*rC3 preroll music*
Cory Doctorow: Oh, I just got... Jinxx5: Please, I just wanted to say Hi
Chris...no...Bye Chris and Hi Cory *laughs* We just had a little chat before
and, as I know, you will be reading from your new book in a minute, as I just
stop talking and afterwards, there will be lots of time for all your questions. And
we're really curious already. C D: Great, Yeah. And I do have these
questions from the talk earlier and I'm going to try and get to those too. I'm
going to do a shorter reading, so we can do more interactive stuff. You can watch
videos of me on YouTube if you want to. It's more fun to interact. So the passage
I'm going to read comes from Attack Surface. Attack Surface is a standalone
Little Brother novel. And it's intended for adults. And it stars Masha who's a
young woman, who is at the beginning and the end of the other two books working as
a surveillance contractor. And by this third book, she's like a full-on cyber
mercenary working for a company a lot like, say, the NSO Group or Hacking Team.
Any other kind of hack for hire companies helping post-Soviet dictators
crush rebellions. And the way that she goes to sleep at night and still manages
to, like, square up her conscience is by helping the people, that she spies on. So
during the day, she installs surveillance appliances in the national data centers.
And at night, she meets with the protesters who are being spied on using
this technology and tells them what countermeasures work for it. And so, this
is very early in the novel. And Masha and Kriztina - who's one of these local
protesters - are walking through the square and the fictional, post-Soviet
Republic of Slovstakia during the beginnings of a protest that is shaping up
to be a very serious one.
*starts reading from book* The square buzzed with good energy. There was a line
of grannies who brought out pots and wooden spoons and were whanging away at
them, chanting something in Boris that made everyone understand. Kriztina tried
to translate it, but it was all tangled up with some Baba-Yaga story that every
Slovstakian learned with their mother's borscht recipes. We stopped at a barrel
fire and distributed the last couple of kebabs to the people there. A girl
I'd seen around, emerged from the crowd and stole Kriztina away to hold a muttered
conference that I followed by watching the body language out of the corner of my eye.
I decided that some of Kriztina's contacts had someone on the inside of the neo-Nazi
camp. And judging from her reaction, the news was very bad. What? I asked. She
shook her head. What? 10 p.m., she said, they charge. Supposedly some of the cops
will go over to their side. There's been money changing hands. That was one of the
problems with putting your cops on half pay. Someone might pay the other half. The
Slovstakian police had developed a keen instinct for staying one jump ahead of
purges and turnovers. The ones that didn't develop that instinct ended up in their
own cells or dead at their own colleagues' hands. How many? Borises are world class
shruggers, even adorable Pixie's like Kriztina. If the English have 200
words for passive aggressive and the Inuit have 200 words for snow, then
Borises can convey 200 gradations of emotions with their shoulders. And I
read this one as: Some, enough, too many. We are fucked. No murders, Kriztina. If
it's that bad we can come back another night. If it's that bad, there might not
be another night. Oh that fatalism. Fine, I said, then we do something about it.
Like what? Like you got me a place to sit and keep everyone else away from me for an
hour. The crash barricades around the square had been long colonized by tarps
and turned into shelters where protesters could get away from the lines when they
needed a break. Kriztina returned after a few minutes to lead me to an empty corner
of the warren. It smelled of B.O. and cabbage farts, but it was in the lee of
the wind and private enough. Doubling my long coats tails under my butt for
insulation, I sat down cross-legged and tethered my laptop. A few minutes later, I
was staring at Commander Litvinchuk's email spool. I had a remote desktop on his
computer and could have used his own webmail interface, but it was faster to
just slither into the mail server itself. Thankfully, one of his first edicts after
taking over the ministry had been to migrate everyone off Gmail - which was
secured by 24/7 ninja hackers who'd eat me for breakfast - and on to a hosted mail
server in the same datacenter that I had spent 16 hours in, which was secured by
wishful thinking, bubble gum, and spit. That meant that if the US State Department
wanted to pwn the Slovstakian government, it would have to engage in a trivial hack
against that machine, rather than facing Google's notoriously vicious lawyers. The
guiding light of Boris politics was: Trust no one. Which meant, they had to do it all
for themselves. Litvinchuk's cell-site simulators all fed into a big analytics
system, that maps social graphs and compiled dossiers. He demanded, that the
chiefs of police and military gather the identifiers of all their personnels, so they
could be white-listed in the system. It wouldn't do to have every riot cop placed
under suspicion, because they were present at every riot. The file was in a saved
email. I tabbed over to a different interface, tunneled into the Xoth
appliance. It quickly digested the file and spat out all the SMS messages sent to
or from any cops since I switched it on. I called Kriztina over. She hunkered down
next to me, passed me a thermos of coffee she'd acquired somewhere. It was terrible
and it reminded me of Marcus. Marcus and his precious coffee. He wouldn't last 10
minutes in a real radical uprising, because he wouldn't be able to find
artisanal coffee roasters in the melee. Kriztina, help me search these texts for -
... - help me search these for texts about letting the Nazis get past the lines. She
looked at my screen, the long scrolling list of texts from cops' phones. What is
that? It's what it looks like. Every message sent to or from a cop's phone in
the last ten hours or so. I can't read it, though, which is why I need your help. She
boggled, all cheekbones and tilted eyes and sensuous lips. Then she started
mousing the scroll up and down to read through them. Holy shit, she said in
Slovstakian, which was one of the few phrases I knew. Then, to her credit, she
seemed to get past her surprise and dug into the messages themselves. How do I
search? Here. I opened the search dialog. Let me know if you need help with
wildcards. Kriztina wasn't a hacker, but I taught her a little regular expression-foo,
to help her with an earlier project. Regex are one of the secret weapons of
hackerdom. Compact search strings that pass through huge files for incredibly
specific patterns. If you didn't fuck them up, which most people did. She tried a few
tentative searches. Am I looking for names, passwords? Something that would
freak out the interior ministry. We're going to forward a bunch of these. She
stopped and stared at me, all eyelashes. It's a joke? It won't look like it came
from us. It'll look like it came from a source inside the ministry. She stared
some more of the hamsters running around on their wheels, behind her eyes. Masha,
how do you do this? We had a deal. I'd help you and you wouldn't ask me
questions. I'd struck that deal with her after our first night on the barricades
together, when I showed her how to flash her phone with Paranoid Android. And we
watched the stingrays bounce off of it as she moved around the square. She knew I
did something for an American security contractor and had googled my connection
with "M1k3y", whom she worshiped naturally. I'd read the messages she'd
sent to her cell's chat channel sticking up for me as a trusty sidekick..
trustworthy sidekick to their Americanski- Hero. A couple of the others had wisely
and almost correctly assumed, that I was a police informant. It looked like maybe she
was regretting not listening to them. I waited. Talking first would surrender the
initiative, make me look weak. If we can't trust you, we're already dead, she said,
finally. That's true. Luckily, you can trust me. Search. We worked through some
queries together and I showed her how to use wildcards to expand her searches
without having them spill over the whole mountain of short messages. It would have
gone faster if I could have read the Cyrillic characters, but I had to rely on
Kriztina for that. When we had a good representative sample - a round 100,
enough to be convincing, not so many that Litvinchuk wouldn't be able to digest them
- I composed an email to him in English. This wasn't as weird as it might seem. He
had recruited senior staff from all over Europe and a couple of South African
mercs, and they all use a kind of pidgin English among themselves with generous
pastings from Google Translate, because OPSEC, right? Fractured English was a lot
easier to fake than native speech. Even so, I wasn't going to leave this to
chance. I grabbed a couple 1000 emails from mid-level bureaucrat I was planning
on impersonating and threw them in a cloud machine where I kept a fork of Anonymouth,
a plagiarism detector that used stylometry to profile the grammar, syntax, and
vocabulary from a training set, then evaluated new text to see if they seemed
by the same author. I trained my Anonymouth on several thousand individual
profiles from journalists and bloggers to every one of my bosses, which was
sometimes handy in figuring out when someone was using a ghostwriter or
delegated to a subordinate. Mainly, though, I used it for my own
impersonations. I'm sure that other people have thought about using stylometry to
fine tune impersonations, but no one's talking about it that I can find. It
didn't take much work for me to tweak Anonymouth to give me a ranked order list
of suggestions to make my forgery less detectable to Anonymouth. Shorten this
sentence, find a synonym for that word, add a couple of commas. After a few passes
through, my forgeries could fool humans and robots every time. I had a guy in mind
for my whistleblower: one of the South Africans, Nicholas Van Dijk. I'd seen him
in action in a bunch of flame wars with his Slovstakian counterparts. Friction
that would make him a believable rat. I played it up. Giving Nicholas some thinly
veiled grievances about how much dough his enemies were raking in for their treachery
and fishing for a little finder's fee for his being such a straight arrow.
Verisimilitude. Litvinchuk would go predictably apeshit when he learned that
his corps was riddled with traitors. But even he'd noticed something was off of a
dickhead like Van Dijk, who'd knock out his teammates without trying to get
something for himself in the deal. A couple of passes through Anonymouth, and I
had a candidate text along with the URL for a pastebin that I put the SMSes into.
No one at the Interior Ministry used PGP for email, because no normal human being
does. And so it was simplicity itself to manufacture an email and in Litvinchuk's
inbox that was indistinguishable from the real thing. I even forged the headers for
the same reason that a dollhouse builder paints tiny titles on the spines of the
books in the living room. Even though no one will ever see them, there's a
professional pride in getting the details right. Also, I had a script that did it for me.
*stops reading from book* Well, there we go.
J: Woohoo, I think you should...we all think the big applause right now.
C D: I just realized, that I found out about Anonymouth at 25C3.
J: Really? C D: I completely, like when I chose the
reading, I wasn't thinking about that. And as I was reading, I was like, didn't I
learn about this at a CCC? And I did. J: And now you're writing about it.
C D: Yeah. Yeah. That's why I write off my trips to hacker cons.
J: Huh. Do you actually use all those things for your research?
C D: Uh, many of them. I can't say, that I use Anonymouth, because I don't have to
forge many things, nor do I have to puncture forgeries. But I mean, the thing
that immediately struck me during the Anonymouth presentation was, if you
were like a fanfic writer, who wanted to find all the ways that your Harry Potter
story was not quite like a J.K. Rowling Harry Potter story, you could then tweak
your story to Rowling-ify it using Anonymouth. Right. Using this
plagiarism detectors, that are, you see, an adversarial stylometry tool. Of course,
today, if you just wanted to make it seem like J.K. Rowling, you'd throw in some
transphobic stuff. So, that would that would be the clincher.
J: Probably, yes. C D: Yeah.
J: But there's a pretty interesting discussion of that. Because lots of
authors and actually publishers are so freaking out about text AIs, that can
generate texts, that are pretty good already. Not like human yet, but pretty
good. C D: Aha.
J: Umm... C D:Yeah.
J: I think there's something behind that already.
C D: I used a GPT3 composition tool, that some people I know built and played around
with it. And it is really far from doing the kind of work I do. I don't know. I
won't say that it's really far from automating some tasks. Obviously it
automates some tasks. But I think, that the state of GPT3 is such that, if you are
worried about losing your job to GPT3, you probably have a really boring, terrible
job. Because it's not producing anything that...I mean, apart from kind of text art.
It's fun text art. I mean, I think maybe you could, like, replace Internet trolls
with it, you know. Every now and again, I'll write about, like, you know,
criticism of Modi and these huge, like, Hindu nationalist troll armies will
come after me and that the messages are so self similar that they're really easy to
identify and block. You don't even like a second word. It's just like, you know,
block report and away you go. But, if they had, like, a good GPT3 package, they could
probably make a whole series of harassing messages that would be harder to detect.
But again, like, I'm not worried about those people losing their jobs. I am
worried about, you know, the possibility of like vast disinformation campaigns, that
are harder to block or detect, but not about the, you know, technology driven
automation unemployment as a result of all of the Internet trolls being replaced.
*laughs* J: Yeah, I'm totally with you at that
point, because there will always be the love for human generated text, for the art
of or behind it. And there are somehow, yeah...
C D: A lot of the most remarkable GPT3 blocks, that have appeared, right,
where people of like use GPT3 to make something, turn out to be straight up
copy-pastes of actual texts written by humans, because GPT3 sometimes will just
regurgitate, like, half paragraphs, whole paragraphs that are part of its training
data. And so, again, like that is a very impressive task, right, finding the, like,
the best paragraph from a bunch of pre- written paragraphs by humans. That is
impressive and it amounts to something, but it's not the same as composing it.
J: Yeah, that's totally right. And it was pretty depressing I think, that when we put
some legal texts into a Markov chain and made a game, ok, which is the real
legal text and which is the Markov chain, and we made 3 or 4 rounds and
people always failed. C D: Yeah, I'm not surprised. I mean, it's
an open secret that like it was several months after Twitter's launch that someone
noticed that Twitter's terms of service represent repeatedly mentioned Flickr,
because they copied and pasted Flickr's terms of service to make them Twitter's
terms of service. And, like, no one, not even Twitter's lawyers had read the terms
of service to notice that, it didn't mention Twitter. So, you know, I'm not
surprised. Like literally nobody reads those, right? Those are like self-
reproducing text viruses. J: Yeah, actually they are. Shall we have
a look into the questions we still have? C D: Yeah
J: So, we do have 2 parts I think!? C:D: Right, I only have one of them.
J: I think you have the one from the... your previous talk.
C D: So, I can... One of my answer, one or two of these and then you can think about the
rest of these. Right. So. What's the one that I liked here, oh, was ... We can't
use Antimonopoly. It's not like you can dissolve Facebook overnight,
realistically, what's the roadmap to a more sustainable environment? So I think
that misunderstands the benefits of a protracted antitrust action. That, you
know, if we were to say to Facebook, all right, we're going to break out
WhatsApp and Insta. Which I think we could do even without invoking antimonopoly law.
I think you could say that, especially in the EU, their merger was was contingent on
them not merging the backends of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp. And then they
later merged the backends of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp. And I think if you
are given regulatory forbearance, if you're given an exemption to a regulation
on promise of certain conduct, then if you engage in that conduct, then we should
just revoke it. Right? We should just revoke the forbearance. I
think that's a pretty straightforward lift. But even if it were to take a long
time, even if we spent a decade trying to make Google spin out its ad tech stack,
which I think we should do. That 10 years would really like dramatically alter the
way that investors and corporate executives thought about anti-competitive
conduct. Right? It would get all of the the people who are currently, when
they balance out, you know, the upside of a monopoly and the downside of monopoly,
it would weight the downside much more heavily. And you would get the kind of
forbearance you got, say from IBM, when they didn't go after Tom Jennings,
when he was making the Phoenix ROM. And you would then see things like investment.
So, you know, the thing, that market believers say about markets is, that they
respond very quickly and regulators respond slowly. And that's true. The
markets are very quick. You can see that in the growth of technologies
over the crisis. Right? Like think of how quickly markets turned Zoom into the thing
that we all use. Right. It was, you know, if you tried to regulate a video
conferencing system, though, by the time the consultations were done and so on, it
would have been years later. And markets are actually pretty good at fighting
monopolies, if they're well regulated. Right. You know, the reason, that venture
capitalists don't fund Facebook competitors is not because they, you know,
love Facebook and they wouldn't want to see Facebook in trouble. It's
because, they think that, if they tried to fight Facebook, Facebook would destroy
them. And so, if we were to put Facebook on notice that everything it did from now on
was going to be part of this ongoing antitrust action, which I think just
happened right just before Christmas with the new slate of anti-trust suits against
them. Then, if you can make that, if you can make an investor understand that you
could get capital to start a competitor to Facebook. Now, in terms of what we can do
that fits between antitrust action and nothing, what we can do to get like jam
today instead of jam tomorrow, there's two courses involving interoperability. So one
of them is is already in the Digital Services Act. It was in the Access Act
that was proposed in the US last year. And the DSA and the Access Act
both have these mandatory interoperability components where they say, you know,
Facebook must produce an interface that third parties can log into. And they have
different ways of trying to make sure that that third party isn't Cambridge
Analytica. And it's going to be, it's hard, but it will open some
regulatory space in concert with these antitrust enforcement actions. But even
more exciting would be an interoperator's defense, a law or a regulation that said,
if you devise a way to interface a new product with an existing product for a
legitimate purpose, including increased consumer freedom, security auditing,
accessibility for people with disabilities and you know independent repair and so on,
that notwithstanding any law, software patents, copyrights, terms of service,
trade secrecy, non-compete, you have an absolute defense. And obviously passing
that law would be really hard, but it wouldn't have to come legislatively, like
you could imagine bits and pieces of it emerging. Like maybe we say to Facebook
that the remedy for it's unlawful and deceptive merger with Instagram and
WhatsApp is that they have to sign a consent decree saying they won't punish
people who build interoperable services on this basis. And so they have to act as
though that were the law, even if it wasn't the law. Or we might see things
like a procurement guideline where you know we might have educational
authorities who say to Google, yeah, we're going to buy Google classroom site
licenses for all of our locked down kids, but as a condition of that, you have to
promise that you will not seek any kind of vengeance against people who do the
following things. Or we might say to Apple, as a procurement matter, if we're
going to buy fifty thousand iPads for our school district, you have to promise not
to sue people who produce side loading tools, because we have apps that our
district depends on, and we can't, you know, we can't be dependent on you guys
deciding that you don't want to lock that app out. And so you get this kind of like
multilayered stack where you have antitrust enforcement that is like 'pour
encourager les autres'. You know, sometimes you have to execute an admiral
to encourage the rest of them. And that just ripples out through the whole sector.
And then you have interoperability mandates, through regulation that are slow
moving, but not as slow moving as lawsuits. You have new market
opportunities that are much faster moving that will depend on both the lawsuits and
the regulation. And then you have unilateral actions that governments can
take with very little consultation without having to get things
through parliament where they can just bind over technology companies to behave
in certain ways so that, you know, they must do it. Like imagine if the remedy for
Dieselgate was that the German state said to Volkswagen and other giant German
automakers, you are no longer allowed to block any independent auditing service,
repair or manufacture of parts for any of your vehicles. It's a natural remedy,
right? Like it directly addresses the bad conduct, but it also creates right to
repair, interoperability, independent security auditing, all of that stuff out
of the gate. And like you could get it just as part of a consent decree. You
could get it just with the German regulator talking to the lawyers for Audi
and saying, if you don't want your CEO to go to jail, you have to sign this paper.
Right? And then then you get actual, like fast moving action. And so I think it's
that kind of holistic thinking about how technology, markets, law and norms all
work together that gets us to a solution. And then as against this backdrop,
remember, that there are people who are worried about monopolies in beer who are
going to be fighting your corner. And there's people are going to be upset that
all glasses are made by one company, Luxottica in Italy, who've raised prices a
thousand percent over the last decade, who are also going to be fighting your corner
on this. And so, you know, as opposed to being a war on a thousand fronts, this is
going to be a battle with a thousand allies. And that's going to make that
antitrust stuff move a lot faster than it did with Microsoft, because this won't be
just a one off assault on Microsoft, or on Google, or on Facebook. This is going to be
like a global movement to it to attack monopolism itself.
J: As I just said, markets, ecosystems. There was another pretty interesting
question about, by the way, interoperability and free and open source
ecosystems and things like probably the fattyverse or so, that just rise and come
up as a yeah as a real alternative to the solutions we've had over the last 10 or 15
years? What do you see in those? C D: So I think the thing that's missing,
I mean, I like them. I use them. I have a Mastodon account. I'm actually trying to
stand up a Mastodon server right now. And but the problem with Diaspora, Mastodon
and other, like federated answers to Facebook is not centralization
versus decentralization or features versus non-features. It's interoperability.
Specifically, it's both the lack of a standardized interoperable means of
connecting to these services, which, to its credit, Twitter is actually like
trying to do something about Twitter's Project Blue Sky. I think they have
like, they've sat down and they've gone like, well, having absolute control of our
users is worth this much. Not being responsible for moderating content is
worth this much. The only way we get out from not moderating content is by not
owning the content, not having the capacity to moderate the content
and just being like a federator or a central node and a federator. And so
they're kind of moving towards it. And they want to provide like a managed
interface. Right. They want to have, like, you know, a standardized API that everyone
accesses. The problem with those standardized APIs is that Twitter used to
have them and then they took them away. So you know the thing that produces an
equilibrium where those standardized APIs are both good and durable is competitive
compatibility. If you know, that the day you withdraw the standardized API, hackers
all over the world are going to write bots that just replace the API with scrapers,
that you're going to have to fight like this, it's like marching on
Stalingrad, right? Like you're just going to have, like, this kind of endless
grinding trench warfare with with hackers who will be legally immunized from your
from any legal tool you have to shut them down. And all you'll be able to do is just
tweak intrusion detection system rules and try in a system with hundreds of millions
of users to distinguish users who are just weird from bots. Right. Because like, when
you have, like think about Facebook, right. Facebook's got 2.6 billion users
and has 2.6 million, one in a million use cases or 2.6
thousand one in a million use cases every single day. Right. So distinguishing the
dolphins from the tuna in your tuna net is going to be really hard when you're
operating at that scale. And so, you know, when you're like in the
meeting with the head of, the CTO and the CSO and the chief marketing officer and
the CFO and the shareholders and the board, and they're like "We need more
revenue. We're going to shut down the API, we're going to nerf the API". The
technologists in the room can say this is what the bill for that is going to look
like and it's going to exceed the excess capital we get from blocking the API. And
so, you know, this idea that, like, we can just like all of us, decide that next
Wednesday we're going to shut down our Twitter accounts and reopen them on
Mastodon. It's crazy. It's not how technology has ever worked, right? The way
that we got Keynote as like a standard for a lot of people's PowerPoint presentations
or conference presentations was not by everyone saying, like: On Thursday, the
21st we stop using PowerPoint, we start using Keynote. It was by iWorks
Suite being able to read and write PowerPoint files. And by having this kind
of this, this kind of protracted period where it was not binary. Right? Like
you can have one foot in one camp, one foot in the other, you know, I analogize it
sometimes to my family's migration history, where my grandmother was a Soviet
refugee. She came to Canada and she lost touch with her family for 15 years. Right?
She couldn't phone them. She couldn't write to them, like they exchanged
messages. Sometimes if someone got a visa to go to Leningrad, they she would tell
them what to tell her mother if they could find her mother. And, you know,
obviously, like leaving the Soviet Union was really hard for my family. It was a
really hard choice, even though Canada was a better place to be for them because of
the very high costs that came with it. And they have family members. I have family
members in St. Petersburg who never came, because the cost was too high. So five
years ago, I left London and moved to Los Angeles. And here I am in my office in Los
Angeles. Not only did all of my books come with me, but let me see if I can get it in
the frame over there is my theremin. OK, that's the theremin that I bought that
runs on British voltage that has a little mains adapter. We just got off a zoom call
with my relatives in London and we talk to my family in Canada every week. So for us,
the switching costs were really low because if we changed our mind, we could
go back. And in fact, this is the third time I've moved to Los Angeles so I could
I could try Los Angeles, see how it worked, go back to London, come back. It
was expensive, right? But it wasn't leaving the Soviet Union in the forties
expensive. And so, you know, by all means, build the place that people who want to
escape Mark Zuckerberg's Iron Curtain will find as a happy home. But give them the
ability to have one foot in one, one foot in the other. And, you know, the other
piece of this is every time Zuckerberg says, oh, I'm blocking Interop tools to
keep my users safe. Remember that in the DDR they said the Berlin Wall isn't to
keep East Germans in, it's to keep West Germans out of the workers paradise. And
it's the same fucking excuse. J: It always is. I just got in a message
here and probably an interesting question, by the way, or actually two, linking
together. Coming back to the monopolies, you did not say much about Amazon on your
talk before. And we'll have another question for the fireside chat here with
your book. That the person asked why you actually went away from publishing under
the CC licenses and went to bigger publishing houses. Would you like to
explain probably why, also the Amazon part then...
C D: I didn't work Amazon in just because of time pressure, but all of this stuff
applies to Amazon. I mean, I think the most interesting thing about Amazon is in
terms of its worker uprising, where there's been an explicit, so remember that
all tech companies are split into some of the highest paid workers on Earth and some
of the lowest paid workers on Earth. Right. And so in Amazon's case, that's
like the warehouse workers who have some of the worst working conditions and so on.
And explicitly, the tech worker uprising in Amazon was in solidarity with the
warehouse workers. And that's really interesting, right, because it's crossing
these class boundaries and it's crossing these divisions that the firms themselves
deliberately created to prevent solidarity. You know, in the same way that
in the early days of the trade union movement in the US, if the Italian auto
workers were on strike, they'd bring in German auto workers to break the strike
and they would try to make it about Germans and Italians, not workers. In the
same way, you have this kind of, you divide up the workplace into contractors and non-
contractors, green badges and blue badges. And it it works to drive a fracture line
between different people who actually have shared interests. In terms of publishing.
Well, it's about monopolies. There's five publishers left and in fact, there's about
to be four because Bertelsmann is buying Simon and Schuster, assuming the DOJ lets
them do it, which, you know, this is kind of like the first litmus test of whether
Biden's DOJ has got like any real serious commitment to blocking monopolistic
mergers, because the idea that we should go from five companies to four in
publishing is outrageous. There's just no reason for it. So the, you know, with five
publishers, there's exactly one that lets me go DRM free, and that's Tor. And Tor
was also the only one that would let me go Creative Commons. And they change their
mind. And so the choice was try and self publish, which frankly, like I've done it,
it's hard work. I would get one tenth as many books written and I would go to my
deathbed with dozens of unwritten books but a better Creative Commons track record
or suck it up and I sucked it up. I don't like it and they know I don't like it. I
like Tor. They're the smallest, most, they're owned by McMillan, which is owned
by von Holtzbrink and you know they're the smallest, they're most ethical. They're the
ones that I like the best. But they didn't like the Creative Commons licenses in the
end. And so that was where I ended up. It sucks now you know, I can still cc license
the other stuff that I do. And if anything, I've become more permissive in
that. And I left Boing Boing almost a year ago, a year minus a week and a half ago.
And when I left, I started this new thing called Pluralistic. And Boing Boing was
licensed under a very restrictive cc license. This is cc-by. It's as close as
you get to a public domain without going cc-zero, it just requires attribution. And
so pluralistic is a pretty significant piece of writing. I am taking a break from
it this week, but I write three or four substantial articles every day that are
cc-zero or cc-by and that I think like, you know, if you're interested in my work,
like there's a lot of it out there under extremely generous, far more generous than
my novels' cc licenses. I wish I could do the cc licenses to. I mean, if nothing
else, I mean, this is a little inside baseball, but given that it's a German
audience and it's relevant to Germany. So the Germans that I meet who've read Little
Brother and my other books inevitably found them through Creative Commons
licenses. In part, I think because English works in Germany are still pretty
expensive relative to the German translations. And Germans have a high
enough literacy in English that they like to read original English texts. And so
before there were e-book markets that served Germany with English language text,
the only way to get an English language ebook was to pirate it or get a
cc one, and mine was the only cc one. So what's interesting about that is now,
thanks to Tor books, I'm able to run my own eBook store if you go to craphound.com
slash shop, I have an eBook store, it's DRM Free, EULA free books, and the way the
publishing contracts work is my British publisher has rights in British
territories except Canada, like former British Empire territories, except
Canada. India, Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the UK and so on. And my American
publisher has rights in the US and Canada. And then nobody has the exclusive right to
non English speaking territories, like Germany. And about 10 to 15 percent of my
ebook sales come from Germany. And I get all the money from those, right. When I
sell an ebook in the UK, I give 70 percent of the money to my publisher and then they
give me twenty five percent back as my royalty. When I sell a book in the US, I
give seventy percent to my US publisher and they give me back twenty five percent
as my royalty. When I sell a book in Germany, I keep all of it. I get twice as
much money. And so 10 to 15 percent of my readership are in Germany and they account
for 30 percent of my gross receipts from the website. And so that is like super
cool. And you know I understand that my publisher is not neither here nor there on
that one because they don't get a dime from it. But for me, my German audience is
super important. My German, English speaking audience, is super important.
J: And, would have self-publishing ever be a way for you in the largest scale,
so like Joanna Penn is doing in the UK? C D: It's just a lot of work. I mean, it
is like like I work at 16 to 18 hour day, most days. Like I did the - so writing
Pluralistic, doing EFF and working on novels during the crisis, the first day I
took off between March 19th, after March 19th was December the 17th. So I didn't
have a weekend off, I didn't have a day off. So and I wrote a book. I wrote a book
during the crisis and I self published an audio book and I had four books come out.
And - you know, I if - if I were doing more, if I were doing the stuff that my
publisher does, I wouldn't have written that book. I would have written maybe half
that book. And so it's just a matter of how much time I have. And, you know, I
have done an experiment. I did a self publish short story collection and made a
bunch of money, like relative to how short story - short story collections
don't make a lot of money usually. So it made about three times as much, four times
as much. But the amount of the actual gross dollars that it made was
significantly less than I would get for going through a publisher. And you know
that the amount of extra work was a novel's worth of work. And so I just, you
know, back to, like what I want to be worried about on my deathbed. And I would
much rather have published all of these books without EULAs, without DRM and, you
know, argued for a more robust set of fair dealing and fair use rules that would
allow people to use them widely than having written half as many books, but
gotten them all out under CC to a much smaller audience.
J: Yeah, it's a [balances with hands], yeah.
C D: It's not, I mean, I'm not thrilled about it. It's like and maybe it's the
wrong call - I don't know. But it's like, you know. It's the call I made for now.
You know, if we see massive de- monopolization, maybe it'll get easier.
J: Hmm. I see in the chat. We do have a question. So, do we want to try to have
someone free the microphone and ask the question here in the room?
Guest-sir#3: I think I'm now unmuted. J: Yes, you're.
Guest: Hi Cory, just a quick question. So as the readers, is there anything we can
do about this? It seems like the business of publishing is pretty in, let's say, a
bit of a difficult situation. Is there anything we can do?
C D: Yeah, I mean, I think this is the problem with our consumerism more broadly
is that, you know, consumerism, the value of consumer rights movements - and there
are some very, you know EFF, have has its origins in consumer rights, groups like
BEUC and EDRI are fundamentally consumer rights groups - the value
of them is they work fast, right? Like consumer power is fast power, but
its limited power and citizen power is slow. But consumers can't, by definition, can't
shop their way out of a monopoly. Making better consumer choices, making better
individual choices will not solve monopolism because the whole point of
monopolism is that the meaningful choices have been taken off the table. That's
- that's the real problem of monopolism is the way that it distorts our public
policy. And so for that, you need to be involved in democracy. And so to be
involved in democracy is to not think of yourself primarily as an actor whose voice
is felt through purchase decisions, but rather through someone who's part of a
movement. And, you know, the good news is that there's a wide political spectrum of
mainstream political movements that are concerned with monopoly right now. And
it's not the exclusive purview of the left. I mean, the right for a long time,
we're universally cheerleaders for monopoly. But increasingly, you
know,they're like: Well, I was fine when Facebook was de platforming anti-pipeline
activists and trans-rights activists. But now that Alex Jones is gone, I'm you know,
where will AfD meet if not on Facebook? And so now suddenly they're all worried
about monopoly. And, you know, the risk is that they will structure their anti-
monopoly remedies in ways that actually just make the monopoly stronger. The big
one of those is arguing for more intense, more fine grained accountability for
moderation decisions. And the thing about that is, the reason that Facebook makes bad
moderation decisions is not merely because Mark Zuckerberg is not well suited to
being in charge of the lives of 2.6 billion people. It's because, like no
one on Earth should have that job. And, if we say, all right, you've got to moderate
all the bad stuff or moderate better or not have more false positives or
whatever, stop harassment or anything else, all we do is we create this like
floor underneath which no one can afford to participate as an alternative to
Facebook. And that just makes Facebook the endless monopoly. And I fear that both the
right and the left - for their own reasons - are in their anti-monopoly energy going
down the wrong path here. And so this is where we need people in movements who are
technologists and understand the technology and can say - in the same way
that we've said now for decades, whenever someone says: Oh, we need to get
rid of cryptography and replace it with cryptography-with-lawful-access-back-doors
and that will only let the good guys in and won't let the bad guys in - and we say
to them, look, you know, I am here as your constituent, as a technologist, as someone
who works in the field and I'm going to explain to you what's at risk and why that
doesn't work. You know, in words that you can understand. We need to go in and have
those same conversations about moderation and about this idea that, like, it's not
too late for a dynamic Internet. That we can we can aspire to something better than
a slightly more responsible Facebook. That we can aspire to a more self determining
more pluralistic Internet where you don't have to hope that Facebook cleans up its
act. You can just go somewhere else. Whose policies you like better and still talk to
your Facebook friends. J: Hmm. And as you just said activists and
all the bad stuff. We have some more questions here. You also said
something about that dividing and fracture line before where workers were divided.
And I have a question: Why do all those, or most, or many left-wing communities
split up about fundamental discussions while right wing people just stick
together and, yeah, try to to work together for benefits?
C D: Well, I think that I mean, it's multifaceted and that characterization is
not entirely true, right? You know, the right wing movements do have really
serious fracture lines. In Canada, our conservative party was like many
conservative parties. One of these chimeras where you have, you know,
wealthy people and social conservatives and wealthy people say you vote for our
tax breaks and we'll punish women who have abortions and they fused this
coalition. And in Canada, after the Mulroney years - he was our Helmut Kohl
equivalent - the conservatives were in such bad odour that they pulled less than
12 percent in the election, didn't qualify for free office space on Parliament Hill.
And the party broke up and became two parties, the Conservative Party and the
Reform Party. And hilariously, later on, they reformed and they were at this all
party conference and the naming committee went into a closed room to figure out what
they were going to call the new party. And they came up with the Canadian
Conservative Reform Alliance Party - which is CRAP. And no one noticed until after
the press release. But conservative parties fracture all the time. They have
really serious, grotesque fracture lines. The Republican Party is in major
disarray at the moment and will probably be in worse disarray after the election.
The run off in Georgia in January if they lose control of the Senate because money
talks and bullshit walks. If you don't deliver, if your program doesn't deliver
the majority that allows you to enact the wider program, then you are discredited
and you lose your seat. I mean, the British Tories have undergone the same
thing. That's what Brexit was. It was a split in the British Tories. In terms of
the left, there are lots of reasons the left splinters. Some of it is what Freud
called the narcissism of small differences. You know, you call it free
software, i call it open source. We can't be friends anymore. Some of it is
legitimate differences, which, you know, there are real meaningful differences
between, say, liberals in the left. And there are lots of places where they agree.
But there are irreconcilable differences. And when it comes to those breaking
points, you just, the alliance is going to fall apart, right? It may, it may -
personal friendships may endure, but the wider questions are going to drive it
apart. And then I just watched a video with Boots Riley, you know, who is the guy
who made "Sorry to disturb you", he's a revolutionary rapper. And he talked about
the history of the protest movement in the US and the trade union movement. And one
thing that is really under reported, including to my shame by me in the last
nine months, is that the US had more wildcat strikes than at any time since
the 1940s. Strikes where there wasn't a union, that it was unsanctioned and they
were in support of the same issues as the protests that got all the coverage, Black
Lives Matter and so on. But they didn't draw the coverage. And Riley was on the
show talking about the way that the left - including the radical left in the US -
moved from strikes to protests. Where the primary mechanism for enacting a program
of change was protests and not strikes. And he said that it came from the anti-
communist witch hunts of the 1950s and 60s and that the trade union movement - to
avoid the penalty of being tarred as communists by the witch hunters, by the
McCarthy hearings, they backed away from radical political agendas and they became
effectively part of the establishment. And that the radical left split off and they
declared that student movements were the future of political, radical political
change. And student movements, they can have symbolic strikes, but a student
strike is not a strike in the way that workers strike is, right? A worker strike
is really fundamental. Like at its core, a worker strike is the argument that who
gets to decide how things get made and who gets to own those things should be in a
different set of hands, should be differently organized. It is a
foundationally different project than a protest. A protest is about what the
people in charge should do and a strike is about who should be in charge. And he says
that the legacy of that today is that we focus our energies on the outcomes of our
political arrangements, which are structural racism, sexism, inequality and
so on. But we don't talk about the underlying structure anymore. We don't
address the underlying structure. We may talk about it in our protest, but we don't
address it with the most tried and true direct action tool we have for changing
those structural arrangements, which is striking. And I, you know, I just listened
to that yesterday and I've been thinking about it ever since. And I think that it
does reveal a really like, non-trivial distinction between different ways of
looking at theories of change. And it's not that kind of cartoony, like Marxist
can't care about class and everyone else, and they're all white dudes. And then
everyone else cares about gender and race. It's about understanding how anti-
communist witch hunts and how like a deliberate, like normative and political
project to discredit a certain kind of - a certain ideology, changed the way that we
talk about what our political aspirations might be. And it's a really important
distinction. It really matters. I'm still trying to digest it. But, you know, I'm
thinking about it ever since. J: Hmm, we have, as we said just before we
went online with the fireside chat here, by the way. And I'm really happy that
we're exploring this, yeah, for us new format of a talk/chat. I'm really happy to
have people here in the room with us. So this will be for all the other fireside
chat, another invitation to pop in and ask your questions directly and be here with
us in the room. And we have people in the audience who have a really big question
that probably all of us have. It's 2020 for all of us and 2020 is somewhat
demanding. And how do you manage? To not get depressive over activism, so how can
you stay positive with all the stuff happening and all the opponents we face in
activism? C D: Yeah, you know, I would lie if I said
I hadn't felt a lot of despair this year. I mean, lucky for me, the way that I cope
with stress is by working. So, you know, it's not entirely great because when I
work without balance, you know, when when all you do is stick your face in your
computer and work, then your emotional health suffers and your physical health. I
have a chronic pain problem. And I hurt myself so badly a couple of weeks ago that
I was actually walking around on a cane. Literally just from sitting too much and
neglecting my physical welfare, not doing the self care that I need to manage my
disability. So, you know, it's not been great for anyone. I, you know,
I'm working on this utopian novel right now, "The Lost Cause", which is a novel
set after "Green New Deal" in which people have oriented themselves to the long
project of dealing with climate change. And so that includes things like a
300 year project to relocate all the world's cities 20 kilometers inland and
really big structural changes to cope with hundreds of millions of refugees that we
know will come and orienting our work around contingency plans for months at a
time when you can't leave your house because of wildfires. And it is
indistinguishable from an environmental dystopian novel, except for the fact that
the people in the book don't feel helpless. They know what's coming. They
know they can't stop it, but they know that they can prepare for it. They can do
stuff that will manage it. And so for me, that's like, you know, back to the theme
of my talk I just gave: Self- determination, right. The ability to have
like a say in how this stuff works out to know which parts are parameterized and
which parts are set in stone. That is, I think, the thing that keeps at least some
people sane and dedicated and acting. And so this is the upside of activism, right?
Is like doing something to try and make a difference may feel hopeless and
exhausting, but try doing nothing to make a difference and to just be like tempest
tossed, smashed around by the breaking down system, that's for me anyway, much,
much harder and more stressful. And, you know, ultimately, like my view of the
world is that we cannot operate a theory of change like a novelist, we have to
operate a theory of change, like a programmer. So novelists, you know, posit
this like reductionist, simplified way of getting from A to Z where you have an
ending, you have a beginning, and you work out the steps to take you up a dramatic
curve and then down and through your denouement, right? And programers, when
they work with, like, non-trivial data sets, they know that the terrain is
unknowably complex, that if you try to enumerate the whole terrain and find an
optimal path through it, the terrain would have like altered by the time you'd
finished. And also the moment during which you want to do the job would have passed.
So you can't figure out how to get from A to Z if you're writing code that you can't
find the optimal way, the one true way, the best way. Instead, what you have to do
is hill climb, right. You have to like ascend a gradient towards a better future,
like the victory condition you're looking for. And you might end up stuck in a local
maximum. You might have to do something like hill descent in order to do more hill
climbing. But in order to get from from A to Z in software, you assume that if you
can ascend the gradient to a new area of the terrain, that from that new area, new
terrain will be revealed that you can't see from where you are now and that the
best way to map the territory is to traverse it, and that even if you have
some reversals, even if you have to double back on yourself to get all the way
through it, you will still have done a better job than if you had tried to do it
perfectly all at once the way a novelist does. And so whatever things look shitty
and scary I just say, like, if I can think of one thing that I can do that improves
my situation, that I will find myself in a new zone from which I might have new
courses of action that I can't even imagine now. And that's what keeps me
going. It may not make me happy, but it's a reason to put one foot in front of the
other. J: Yeah, I think we all need that. We do
have two more questions in the chat or two and a half, and we have like three minutes
left. So can I can I get two short ones, probably? Ian you're first of them.
Ian: Hi - Hi, Cory. Thanks for your work. Amazing. I love it so much and I read all
of it whenever you post something new. I want to ask about the book "For the Win".
And I love that much and it showed the world that games are actually a market, a
big financial market, and the environment, the setting of the scene feels a bit like
there could be more stuff happening at the end of the book, so it's a bit open. I
don't want to spoil it to anyone, but it felt a bit like there could be more. What
would it take for you to write a sequel to "For the Win"?
C D: Well, you know, I wrote "For the Win" when I was - as part of my reckoning with
great financial crisis and also as part of my marriage; because I'm married to a
former professional Quake player. And so I - she was at GDC when the first gold farmer came
forward. And so gold farming was like a thing that I was really interested in. I
was really interested in that burgeoning, you know, games economics world. Yanis
Varoufakis working for that Icelandic game company and so on. But today, I'm far more
interested in heterodox economics and particularly in modern monetary theory.
And I think that if I were ever to revisit this, I don't know that I would. But it
would be - what would be a really interesting way to revisit this would be
to to do an "MMT lens gold farming" novel. Ian: Yes, please. Sounds great.
J: OK, so we see a next novel coming up there. And we have one last question from
Caige please. Caige: Hi Cory, thank you for the talk,
really great to have you here. So, given everything that you've
said about monopolies, massive unchecked corporate power and so forth: What is one
realistic thing that we could all do to combat this that would actually have a
significant impact and actually have a second quick follow up on that: What's the
one thing that truly brings you hope in all of this?
C D: Well, so the one realistic thing is you can't do anything individually. You
have to do it collectively. Right. So you have to find a political movement. And
this is this is my point about the right and the left and different kinds of
parties and so on. You have to find a political movement that is orienting
itself towards monopoly and towards dealing with monopoly. You know, our
policymakers are even the ones that perceive a problem with monopoly, don't
perceive the political will to do anything about it yet. You know, I debated Vestager
from the audience last year at Reboot and in or not reboot - at re:publica in
Berlin, and she was like: "Oh, we can't do breakup's. They take 15 years and cost too
much money". She needs to have political and social movements who have her back,
who say: 15 years to break up Facebook sounds good to me! Let's spend the money
right and to get there, it's not an individual thing. It's a social thing. You
know, it's being involved in a political party, in a political movement that is
engaged with this. Larry Lessig talks about the world being regulated by code,
norms, markets and law, right? So, you know, you can have this normative
discussion with your friends. You can you can bring them along to the idea that, you
know, all of their problems have a common origin, that it's monopolies. If you have
a British friend who's local government collapsed last year because of
"Carillion", you can say, oh, yeah, the big four accounting firms which were
allowed to buy all of their competitors and merged with a bunch of consulting
services, they audit the books of all these companies, including Wirecard. They
forged the books for their customers and allowed them to steal from us, right? So,
that's not a problem of corruption in the accounting industry. That's a problem of
monopoly. And then you can get involved with your party, with your social
movement, if you're involved with, you know, with "netzpolitik" or if you're
involved with "EFF" or if you're involved with "Quadrature", you can say, look: This
is my priority too. You know, at EFF we have an anti-monopoly group now that's
been working for the last year and now that Anti-monopoly has come to Tech, you
know, EEFs job is gonna be for the next years to come, it's gonna be making sure
that anti-monopolists understand the technical dimension, that they don't
inadvertently create more durable monopolies by fighting it. We need those
technical experts. So, you know, like in the same way that the one thing that you
can do about climate change is to find a political party that cares about climate
change and then demand that they take meaningful action. The one thing you can
do about monopoly is to get involved with anti-monopoly movements because your
individual action isn't going to do enough there. It's it's too little. As to what
gives me hope? I mean, the thing that gives me hope is we have gone from anti-
monopolism being like a fringe thing that nobody cared about, and that was just
laughable to it being central in like literally less than a year. Like a year
ago, a year and a half ago, March 2019, I stood on a stage in Berlin and argued with
Europe's top anti-trust enforcer about whether we would ever break up Facebook.
And she said we wouldn't. And she's the most powerful, most active, most take no-
prisoners anti-trust enforcer in the world today. We're ready to break up Facebook.
It might take a decade, but we went from this is impossible to let's get doing it
in less than a year or just over a year, right? That is remarkable progress. It
might seem slow, but like it's a doubling curve. You know, it's got momentum. Like,
get behind it and push with whatever group, with whatever organization you're
involved with, push and push and push. What gives me hope? That's what gives me
hope. J: And this is a wonderful ending where
unfortunately out of time. People saying they like this format. And I think we'll
see a bit more of that over the rC3. And I'm really, really happy, Cory, that you
were the first of our authors doing a fireside chat and probably we'll have some
progress on turning over publishing industry at some point.
C D: So, for sure, and I have to say it is an honor and a privilege, as always, to
speak at CCC. And I'm really indebted to you volunteers and the people who make
it happen every year. It's a remarkable event and I'm looking forward to actually
seeing you folks in person again soon. I hope I can come to Leipzig for an in-
person one next year. J: Yes, please. That would be really
great. Thank you very much, Cory.
*rC3 postroll music*
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