Podcast – Cory Doctorow's craphound.com

In this special Covid-19 edition of my podcast, I revisit my end-of-the-world short story When Sysadmins Ruled the Earth, originally published in Baen’s Universe in 2005. Hundreds of people have emailed and tweeted me about this story this week, so I thought it was long overdue that I revisited it (I last read it into my podcast in 2006). Sysadmins is a story about civic duty at the end of the world, about the network admins who decide to keep the internet running even as the apocalypse rages. It’s a story about mutual aid, human goodness, and real disagreements among people of goodwill. I hope it gives you some comfort. When Felix’s special phone rang at two in the morning, Kelly rolled over and punched him in the shoulder and hissed, “Why didn’t you turn that fucking thing off before bed?” “Because I’m on call,” he said. “You’re not a fucking doctor,” she said, kicking him as he sat on the bed’s edge, pulling on the pants he’d left on the floor before turning in. “You’re a goddamned systems administrator.” “It’s my job,” he said. “They work you like a government mule,” she said. “You know I’m right. For Christ’s sake, you’re a father now, you can’t go running off in the middle of the night every time someone’s porn supply goes down. Don’t answer that phone.” He knew she was right. He answered the phone. MP3

For my latest podcast, I read my latest Locus op-ed, A Lever Without a Fulcrum Is Just a Stick, which analyzes why giving creators more copyright hasn’t made them richer, and proposes other kinds of authors’ rights that would translate into real money for real creators. The fact that the company can’t reproduce your book without your permission doesn’t mean much if the only way to get your book into the public’s hands is through that company, or one of a small handful of companies with identical negotiating positions. None of the Big Five publishers will let you keep your ebook rights, and increasingly they won’t let you split your commonwealth and US rights, or retain your audio rights, or even opt out of binding arbitration in your contract, meaning that all disputes you have with them need to be settled not in court, but in a private arbitration system where they pay the judge who decides whether you’ve been wronged by them. In that monopolistic world, beefing up the author’s monopoly isn’t just useless – it’s counterproductive. You can extend the scope or duration of copyright all you like, but if those new rights are useful to the firms that monopolize the sector, they will simply acquire them as a condition of doing business with them, and add the rights to their arsenals, strengthening their market dominance. MP3

Last night I sat down for an interview and lively Q&A at the Kelowna Public Library with the CBC’s Sarah Penton as part of the Canada Reads national book prize, for which my book Radicalized is a finalist. Courtney Dickson was kind enough to send me raw audio from the board and to give me permission to post it and include it in my podcast feed. It was a genuinely wonderful night, with great and thoughtful questions, and I’m really glad that I get to share it with you! (MP3)

A couple of weeks ago, I posted Part I of my interview with the Firewalls Don’t Stop Dragons podcast, a podcast that covers computer security in a way that is accessible to nontechnical people. Carey Parker has posted part II (MP3) of the interview, where we dig into Right to Repair, Adversarial Interoperability, and monopoly control and trustbusting. It’s a great interview — hope you enjoy hearing it as much as I enjoyed participating in it!

For my latest podcast, I read my 2017 Wired op-ed, Disasters Don’t Have to End in Dystopias, a discussion of the themes in my novel Walkaway. The thesis is that our estimations of probability of danger are unduly influenced by our ability to vividly imagine that danger (this is called the “availability heuristic”), so stories about human barbarism during crises inspires people to expect — and perform — that barbarism. The answer is to tell stories that reflect the reality of crises: that they are the times when people pull together and help each other out. Here’s how you can recognize a dystopia: It’s a science fiction story in which disaster is followed by brutal, mindless violence. Here’s how you make a dystopia: Convince people that when disaster strikes, their neighbors are their enemies, not their mutual saviors and responsibilities. The belief that when the lights go out, your neighbors will come over with a shotgun—rather than the contents of their freezer so you can have a barbecue before it all spoils—isn’t just a self-fulfilling prophecy, it’s a weaponized narrative. The belief in the barely restrained predatory nature of the people around you is the cause of dystopia, the belief that turns mere crises into catastrophes. Stories of futures in which disaster strikes and we rise to the occasion are a vaccine against the virus of mistrust. Our disaster recovery is always fastest and smoothest when we work together, when every seat on every lifeboat is taken. Stories in which the breakdown of technology means the breakdown of civilization are a vile libel on humanity itself. It’s not that some people aren’t greedy all the time (or that all of us aren’t greedy some of the time). It’s about whether it’s normal to act on our better natures or whether our worst instincts are so intrinsic to our humanity that you can’t be held responsible for surrendering to them. MP3

My book Radicalized is a finalist for Canada Reads, the CBC’s national book prize. I sat down with Sheelagh Rogers, host of The Next Chapter, for a wide-ranging interview (MP3) about the book and the Trump-era anxiety that drove me to write it.

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

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.

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

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