sought out ways to express their desire for technological self-determination. That self-determination was hard to express in the locked-down days of the mainframe, but as personal computers started to appear in university labs, and then in students’ dorm rooms, there was a revolution.

    The revolution began in 1991, in the very birthplace of the supercomputer: Minneapolis-St Paul. It was named after the University of Minnesota’s (UMN) mascot, the gopher.

    MP3

    Talking Adversarial Interoperability with the Firewalls Don’t Stop Dragons podcast (Part I) Feb 18, 2020
    Show notes

    It’s been a few years since I last sat down with Carey Parker and his Firewalls Don’t Stop Dragons podcast, and last week I corrected that oversight, recording a long interview about the Right to Repair, Adversarial Interoperability, and Sonos’s e-waste gambit. Part I is up now (MP3), and part II will be up in a week.

    Persuasion, Adaptation, and the Arms Race for Your Attention Feb 10, 2020
    Show notes

    For my latest podcast, I read my January 2018 Locus column, Persuasion, Adaptation, and the Arms Race for Your Attention.

    The essay proposes that we are be too worried about the seemingly unstoppable power of opinion-manipulators and their new social media superweapons.

    Not because these techniques don’t work (though when someone who wants to sell you persuasion tools tells you that they’re amazing and unstoppable, some skepticism is warranted), but because a large slice of any population will eventually adapt to any stimulus, which is why most of us aren’t addicted to slot machines, Farmville and Pokemon Go.

    When a new attentional soft spot is discovered, the world can change overnight. One day, every­one you know is signal boosting, retweeting, and posting Upworthy headlines like “This video might hurt to watch. Luckily, it might also explain why,” or “Most Of These People Do The Right Thing, But The Guys At The End? I Wish I Could Yell At Them.” The style was compelling at first, then reductive and simplistic, then annoying. Now it’s ironic (at best). Some people are definitely still susceptible to “This Is The Most Inspiring Yet Depressing Yet Hilarious Yet Horrifying Yet Heartwarming Grad Speech,” but the rest of us have adapted, and these headlines bounce off of our attention like pre-penicillin bacteria being batted aside by our 21st century immune systems.

    There is a war for your attention, and like all adversarial scenarios, the sides develop new countermeasures and then new tactics to overcome those countermeasures. The predator carves the prey, the prey carves the preda­tor. To get a sense of just how far the state of the art has advanced since Farmville, fire up Universal Paperclips, the free browser game from game designer Frank Lantz, which challenges you to balance resource acquisi­tion, timing, and resource allocation to create paperclips, progressing by purchasing upgraded paperclip-production and paperclip-marketing tools, until, eventually, you produce a sentient AI that turns the entire universe into paperclips, exterminating all life.

    Universal Paperclips makes Farmville seem about as addictive as Candy­land. Literally from the first click, it is weaving an attentional net around your limbic system, carefully reeling in and releasing your dopamine with the skill of a master fisherman. Universal Paperclips doesn’t just suck you in, it harpoons you.

    MP3

    Podcast: In Serving Big Company Interests, Copyright Is in Crisis Feb 05, 2020
    Show notes

    For my latest podcast, I read my Copyright Week post for EFF’s Deeplinks blog, , In Serving Big Company Interests, Copyright Is in Crisis.

    The essay discusses how the “author’s monopoly” of copyright is of less and less use in serving as leverage for dealing with publishers and other parts of the entertainment supply chain. That’s because these little monopolies have been extracted from authors through the lopsided contracts they were supposed to prevent, increasing the leverage that the industry has over its talent pool. As the monopolies pile up in the industry’s vaults, they contribute to even more market concentration and an even more one-sided, buyer’s market for creators’ work.

    But not all copyrights act like this: some rights, like the inalienable “reversion right” in US copyright that lets creators claw their copyrights back after 35 years irrespective of their contracts, actually do enrich creators. There are many similar measures we could be taking to help creators get a better bargain, but we won’t get to them if we continue to blindly demand more monopolies that our industrial partners take and use to enrich themselves so that they, not us, can drive the copyright debate.

    2019 was not a good year for competition in the entertainment sector. Mergers like the $71.3B Disney-Fox deal reduced the number of big movie studios from five (already a farcical number) to four (impossibly, even worse). The Hollywood screenwriters have been locked in a record-breaking strike with the talent agencies—there are only three major agencies, all dominated by private equity investors, and the lack of competition means that they increasingly are negotiating deals on behalf of writers in which they agree to accept less money for writers in exchange for large fees for themselves.

    On top of that, the big entertainment companies are increasingly diversifying and becoming distribution channels. The Trump administration approved the AT&T/Time-Warner merger just as the Obama administration approved the Universal/Comcast merger a decade earlier. Meanwhile, Disney has launched a streaming service and is pulling the catalogs of all its subsidiaries from rival services. That means that the creators behind those works will no longer receive residual payments from Disney for the licensing fees it receives from the likes of Netflix—instead, their work will stream exclusively on Disney Plus, and Disney will no longer have to pay the creators any more money for the use of their work.

    MP3

    The case for … cities that aren’t dystopian surveillance states Jan 27, 2020
    Show notes

    For my latest podcast, I read my Guardian Cities column, “The case for … cities that aren’t dystopian surveillance states,” which was the last piece ever commissioned for the section.

    The Guardian commissioned the piece after reading my Toronto Life blurb about how a “smart city” could be focused on enabling its residents, rather than tracking and manipulating them.

    In the article, I revisit my 2015 Locus column on the idea of an Internet of Things that treats people “as sensors, not things to be sensed” — a world where your devices never share your data with anyone else to get recommendations or advice, but rather, where all the inanimate objects stream data about how busy they are and whether they’re in good repair, and your device taps into those streams and makes private recommendations, without relaying anything about you or your choices to anyone else.

    As I’ve often written, the most important thing about technology isn’t what it does, but who it does it to, and who it does it for. The sizzle-reels for “smart cities” always feature a control room where wise technocrats monitor the city and everyone in it — all I’m asking is that we all get a seat in that control room.

    It’s a safe bet that the people who make those videos imagine themselves as one of the controllers watching the monitors – not as one of the plebs whose movements are being fed to the cameras that feed the monitors. It’s a safe bet that most of us would like that kind of god’s-eye view into our cities, and with a little tweaking, we could have it.

    If we decide to treat people as sensors, and not as things to be sensed – if we observe Kant’s injunction that humans should be “treated as an end in themselves and not as a means to something else” – then we can modify the smart city to gather information about the things and share that information with the people.

    Imagine a human-centred smart city that knows everything it can about things. It knows how many seats are free on every bus, it knows how busy every road is, it knows where there are short-hire bikes available and where there are potholes. It knows how much footfall every metre of pavement receives, and which public loos are busiest.

    MP3

    Radicalized is a Canada Reads finalist, will be a graphic novel, and is eligible for the Hugo Award! Jan 22, 2020
    Show notes

    My 2019 book Radicalized has been named one of the five finalists for Canada Reads, the CBC’s annual book prize — Canada’s leading national book award, alongside of the Governor General’s award!

    My book was nominated by Akil Augustine, a beloved Canadian sportscaster and storyteller, and he’ll be championing the book through the Canada Reads process between now and March, when the winner is announced!

    The festivities kick off tonight, Wednesday, January 22nd, when Akil, me, and the other nominees and their champions will appear for a panel discussion at Toronto’s Eaton Centre Indigo Books at 7PM (free, but reserved tickets are recommended!).

    To celebrate this amazing news, I have two more announcements that I’ve been dying to make:

    1. The lead story from Radicalized, “Unauthorized Bread,” is being adapted as a graphic novel that Firstsecond will publish in 2022; I’m working on the adaptation with the excellent Jenn Doyle, known for their Knights Errant graphic novels.
    2. Ars Technica has published Unauthorized Bread as a free online read as of today!

    Keen observers will recall that “Unauthorized Bread” is also in development for television with Topic Studios, parent company of The Intercept.

    Needless to say, I’m very happy about all of this! And it would be remiss for me not to add that all four of the novellas in Radicalized are eligible for this year’s Hugo Award — nominations for which have just opened — and to add, frankly, that I really hope that if you are going to nominate one of these tales for the award, that you make it “Unauthorized Bread.”

    To make that case more thoroughly, please allow me to sweeten the pot with this week’s podcast, (MP3) which includes the first 30 minutes of the “Unauthorized Bread” audiobook, courtesy of Macmillan Audio, featuring Lameece Issaq’s incredible voice-acting. I’m very grateful to Macmillan for giving me permission to share this audio with you.

    MP3

    Inaction is a form of action Jan 13, 2020
    Show notes

    In my latest podcast (MP3), I read my latest Locus column, Inaction is a Form of Action,, where I I discuss how the US government’s unwillingness to enforce its own anti-monopoly laws has resulted in the dominance of a handful of giant tech companies who get to decide what kind of speech is and isn’t allowed — that is, how the USG’s complicity in the creation of monopolies allows for a kind of government censorship that somehow does not violate the First Amendment.

    We’re often told that “it’s not censorship when a private actor tells you to shut up on their own private platform” — but when the government decides not to create any public spaces (say, by declining to create publicly owned internet infrastructure) and then allows a handful of private companies to dominate the privately owned world of online communications, then those companies’ decisions about who may speak and what they may say become a form of government speech regulation — albeit one at arm’s length.

    I don’t think that the solution to this is regulating the tech platforms so they have better speech rules — I think it’s breaking them up and forcing them to allow interoperability, so that their speech rules no longer dictate what kind of discourse we’re allowed to have.

    Imagine two different restaurants: one prohibits any discussion of any subject the management deems “political” and the other has no such restriction. It’s easy to see that we’d say that you have more right to freely express yourself in the Anything Goes Bistro than in the No Politics at the Table Diner across the street.

    Now, the house rules at the No Politics at the Table Diner have implications for free speech, but these are softened by the fact that you can always eat at the Anything Goes Bistro, and, of course, you can always talk politics when you’re not at a restaurant at all: on the public sidewalk (where the First Amendment shields you from bans on political talk), in your own home, or even in the No Politics Diner, assuming you can text covertly under the tablecloth when the management isn’t looking.

    Depending on your town and its dining trends, the house rules at The No Politics Diner might matter more or less. If No Politics has the best food in town and everywhere else has a C rating from the health department, then the No Politics Diner’s rules matter a lot more than if No Politics is a greasy spoon that no one eats in if they can get a table elsewhere.

    What happens if some deep-pocketed private-equity types hit on a strategy to turn The No Politics Diner into a citywide phenomenon? They merge The No Politics Diner with all the other restaurants in town, spending like drunken sailors. Once that’s accomplished, the NPD cartel goes after the remaining competition: any holdouts, and anyone who tries to open a rival is given the chance to sell out cheap, or be driven out of business. NPD has lots of ways to do this: for example, they’ll open a rival on the same block and sell food below cost to drive the refuseniks out of business (they’re not above sending spies to steal their recipes, either!). Even though some people resent NPD and want to talk politics, there’s not enough people willing to pay a premium for their dinner to keep the Anything Goes Bistro in business.

    MP3

    Science fiction and the unforeseeable future: In the 2020s, let’s imagine better things Jan 06, 2020
    Show notes

    In my latest podcast (MP3), I read my Globe and Mail editorial, Science fiction and the unforeseeable future: In the 2020s, let’s imagine better things, where I reflect on what science fiction can tell us about the 2020s for the Globe‘s end-of-the-decade package; I wrote about how science fiction can’t predict the future, but might inspire it, and how the dystopian malaise of science fiction can be turned into a inspiring tale of “adversity met and overcome – hard work and commitment wrenching a limping victory from the jaws of defeat.”

    I describe a scenario for a “Canadian miracle”: “As the vast majority of Canadians come to realize the scale of the crisis, they are finally successful in their demand that their government address it unilaterally, without waiting for other countries to agree.”

    Canada goes on a war footing: Full employment is guaranteed to anyone who will work on the energy transition – building wind, tide and solar facilities; power storage systems; electrified transit systems; high-speed rail; and retrofits to existing housing stock for an order-of-magnitude increase in energy and thermal efficiency. All of these are entirely precedented – retrofitting the housing stock is not so different from the job we undertook to purge our homes of lead paint and asbestos, and the cause every bit as urgent.

    How will we pay for it? The same way we paid for the Second World War: spending the money into existence (much easier now that we can do so with a keyboard rather than a printing press), then running a massive campaign to sequester all that money in war bonds so it doesn’t cause inflation.

    The justification for taking such extreme measures is obvious: a 1000 Year Reich is a horror too ghastly to countenance, but rendering our planet incapable of sustaining human life is even worse.

    MP3

    Party Discipline, a Walkaway story (Part 4) (the final part!) Dec 21, 2019
    Show notes

    In my latest podcast (MP3), I conclude my serial reading of my novella Party Discipline, which I wrote while on a 35-city, 45-day tour for my novel Walkaway in 2017; Party Discipline is a story set in the world of Walkaway, about two high-school seniors who conspire to throw a “Communist Party” at a sheet metal factory whose owners are shutting down and stealing their workers’ final paychecks. These parties are both literally parties — music, dancing, intoxicants — and “Communist” in that the partygoers take over the means of production and start them up, giving away the products they create to the attendees. Walkaway opens with a Communist Party and I wanted to dig into what might go into pulling one of those off.

    Here’s part 1 of the reading, here’s part 2, and here’s part 3.

    We rode back to Burbank with Shirelle on my lap and one of my butt-cheeks squeezed between the edge of the passenger seat and the door. The truck squeaked on its suspension as we went over the potholes, riding low with a huge load of shopping carts under tarps in its bed. The carts were pretty amazing: strong as hell but light enough for me to lift one over my head, using crazy math to create a tensegrity structure that would hold up to serious abuse. They were rustproof, super-steerable and could be reconfigured into different compartment-sizes or shelves with grills that clipped to the sides. And light as they were, you put enough of them into a truck and they’d weigh a ton. A literal ton, and Jose—our driver’s—truck was only rated for a half-ton. It was a rough ride.

    Our plan was to pull up on skid row and start handing out carts to anyone around, giving people two or three to share with their friends. Each truck had a different stretch we were going to hit, but as we got close to our spot, two things became very apparent: one, there were no homeless people around, because two, the place was crawling with five-oh. The Burbank cops had their dumb old tanks out, big armored MRAPs they used for riot control and whenever they wanted to put on a show of force, and there was a lot of crime-scene tape and blinking lights on hobby-horses.

    MP3

    My annual Daddy-Daughter Xmas Podcast: interview with an 11-year-old Dec 20, 2019
    Show notes

    Every year, I record a short podcast with my daughter, Poesy. Originally, we’d just sing Christmas carols, but with Poesy being nearly 12, we’ve had a moratorium on singing. This year, I interviewed Poe about her favorite Youtubers, books, apps, and pass-times, as well as her feelings on data-retention (meh) and horses (love ’em). And we even manage to squeeze in a song!

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