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Reclaiming the Internet

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“You don't have to fight tech monopolies to get rid of tech monopolies. You have to fight corporate power to get rid of tech monopolies.” - Cory Doctorow Share on X

We may not always understand the evolution of the internet and how tech monopolies exist, but having digital freedom fighters is vital to making conscious change. Today's guest is Cory Doctorow. Cory is a science fiction author, activist, and journalist. He is the author of many books and most recently, Picks and Shovels, The Bezel, and The Lost Cause, a solar punk science fiction novel of hope amidst the climate change emergency. 

His most recent nonfiction book is The Internet Con: How to Seize the Means of Corruption, a big tech disassembly manual. Other recent books include Red Team Blues, a science fiction crime thriller. In 2020, he was inducted into the Canadian Science Fiction and Fantasy Hall of Fame

Cory talks about the slow decline of online platforms and has spent decades fighting for digital rights, fair tech policy and a better, freer internet. His work spans peer to peer networks to antitrust reform and his books—fiction and nonfiction—have become battle cries for tech reformers and digital freedom fighters around the world.

In this episode we talk about how we got here, what Cory sees as the most urgent threats to digital freedom and the small cracks in the system that might finally let the light back in. From jailbreaking laws and app store monopolies to what comes after big tech’s dominance, Cory shares a roadmap for reclaiming the internet—not just as consumers but as citizens.

“If you’re putting a lock on something I own and not giving me the key, that lock is not there for my benefit.” - Cory Doctorow Share on X

Show Notes:

“I think we’re closer to meaningful change than we’ve ever been in my career. The chaos means the ground is shifting—and we have a chance to shape what comes next.” - Cory Doctorow Share on X

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Transcript:

Cory, thanks so much for coming on the Easy Prey Podcast.

Oh, it’s absolutely my pleasure. Thanks for having me on.

Super looking forward to this. Can you give myself and the audience a little bit of background about who you are and what you do?

My name is Cory Doctorow. I’m a science fiction novelist, activist, and a journalist. For more than 23 years, I’ve worked with the Electronic Frontier Foundation as an activist, mostly on digital rights management and some related issues like competition and antitrust. I was formerly their European director.

I’ve written more than 30 books, most of them science fiction novels, some for adults, some for young adults, some graphic novels for tweens, and a picture book, as well as several books of non-fiction and short story collections. I am a bestseller in many countries in the world, and I am known these days for having coined the term “enshittification.” For 19 years, I was co-editor and I remained co-owner of one of the seminal blogs, a website called Boing Boing.

I remember Boing Boing.

It’s still going. I have a solo project now. I have a newsletter called Pluralistic at pluralistic.net. You can get that as email, as RSS, as a webpage. It goes out every day as a Twitter thread, a Mastodon thread. It goes out on Tumblr and on Medium. It’s all open license, Creative Commons attribution, so you can republish it, including commercially without compensating me or without my permission. You’ve just got to follow the license terms.

Cool. So your origin story. How did you get into tech, freedom, digital rights, being an author?

Well, they are quite intertwined. I always say to young people who want to know how to get into the tech sector, if you don’t have the hard work ethic, the foresight, and the sticktoitiveness to be born in 1971, I can’t help you.

Being born in 1971 with a computer scientist for a father meant that we had teletype terminals in the house in the mid-70s, an Apple II Plus and a modem in the late-70s, and the rest is history, as they say.

There came a time after I dropped out of my fourth undergraduate program when it became very clear that the tech sector would take anyone who understood technology, even a little, and give them a job that paid significantly more than I was making working in a science fiction bookstore.

I went from there to becoming a web developer and also a freelance CIO, helping small businesses get online, wire up their offices.

One of my clients and I, along with my neighbor, started a software company during the dot-com bubble, raised money, I moved to San Francisco, and I got involved with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which is an organization that I thought very highly of already.

My colleague and mentor, Bruce Sterling, had written a history of the EFF called The Hacker Crackdown that I had devoured. I knew some people who were peripheral to the organization, and my software company was a peer-to-peer company.

Our investors, after the master lawsuits came down, got freaked out as heck. We needed legal representation of the sort we weren’t getting from our corporate counsel. We needed specialists.

A bunch of our programmers were hackers from a group called Cult of the Dead Cow, which is now infamous because Beto O’Rourke admitted that he was a member as a teenager. They knew the EFF folks from the cryptographic fights, the fights over information security, hacker rights, and so on.

I got to know them, and they had just been kicked out of their offices in San Francisco during the dot-com bubble. Everyone who could be evicted was, so they could re-rent that office at crazy rates. They were all working out of their living rooms and meeting in a cafe once a week. I had rented an office with an extra room, so we put them up. There was only six of them at the time.

I realized as EFF co-founder John Perry Barlow, who’s also the junior lyricist for the Grateful Dead as he once said, “I was more of a dot-org guy than a dot-com guy.” Eventually, I quit the company I helped found, and I went to work for EFF as their European director for quite some time. I ended up living in London for 13 years before moving to Los Angeles where I live now.

As to science fiction, my dad was a science fiction fan. When I was a kid, we used to watch Doctor Who together with my baby brother on nights when my mom was off at teacher’s college. The woman who had introduced Doctor Who every week on public TV in Ontario was the science fiction writer, editor, and critic named Judith Merril.

Judy had been married to Frederik Pohl. They had lived in Chicago. After the 1968 police riots in Chicago, she decided to enter voluntary exile. She took the kids. She divorced Fred. They moved to Toronto, and she got the books in the divorce. She donated them to the Toronto Public Library system, where they formed the nucleus of what’s now the largest public science fiction reference collection in the world called The Merril Collection.

She got this sweet gig on public TV, and she was a tough old broad. She was a gray-haired lady with a squint, who took no shit from anyone, chain smoked, and had a great, gravelly voice. She was like Slappy the squirrel. She’d come on on Tuesday nights on TV Ontario, and introduce Doctor Who.

She’d say things like, “Tonight’s show is about time loops. I remember we invented time loops in 1938. It was at the Futurian House at a spaghetti potluck dinner. I remember because Isaac Asimov was there, and he wouldn’t stop grabbing CM Cornblue’s girlfriend’s ass. Cyril got very angry about it.”

“Anyway, we got to talking about time loops, and that night we wrote 13 stories about time loops. In the morning, I took the A train to Rockefeller Center, and I threw them over John W. Campbell’s transmeta astounding stories. He published them all, and that is where time loops came from.”

I already knew who Judy was, and when I was about nine or 10 years old, we took a school trip to her library. She said, “Kids, if you write a story, you can bring it to me and I’ll help you make it better. I’m the writer in residence here, which, to be very Canadian about it, it’s like Wayne Gretzky offering to help a 10-year-old work on a slapshot.”

I started going down to the Merril Collection. It was then called The Spaced Out Library; it was the 80s. Judy mentored me, and it turned out she had convinced a local fan when I was just one or two years old to found what became the oldest science fiction bookstore in the world.

I ended up getting a job there. She convinced some other local fans to start a science fiction magazine. They published my first story. She would take the writers who were doing well and put them in workshops together where they would critique each other’s work. So I became part of a very long, live, and continuing science fiction workshop called the Cecil Street Irregulars.

As it turned out, she even founded the amazing writing workshop at my weird alternative high school. I didn’t know this at the time, but 10 years before I got there, she’d had a writers-in-the-school grant. She’d gone and set up this workshop that was still running. People came from all over the city from other schools to attend this workshop. It started at 5:00 PM and ended at 6:30 PM or 7:00 PM. And a couple of nights a week, kids would trek down there not for credit, just to be in the workshop.

I really owe it all to Judith Merril. You combine politics—my dad and mom were involved in politics. My dad was anti-nuclear proliferation and labor activist, and my mom was also a labor activist and also involved in fight to legalize abortion in Canada. I grew up in this very political milieu. You combine the computers I grew up with and the science fiction I grew up with and the politics I grew up with and you get me. That’s how I ended up where I am.

That makes sense. That actually does make a whole lot of sense. You and I, for some portion of our formational years were pre-public Internet. How has your use of the Internet, what you think of the Internet, and how you interact with it changed over your life?

Oh, well, enormously. Our first connection with network communication was a modem card, a Hayes 150-baud, maybe it was a 300-baud. No, it was 110-baud modem card in our Apple II Plus. The Apple II Plus had limited expansion slots. The slot that we used for the modem was otherwise occupied by a memory expansion card that also had lowercase characters because out of the box, the Apple II Plus has only uppercase characters. An 80-column card, that’s what it was.

I tell you what. I didn’t see a lowercase letter for about five years because I never put that card in because the modem was just always connected. I learned tricks. I learned toll fraud. I could call BBSes elsewhere in the world without getting the phone bills that would get my parents angry at me.

But I also learned the AT command sets because it was a rotary-dial modem, a pulse-style modem. You would never get into a busy BBS with a pulse-style modem. The window in which the lines were open were too small, so I got a touchtone phone and I would hand redial it over and over again until it rang, and then I would do the AT command to pick up the line, and I would slam the phone down as I heard the carrier come on.

So that was my early experience. BSSes became more sophisticated, they became multi-line, and they got feeds. In particular, BBSes has got FidoNet.

I ran a FidoNet node.

Tom Jennings, who created FidoNet, is a pal of mine. He lives here in Los Angeles. He’s got a little cameo in my latest novel. He comes to our Christmas parties. I even have some Tom Jennings stuff.

That black paper tape you see hanging there, that’s a hand-punched paper tape biography of Nicola Tesla that he made as a performance piece, and he fed it through a teletype printer that he refurbished. He refurbished this vintage hardware with no take-up reel. So the Tesla biography just fell on the floor as it ran through it. It was a beautiful thing.

The terminal had bells and lights. He’d programmed the biography to ring the bell and flash the lights when the ASCII art diagrams or Turing machines were coming up, so that you could come and watch the Turing machine be drawn on the page with the fanfold wide format printer paper. He’s an amazing guy.

So we had FidoNet, and there was another network—gosh, I’m blanking on what it was called, but it was part of these first-class BBSes, which were these Mac BBSes. They had a way of connecting each other.

But then I remember one day, I dialed up my local BBS. Instead of just 50 FidoNet feeds, there were 50,000 Usenet feeds. That was the day I found out much later when I got to know Tom, that he and John Gilmore, who founded EFF, along with John Perry Barlow, Steve Wozniak, and Mitch Kapor, that he and John Gilmore who had founded the first dial-up ISP in the world, The Little Garden, decided that they would bridge Usenet into FidoNet. And that was how I got Usenet in my FidoNet feed.

Then we got our first Freenet in Toronto. I was going to meetings and arguing about whether we’d have the alt hierarchy. Then I put in an ISDN line at home and ran blue wire all around the building. I lived in a warehouse and there were 15 units.

We got a couple of thousand feet of Cat5 and some routers, and ran really hubs because routers were too expensive. Ran always-on network connections, 64K to everyone, which was a miracle.

At that point, I started providing that as a service to clients, getting their ISDN set up for them and getting them always-on network connections. Then we got DSL, and then Wi-Fi. I became an open Wi-Fi activist, traveled with Wi-Fi hotspots and would connect people.

When we were at the United Nations fighting tech policy questions at the World Intellectual Property Organization, we would use Wi-Fi hotspots with no network drop to make WLANS among all the NGOs so that we could run chats in the background or run a back channel during the plenary sessions.

We actually started using Etherpad running on a local instance, so running on someone’s Mac because it was just a Unix utility running on someone’s Mac. We would have three people. One person would be transcribing everything said in the UN meeting, one person would be cleaning up their typos, and a third person would be annotating it.

We would publish these twice a day. We’d go upstairs to where there were five PCs. We’d unplug one, plug it into one of ours and upload this, and it would get slash audit.

By contrast, these meetings were dominated by private industry, mostly by pharma, but also the record and movie companies. These meetings, official records were published at six month intervals, but only after the secretariat had circulated the transcript to everyone quoted in it, and gave them the opportunity to redact anything they didn’t want in the public record.

We were publishing real-time records of this. We were live-blogging it, and it completely changed the way the room worked. We actually defeated a bad copyright treaty that way.

Today, of course I have my distraction rectangle in my pocket, just like you, and I have watched the Internet become what Tommy Eastman calls five giant websites filled with screenshots of text from the other four. I am as worried about the Internet as I am excited about its potential.

I am as worried about the Internet as I am excited about its potential. -Cory Doctorow Share on X

I am quite mournful of the old, good internet we had. I’m quite insistent that this can’t be the end of it, that we need a new, good internet. We need to make the shiternet an unfortunate transitional phase between that old, good internet and that new, good internet.

I think the path to that lies through technological self-determination, the ability to modify and improve the services, devices, and code that we use, so that they serve us rather than the people who made them or the people who operate them. That’s really what my life’s work is these days.

Is that last statement what worries you most about the Internet now?

I think what worries me most about the Internet is what has worried me all along, which is that ubiquitous computing and sensing, and ubiquitous technology as a single path through which we engage with one another civically, politically, socially and so on could become a powerful tool of surveillance and control, and it has become that.

There’s a revisionist history of EFF and the movement that it was part of and remains part of, that says it was just a naive moment in which people could not conceive that giving everyone the Internet would end anywhere in any way but perfectly.

No one starts EFF because they think it’s going to be great, automatically. On the one hand, you have to be very excited about what could happen, but also very frightened about what happens if it goes wrong.

There was a saying during the McCarthy hearings on epithet. They would call people premature anti-fascists. If you didn’t like fascism before America entered the war, if you didn’t like anti-fascism because you hated fascism and not because it was the other side of a war that America was embroiled in, you were a suspect because you were probably a communist. So premature anti-fascist was a euphemism for communist.

I feel like today we have premature internet freedom activist, that if you were an internet freedom activist in the days when the Internet was new, it’s probably because you just wanted to protect tech companies from being regulated.

Whereas if you came into it later and your animating view is that the problem with technology is that big tech perfected the mind control rate that alluded Rasputin and Mesmer were using big data, and that grampy became a QAnon because Facebook invented a mind control rate to sell your nephew fidget spinners, then you’re a sincere tech critic.

But a tech critic who’s been at it all along, who was equally angry about government and commercial policies that were poor, that person is probably just a corporate shill or, at best naive, who just didn’t understand how bad technology could get.

I just don’t think that’s true. I don’t recognize that in my firsthand experience of what we were all doing back then. And I don’t recognize it in what we’re doing today.

So what is the path forward?

Well, I don’t think that there is one path forward. This is the difference between being a novelist and an activist. If you’re a novelist, you can plot a smooth ascent up a gradient of rising tension and stakes until you reach a climax. And then everyone gets a medal from Princess Leia and the book ends.

Whereas if you’re someone working to change society, there are a lot of reversals. There’s no clear path. What you end up doing is what coders would call a hill-climbing algorithm, where you ascend a little bit up the gradient by whatever path you can find, and then reassess what paths are now available to you. Because all of the ways up this gradient are obscured when you’re at a lower state, so you have to keep proceeding stepwise.

I never know how we’re going to get from here to the future I want, but I do know some next steps we can take. Before we started recording, we were talking a little about this. I’ve been giving a lot of thought to what can be salvaged from what Trump is doing right now.

As you heard, I spent a lot of time abroad working on tech policy. I was in 31 countries in three years for EFF. I was on the road 27 days a month. I didn’t even plug my fridge in because it was costing me $10 a month to keep my ice cubes frozen.

The biggest enemy I had, the most significant force I had to contend with wasn’t American multinationals. It was the US trade representative. The US trade representative arm twisted every country in the world into adopting laws that made it a crime to reverse engineer and modify the technology that America exported.

That means you can’t jailbreak your iPhone to use a third-party app store, which means that if you’re a Canadian and you write an app, and I’m a Canadian and I want to use your app, the only way for me to legally do that is for you to put it on Apple’s App Store, such that every dollar that I give you for the rest of time that I’m your customer, takes a round trip through Cupertino and comes back 30 cents lighter, which is what Apple…

Or Ireland.

Well no, but the payment processing fee that Apple charges—it’s the same that Google charges, and Sony on the PlayStation, and Microsoft on the Xbox—30%. The going rate for payment processing in North America is 3%. That is three times what it is in Europe where it’s 1% or less. So this is just this giant private tax on the whole world.

It’s not just that. You think about printer ink. It’s against copyright law in America. It’s the Digital Millennium Copyright Act in Europe. It’s Article 6 of the copyright directive in Canada. It’s Bill C-11 in Mexico. It’s their implementation of the US-Mexico-Canada agreement, that under international law, modifying your printer so that it doesn’t check to see whether you have an OEM printer cartridge or whether it’s been refilled is a crime.

What that means is that HP and the small number of companies that have survived this orgy of acquisitions that have seen them all merge to about five companies that control the whole inkjet market, can raise the price of ink over and over and over again, and all you can do is eat shit.

Which is why today, printer ink is the most expensive fluid you can buy as a civilian without a permit. It’s $10,000 a gallon. You spend more on the fluid that you use to print your grocery list than you would on the semen of a Kentucky Derby winning stallion. It’s grotesque.

So all over the world, we have these laws that protect big tech. If you want to modify the Facebook apps so that it blocks ads and surveillance, it’s a felony. If you want to modify the ventilator in your hospital, so that your onsite technicians can fix it rather than having Medtronic, the American multinational MedTech monopolist that pretends it’s Irish to avoid its taxes, charge you to have someone come out and fix it, which is bad enough when there’s not a pandemic on, but when there is and you really need the God damn ventilators, then you can’t get them fixed at all, you need to pay them. Otherwise, it’s a felony.

If you’re a farmer and you want to fix your own tractor, you can’t do it. John Deere can threaten you with prison for modifying your tractor. So that accepts your repair without a John Deere technician coming out to the farm and typing an unlock code into the console after you do the repair and charging you $200 for it.

All over the world, countries have signed up to these laws, and the reason they did is that they couldn’t get tariff-free access to American markets without it. I remember I once heard from a negotiator from one of the Central American countries that was in the CAFTA, the Central American Free Trade Agreement, with the US. She was the information minister of this country.

She got a phone call from their negotiator saying, “Is it bad to agree to a DRM law?” And she said, “Yes, it’s very bad to agree to a DRM law.” He said, “But they won’t take our soybeans unless we do, so we’re taking a DRM law.”

So all over the world, access to American markets was conditioned on these laws. Access to American markets is now off the table, and it’s not coming back. The system of global trade has been renegotiated. It’s gone through an unscheduled midair disassembly.

What can we salvage out of this? Well, if the only reason countries around the world are signing up to have their economies looted by American multinationals is to get access to the American exports market, well then we can just get rid of that, and it’s time that we just get rid of it. If they do, they’re going to have the opportunity to become an export powerhouse.

There’s going to be a country that has the relationship to printer ink unlocking, that Finland had to mobile phones during the Nokia decade. Once that starts, it’s going to be a race to see which country can claim which vertical first do the capital formation and the business foundation to make that happen.

Once that happens, it’s going to leak into America because there’s no way there to stop Americans from logging into a website, downloading the jailbreaks, and paying for them. We benefit too from that.

This is the thing I’m really interested in right now. I’ve talked to people in all three parties in Canada as they’re going into this election, the Mexican presidency. My colleague, Carolina Botero, has written big editorials in the Colombian daily national newspaper about this. I was on a big Zoom call with a bunch of European consumer advocates this morning.

I’m very excited about this. I don’t know what else is going to happen in the world, but this is a corner of the world that I think I can help make a lot better right now.

How do you keep the tech giants from making, “Hey, we’re going to give money to make sure these things don’t change”?

You can’t bribe all the countries. You can try, but some country’s going to go, “Uh-oh. So all you other countries are going to sit on the sidelines?” The budget available to bribe a country not to jailbreak printers is a subset of the profits you can get by jailbreaking printers. It has to be. Where else is the money going to come from?

HP is not the mint. They don’t get to make their own dollars. They have one source of dollars screwing you on printer ink. In other words, unlocking the printers is always going to be more lucrative than taking the bribe if you’re bold, if you’re going to go for the brass ring.

Maybe it’s Nigeria that gets there first, or Ghana, or some other country with a giant tech sector. Maybe it’s India. Maybe it’s China. Who knows? It’s going to be someone, and whoever gets there first is going to kick off a race to the top because the bribes are nice. But you’re going to have a tech sector in your country. You’re going to have investors and entrepreneurs. Geeks who are going to be like, “Why are we the only people in the world not chasing this opportunity?”

It’ll be interesting because it’s going to flip a lot of markets, in a sense of, right now you can get a printer for free effectively. All of a sudden, printers are going to get expensive, but the ink’s going to be free. That transition time is going to be interesting.

And how expensive are printers going to be? Because once the ink is unlocked, then you could imagine printers that interoperate with existing printers, another printer that has the same sized cartridge wells as an HP printer that’s made by a third party. You could see all kinds of novel market entrants.

The natural number printer companies is not five. That’s an artificial artifact of lack antitrust enforcement. We should probably have as many printer companies as we have, I don’t know, companies that make cars, say.

I was going to say, but there are only about five of them, though.

No, there are about 10. Twenty if you count the Chinese ones that they won’t let you buy in America. At a minimum, 20 companies feels about right to me. That’s their problem. Where they get their margins is their problem.

They’re not a charity as they will tell you when you ask them why they’re taking such grotesque rents. They say, “We’re not a charity.” Well, if you’re not a charity, then I don’t owe you a thing. Figure it out or go bust, and let someone smarter than you buy your assets out of bankruptcy.

There is no eternal right to dominate the printer industry. It should be a temporary thing. I’ve been hearing for years that if we make things cheap, they’ll get expensive. It hasn’t happened. The only thing that’s made things expensive is letting companies create monopolies where they can fix prices. It’s the only thing that’s made stuff expensive.

The only thing that’s made things expensive is letting companies create monopolies where they can fix prices. It’s the only thing that’s made stuff expensive. -Cory Doctorow Share on X

I remember I used to hear people when I was working on DRM on TV. I fought a couple of different DRM standards, one in the US and one in Europe. A studio executive said, “If we don’t have DRM on television, the only thing people will make is reality TV because that’s the only thing cheap enough to make a buck back on.”

Sure, there’s a lot of reality TV, but in the interceding years, we got Netflix. We got prestige television. The most high-budget television era in the history of the world came after that moment. It’s just nonsense. It’s just self-serving rubbish.

So the initial starting question, the route that we went down was what fears do you have about the Internet? What’s the flip side? What’s the excitement? What is the hopeful, optimistic view?

Well, I think that we are now at this moment where we could see a real set of changes. I think we’re closer to those changes than we’ve been in my whole career.

You may have heard Steve Bannon describe himself as a right-wing Leninist. I think I’m a left wing Milton Friedman. Milton Friedman, if you don’t know, was Reagan’s top economist. Thatcher loved him. Pinochet loved him. In Canada, Brian Mulroney loved him. He defined neoliberalism. He had a whole set of policy prescriptions that would involve dismantling the post-war prosperity that was shared so widely, although not perfectly, and we’re going back to the Gilded Age.

People would say, “Milton, nobody wants that.” People like the idea of a dignified retirement, decent education for their kids, and knowing that no one in their town is starving to death. How are you going to convince people to become forelock-tugging plebs again?

He would say, “In times of crisis, ideas can move from the periphery to the center in an eye blink. Our job is to keep good ideas lying around until the crisis hits.” For him, the crisis was the oil crisis. During the oil crisis, American politics and global politics changed.

Now, Milton Friedman had terrible political ideas, but his theory of change cannot be faulted. It’s 100% right. We don’t have an oil crisis, but we have a Trump crisis. We have a reordering of how the world works. It is by no means fixed how things will stand when the dust settles.

Things are up for grabs right now. We can be reactionaries, run around, and freak out about Trump, or we can be tactical. We can figure out what we can stand up as Trump is knocking down stuff and leaving rubble. Because Trump’s going to Trump, but he’s no master strategist. That guy’s all tactics.

He’s just like, “What do I do next? What do I do next?” He’s like a live streamer who broke into a nuclear missile silo, and in the chat is like every freaking Groyper and neo-Nazi. They’re just like, “Push that button. How about that button?” Except as the Heritage Foundation, the America First Institute, and a bunch of Groypers and Nazis. I think that in this chaos there is an opportunity.

From a consumer perspective, how do we as consumers deal with the tech companies that are trying to sell us $10,000 a gallon printer ink? “And well, if you want to use our phone, you’ve got to live in our ecosystem. Everything that you want to connect your phone has to be our ecosystem.” How do consumers fight to break out of that?

There’s not much you can do as a consumer. You’ve really got to do it as a citizen. Shopping your way out of monopolies is like recycling your way out of the climate emergency. By all means, wash your soft plastics before you put them in your blue bin, but you know they’re all going into an incinerator or a landfill.

There are 25 large firms that are responsible for the majority of the world’s climate change. You’re not going to change their conduct by buying different stuff. Hell, you go down to the grocery aisle. Almost everything you’re going to see that’s not on the edges where the produce is, is made by two companies: Unilever, and Procter & Gamble. Every brand. There are 50 brands of chips in your grocery aisle. Pick them all up. Twenty-five of them are made by P&G, the other half are made by Unilever.

But say someone does manage to start a local artisanal potato chip brand that people really love, either Proctor & Gamble or Unilever is going to buy them. When they buy them, they’ll issue a press release that says, “We bought them because we know our consumers value choice.” Any choice you want, so long as it’s Unilever or Proctor & Gamble.

If you pick the high-packaging, low-environmental consideration item, or you pick the low-packaging, high-environmental consideration item, they both come from either Unilever or Proctor & Gamble. You are not altering corporate behavior. They’re just expanding their line to accommodate you. So you’re not going to fix this with shopping. You are going to fix it with politics.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation has a national network of affiliate groups in many cities across America called the Electronic Frontier Alliance. EFA groups are local autonomous groups that join EFF network. EFF has paid activists that help organize them, share information among them, and keep them coordinated with one another. Oftentimes, when we get model legislation in one city from one of these groups, it’ll be proliferated to the other ones and so on. That’s one way you can get involved.

There are going to be lots of other ways to get involved right now, though. There are more political groups kicking off in this moment of chaos than you can count. Find one that matters to you, and do what you can to make a fairer world. Because a fairer world is always going to be a world in which all this other stuff is going to be easier to do. This is all connected.

Find one that matters to you, and do what you can to make a fairer world. -Cory Doctorow Share on X

Before the term ecology came along, people didn’t know that they were fighting on the same side. You care about owls, I care about the ozone layer. What does the destiny of charismatic, nocturnal avians have to do with the gaseous composition of the upper atmosphere?

It’s only the terminology that lets me know and lets you know that we’re fighting the same fight. You don’t have to fight tech monopolies to get rid of tech monopolies. You have to fight corporate power to get rid of tech monopolies. Corporate power, we saw the election that it delivered to us.

We saw the men sitting behind Trump on the dais. We saw the incredible sums of money that went into races up and down the ticket. This is the time to fight corporate power, and you can fight it in lots of different ways. So find the thing that is fighting corporate power where you are. You care about the owls, I care about the ozone layer, and together we’ll save the ecology.

I like that, but there’s just nothing we can do about the platforms.

Well, we can shatter their power, but the way we shatter their power is by doing things like legalizing jailbreaking their apps, or mandating that they stand up APIs so that you can leave but continue to exchange messages with the people that you left behind. It’s like convincing all the people you love to leave Facebook or Twitter together and go to Bluesky. People are starting to get there a little, but it’s slow. It’s hard.

Do you ever see that documentary, Fiddler on the Roof?

No.

Not really a documentary. That’s my dumb joke. So Fiddler on the Roof, every 15 minutes, Cossacks ride through this little Jewish town in the Pale of Settlement and just kick six kinds of shit out of everyone they see. People just take it for two-and-a-half hours. They’re just like, “This sucks, but I’m not leaving.”

In the final sequence of the movie, which, spoiler alert for 70-year-old movie, they get kicked out. The Czar kicks the Jews out of the Pale of Settlement, and you find out why they stayed, because the only thing worse than staying is leaving, because there’s no way they can stay together. They loved each other more than they hated the Czar.

That’s why people are on Facebook and on Twitter. You’re on Facebook because there’s a group that has the same rare disease as you. Your friends are on Facebook because that’s where they organize their kids’ little league carpool. There’s another group that are there because they emigrated from another country and that’s how they stay in touch with the people back home. And then there’s someone whose customers or audience is there. Maybe you can convince the people in your rare disease group to leave, but can they convince all the people whose kids are on the same little league team to leave?

Economists have a name for this. It’s called the collective action problem. The way Facebook solved this collective action problem 15 years ago when they were competing with MySpace—MySpace had all the users baked in—is they gave everyone who wanted to leave MySpace and go to Facebook a bot. You gave that bot your login and your password and it would log into MySpace, impersonating you several times a day, scrape everything in your MySpace outbox and inbox, put them in your Facebook contacts, and you could reply to them there and it would push them back out again.

Now you do that to Facebook today, they’ll say, “You violated the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act,” that you violated their patents, their copyrights, their trade box, blah-blah-blah. Felony contempt of business model.

Well, we have to get rid of those laws. If we get rid of those laws, then we can get people off the platforms. That’s how we evacuate the platforms. You make it easy for people to leave.

I’m thinking of so many of these companies that have come out with APIs. Oh, yeah, sure. There’s an API available for everything that you can do and, probably not with Facebook, but let’s just say everything…

Facebook had an amazing API.

But it’s going to cost you $100 million a year if you actually want to do anything useful with it.

Or they raise the price on it later. This is the roach motel model. Data checks in, but it doesn’t check out. When the API is getting devs to build apps that get people connected to the platform, that API is wide open. Once people are connected to the platform, the API clangs shut. Which is why you also have to legalize reverse engineering, because no one closes the API if they then have to get into a land war in Asia. It is then guerilla warfare with a million people reversing your endpoints to figure out how to get data in and out of your service. That presents an unquantifiable risk.

You remember when Reddit shut down its API and all the third-party apps as a prelude to its IPO? Because they wanted to show that their risks were all quantifiable and could be expressed in their S-1 so that investors would have confidence, buy the stock, and it would pop when they went public.

Well, if it’s legal for people to jailbreak their apps and to reverse engineer this stuff, then they have to put in their S-1 we will have to commit an unknown amount of engineering resource forever into defending the way things are right now, because people are going to be knocking at the doors 24/7 and the courts will not stop them.

So if you want to align their incentives, if you want to make them play nice and make an API that is useful, take away their right to block people from making their own APIs with scrapers. Then they’ll be like, “Ugh. Well, if you must do it, at least do it in a controlled, predictable way that we can talk to our investors about so that we don’t face mass sell-offs when our earnings expectations do not match up with reality. Because we had to spend 30% of our OPEX fighting reverse engineers last quarter.”

I’ll maybe comment from the flip side of that, having run whatismyipaddress.com, that there are several orders of magnitude of traffic that is not human visiting my website, and I have to spend money. “OK, well I need 50 virtual servers and…”

But that’s not illegal for them. It’s not illegal to operate a bot.

That’s true.

We’re not talking about a policy change that touches that in any way. I’m not a big AI fan. I think it’s bullshit, but the way that we’re going to resolve the AI-scraping wars, at least on services like Wikipedia and the Internet archive, is to have the people who run AI bots just figure out that there are torrents that they can get of all that data, and scraping is the dumbest conceivable way to get it.

I’m on the board of Meta Brains, which does MusicBrainz, the largest open catalog of music metadata in the world. It’s open access. We have a torrent. You can just download the torrent every day, just like a diff every day as well. We’re getting destroyed by scrapers, and they’re just dumb. We’ll figure this out. Eventually, they’re going to figure out that it’s not good for them. They’re burning a lot of compute and bandwidth, too. They should just be getting the goddamn torrent.

That is always interesting to me. Maybe it was simpler to program your scraper than it is to deal with some other data source. You’re just making everybody else’s life and your own life worse because…

It’s lazy.

You’re relying on this thing that, “Well, guess what? It’s going to be my life’s mission to break scrapers.” Why not license the data or figure out a way to collaboratively get it as opposed to playing cat and mouse?

Yeah, if you get the torrent, you’re not getting honeypotted. Have you seen Cloudflare’s honeypot? It’s just an endless stream of plausible AI-generated nonsense. They’re just feeding AI to the AI. It’s going to give it mad cow disease.

Yup, and as a website owner who gets targeted by that stuff, I’m happy about that time.

Sure. I don’t have any love for those guys. I just think that the wrong policy tool is to say that you’re allowed to decide who can reverse engineer and modify the services that you put into the world.

We never had that rule when Facebook and Google were getting started. If that was the rule, Facebook wouldn’t have been able to import all those address books. Google wouldn’t have been able to scrape the Internet and make a search index. I think that if it’s sauce for the goose, it’s sauce for the gander.

We want free access while it benefits us, and as soon as it no longer benefits us, we want to charge for it or make it go away.

When we do it, it’s progress. When you do it, it’s piracy.

Is the trick to stay in the middle or to keep it at the progress level?

The trick is to have the rules be set by democratically accountable institutions and not monopolies. There should be limits on how people use technology. You shouldn’t be able to defraud people. You shouldn’t be able to violate… Share on X

The trick is to have the rules be set by democratically accountable institutions and not monopolies. There should be limits on how people use technology. You shouldn’t be able to defraud people. You shouldn’t be able to violate their privacy and so on.

If Apple says, “Oh, we’re going to moderate our App Store to reduce privacy invasions,” that’s great. I’m all for it. People should try and do that. But if I own an iPhone and I don’t think Apple’s doing that well enough, then I should be able to install software Apple doesn’t like, including software that blocks Apple’s own monitoring software, which monitors every iPhone owner and uses the data to fuel targeted advertising network that Apple operates, which there’s no way to opt out of.

It’s fine for you to help me if I choose to stay with you. But if you’re putting a lock on something I own and you’re not giving me the key, then that lock is ultimately not there for my benefit.

It’s there for their benefit. We have specifically unintentionally not talked at all about what you’re writing these days or what you have written. And I want to give you an opportunity. How much of this type of discussion gets into your books and into the content of what you write?

Art is the process of taking a big, numinous, irreducible feeling that is in some artist’s chest and mind, infusing it into some intermediary medium, like a book, dance, painting, or a song, in the hopes that when an audience member encounters it, that some facsimile of that big, numinous, irreducible feeling materializes in their mind and heart.

As you’ve just heard, all of my big, numinous, irreducible feelings relate to my fear and hope about technology. This is what’s in my art too, without wanting to be too toffee-nosed about it.

Writing novels is an art form. Being a fiction writer is an art form. I consider myself a working artist. I’m in my third decade of doing it now. I think I’m pretty good at it. That’s what my art is about.

What are your most recent things that you’ve written and what more specifically are they about?

I write when I’m anxious. So during the lockdowns, I wrote nine books.

I was going to say, you must be a very anxious person with all the writing you’ve done in your life.

Indeed. Very much so. When you write nine books in a couple of years, you get weird and you start to get some weird ideas. One of my weird ideas was what would it be like to write the final volume in a long-running series without writing the rest of the series. To try and capture that last day of summer camp, last episode of Mash Energy without the tedious business of all the stuff that people have done before.

I wrote this book called Red Team Blues. That’s the final adventure of a 67-year-old, hard-charging, two-fisted forensic accountant who’s been in Silicon Valley since the 1980s busting every weird tech scam that a tech bro could come up with. When we meet him in Red Team Blues, he is doing one last job, and it’s a cryptocurrency heist.

I loved that book. It came out great. I sent it to my editor. He emailed me the next morning and it was just three lines. He said, “That was a fucking ride. Whoa.” Then he bought two more of them, and I had a problem because this was the last adventure.

But that was the last one.

Sure, I could bring him out of retirement. There’s some precedent. You have Conan Doyle bringing…

It’s a prequel.

Well, sure. That’s where I landed. Conan Doyle brought Holmes back over Reichenbach Falls. But that was after Queen Victoria promised him a knighthood. It turns out that even vice presidents, the Macmillan Company, cannot knight you.

So I worked out that I could write these books in any order, that in fact if you wrote them out of order, you never had continuity problems because you weren’t foreshadowing; you were back shadowing. You just fix any continuity gonks by inserting intermediate books that resolve the singing contradictions. In fact, the more you did that, the more of a premeditated guy you seem to be, even if you’re just pulling out of your butt.

The third one of these has just come out, it’s set in the early 1980s, and it’s Marty Hench’s first adventure after dropping out of MIT because he can’t finish his computer science program because he’s too busy programming computers. Marty becomes a CPA and follows his genius hacker roommate out to San Francisco in the middle of the weird PC revolution.

The early days of the PC were really weird. We didn’t know what computers were supposed to look like, who was supposed to use them, who was supposed to sell them, or what they were for. In Ontario where I was growing up, we had these computers the Ministry of Education made. They were called the Sammy Icon. They were in this giant injection molded case.

They booted three different operating systems. One of them was a logo prompt, and they had a huge trackball built into them, like the trackball in the front of a Centipede game at the arcade. It was a genuinely weird machine, and they were all over these bizarre computers.

Marty finds himself working with a bizarre computer company. It sounds like the setup for a joke. They’re called Fidelity Computing, and it’s run by an Orthodox rabbi, a Mormon bishop, and a Catholic priest. The punchline is that it’s a Ponzi scheme. It’s pyramid selling, specifically using the bonds of faith opportunistically to get parishioners to sell one another computers that are designed to lock them in, pick their pocket, and be impossible to stop using to get your data out of.

They’re using gimmick floppy drives that require floppy dust that cost 10 times as much, and special printers that require special paper. They’ve resprocketed the fan fold drives on the printers so that you need to buy special paper that costs five times as much. You have to buy from your upline.

Marty pretty quickly figures out he is working for the bad guys, especially when he runs into the competition, which is a rival company called Computing Freedom started by three young women who had previously been sales managers at Fidelity Computing. One is a nun who’s left her order after becoming involved in liberation theology. One’s a Mormon woman who’s left the faith after becoming disgusted with the LDS opposition to the Equal Rights Amendment. And one’s an Orthodox woman whose family has kicked her out because she’s come out as a lesbian.

These three women are making the tools of technological self-determination. They’re making the tools that let you jailbreak your Fidelity computer and get your data off it, or use anyone’s printer paper with your printer, or plug that printer into any computer and just basically get the hell out of the reverend sirs’ multimillion dollar pyramid scheme. And it turns out that the people who make millions of dollars by stealing from the parishioners who trust them are the people who are not above engaging in spectacular acts of violence in order to defend the scam.

What starts as a commercial dispute becomes a shooting war, and it becomes a very noir story set during the AIDS crisis when Joel Effren and the Dead Kennedys are playing San Francisco every weekend, when computers are everywhere, there’s a gold rush on. It was a fun book to write. It’s gotten really good reviews. It’s gotten really good notices. People really enjoy it. They say it’s the best of the Hench novels. The Hench novels are written to be read in any order, obviously, so you can read this one first if you want.

Nice. I go back and forth between being an avid reader and avoiding reading stuff. This story sounds like one that will get me back into reading for a while.

Well, as someone whose kid is starting college in the fall, I hope you become an avid reader. I need the royalties for tuition money.

I will get back into reading just for you. If people want to learn more about you, where can they find you?

pluralistic.net’s my open access newsletter, and that’s the easiest way to stay abreast of what’s going on. I write an essay about four or five days a week for it. As I say, it goes out as an email. There’s no tracking, there are no ads, I don’t get read receipts, there’s not even any graphics in the email. It’s just ASCII text.

There’s the website, pluralistic.net. There’s a full text RSS feed, but you can also subscribe to it on Mastodon, Twitter, Tumblr, and Medium. All those links are across the top of pluralistic.net.

Awesome. Cory, thank you so much for coming on the podcast today.

Thank you very much. It was my pleasure.

 

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