Speaker 1: Welcome to it could happen here. Um the show that
Speaker 1: is normally introduced by me shouting a tonally, but today
Speaker 1: I did like a professional. Um, because today myself and
Speaker 1: my colleagues Garrison and Christopher are talking to someone. I'm
Speaker 1: very excited to chat with Mr Corey. Doctor. Oh Corey, Well,
Speaker 1: hello the show. Thank you very much. It is my
Speaker 1: pleasure to be on it. It's great to meet you
Speaker 1: all and to be talking to you today. Corey. You
Speaker 1: do a lot of writing about kind of technology and
Speaker 1: surveillance and cultural issues around those. You're also an author.
Speaker 1: You've written some great fiction. I think today will probably
Speaker 1: talk most around books like Attack Service and walk Away,
Speaker 1: But you've written a lot of wonderful stuff. Um. And
Speaker 1: you've also worked with the e f F for years
Speaker 1: and years. UM. So you you you're coming at what
Speaker 1: I love about I mean, we're gonna be talking today
Speaker 1: broadly about surveillance and kind of the future of of
Speaker 1: the Internet. Will probably talk about some Metaversey stuff. What
Speaker 1: I love about the way in which you think and
Speaker 1: write about the future is that you're kind of coming
Speaker 1: about it from a number of angles, both as like
Speaker 1: a tech industry journalist, as a fiction writer imagining the
Speaker 1: future and as somebody who's kind of weighted in as
Speaker 1: an activist to this, And UM, I'm kind of wondering,
Speaker 1: where do you see like the greatest potential for actual
Speaker 1: like change? Um? Is it? Is it in kind of
Speaker 1: Is it in lobbying and engaging as an activist or
Speaker 1: is it in sort of imagining as a as a
Speaker 1: as a fiction writer? What might be? So I I
Speaker 1: see them as adjuncts uh, you know, diversity of tactics
Speaker 1: and all that stuff. Um. The thing is that tech
Speaker 1: policy arguments are often very abstract, uh, and they are
Speaker 1: only visceral for the people who would provide the kind
Speaker 1: of political will to do something about them. Usually that
Speaker 1: that comes when it's too late, right, people, people care
Speaker 1: about tech monopolies once the web is turned into five
Speaker 1: giant websites filled with scripted shots of text from the
Speaker 1: other four, But not when Yahoo is on a buying
Speaker 1: spree of tech companies and we're saying, oh, that's how
Speaker 1: tech companies grow, and all tech companies will grow in
Speaker 1: the future by buying all their nascent competitors and rolling
Speaker 1: them up into a big vertically integrated monopoly, which is
Speaker 1: kind of how we got Facebook and Google and the
Speaker 1: rest of it. And um, you need to be able
Speaker 1: to make policy arguments to policy people, but you also
Speaker 1: need to be able to put uh, some some sinew
Speaker 1: and muscle on the bone of that highly abstract kind
Speaker 1: of argument. And and that's where fiction comes in. It's
Speaker 1: kind of a like a fly through of like an
Speaker 1: emotional architects rendering of what things might look like if
Speaker 1: we get it wrong or if we change it. It
Speaker 1: preserves the sense of possibility, you know. I think one
Speaker 1: of the great enemies of change is the inevitable is
Speaker 1: um of capitalist realism and the idea that there is
Speaker 1: no alternative. So if you can make people believe in
Speaker 1: an alternative, than they might work for one. And certainly
Speaker 1: the opposite is true. If people don't believe there is
Speaker 1: any alternative possible, they won't work for one. Why why
Speaker 1: would you? Uh? And so all of that together, I
Speaker 1: think is part of how you mobilize people to care
Speaker 1: about stuff. Yeah, I mean, that makes that makes total sense,
Speaker 1: and it is. It's difficult, I think because I first
Speaker 1: came into technology as a journalist, and it's very difficult
Speaker 1: to get people to care about stuff. And I think
Speaker 1: in particular privacy, which there was. It has been one
Speaker 1: of the most interesting cases of like the kind of
Speaker 1: thought leaders in in an industry freaking out over something
Speaker 1: and people not really having an issue with it because
Speaker 1: we kind of all agreed to hand over all of
Speaker 1: our data to a number of big side not all,
Speaker 1: but I don't know. I'm interested in your thoughts on that.
Speaker 1: I understand the idea that like fiction is um is
Speaker 1: a much better way to try to get people to
Speaker 1: care about these things because it makes them feel as
Speaker 1: opposed to kind of boarding on. I think people can
Speaker 1: get kind of lost in the weeds of acquisitions and
Speaker 1: like uh pivots and you know, tech companies acquiring each
Speaker 1: other and whatnot. Well, look, I think that the part
Speaker 1: of the problem with privacy, the reason that we were
Speaker 1: late to wake up and do something about it, is
Speaker 1: because it was obfuscated. You know, if you've ever seen
Speaker 1: the maps of like how an ad tech stack works,
Speaker 1: the flow diagrams, and there are some things that are
Speaker 1: complicated because um, there are some things that are hard
Speaker 1: to understand because they're complicated. And then there are some
Speaker 1: things that are made complicated so they will be hard
Speaker 1: to understand. And I think in the case of the
Speaker 1: surveillance industry, the latter is true. And it wasn't just
Speaker 1: that they were trying to play us for suckers, they
Speaker 1: were also playing their customers for suckers. Right. One of
Speaker 1: the reasons that the ad tech stack is such a
Speaker 1: snarled hair ball is so that the people who buy
Speaker 1: ads and the publishers who run ads can't tell how
Speaker 1: badly they're being RiPP off by their intermediaries. But this
Speaker 1: also has the side effect of making it very hard
Speaker 1: for us to know as the as the kind of
Speaker 1: inputs to that system, how our own dignity and private
Speaker 1: lives and safety and integrity are being put to risk
Speaker 1: by these systems as well. Um. And you know, it
Speaker 1: may be that people, if they had been well informed
Speaker 1: about what was going on, they might have been indifferent
Speaker 1: as well. But I think that when most people were
Speaker 1: very poorly informed, right when all there was was this
Speaker 1: kind of that privacy discourse was just like stuff as
Speaker 1: being your personal information is being siphoned up, but no
Speaker 1: kind of specifics on how that was being used and
Speaker 1: how that was being done and how it might bring
Speaker 1: you to harm. Um, it's not clear that that you
Speaker 1: can say that that the reason they were indifferent is
Speaker 1: because they were fully informed and inn care if you
Speaker 1: know that they weren't fully informed, if you know that
Speaker 1: they were barely informed. M h, I mean yeah, I
Speaker 1: think are absolutely right. Because when the Cambridge analytic a
Speaker 1: scandal broke, which was I think one of the first
Speaker 1: times that there was a really huge international story that
Speaker 1: made it clear some of the consequences of all this, like,
Speaker 1: it did provoke a lot of a lot of anger.
Speaker 1: Um I I do you worry at all that, Like
Speaker 1: there's a degree to which because it because people got
Speaker 1: tricked or wherever you want to frame it, and it's
Speaker 1: gone the the kind of um financialization of people's private data,
Speaker 1: of people's like personal information, because that has gone so far,
Speaker 1: there's a risk that people are just kind of inured
Speaker 1: to it. Um yeah, well, well, I mean that kind
Speaker 1: of gets to my theory change here, which is that
Speaker 1: there is always gonna be uh a point of um
Speaker 1: maximum and difference peak in difference. You know, Um, if
Speaker 1: you think about something like being a smoker, the likelihood
Speaker 1: that you care about cancer goes up the long or
Speaker 1: you smoke, and the more health effects you feel. And
Speaker 1: certainly there will come a point in your life when
Speaker 1: you will only ever grow more worried about the effects
Speaker 1: of smoking on your life. But there's also a point
Speaker 1: of no return. Right. If the point at which you
Speaker 1: you're you're concern reaches the point where you're actually going
Speaker 1: to do something about smoking is the day you get
Speaker 1: diagnosed with stage four lung cancer, then that um denialism
Speaker 1: can slide into nihilism. You can say, why bother, right,
Speaker 1: it's too late. It's like if if we spend years
Speaker 1: arguing about the crashing population of rhinos and then finally
Speaker 1: there's only one left, and you say you're right, there
Speaker 1: was a problem, you might as well say, like, why
Speaker 1: don't we eat him and find out what he tastes like?
Speaker 1: It's not like the rhinos are ever going to come back, right,
Speaker 1: And so for me, so much of the work is
Speaker 1: about shifting the point of peak indifference to the left
Speaker 1: of the point of no return on the timeline, so
Speaker 1: that people actually start to care earlier, because it's it's
Speaker 1: if you haven't a genuine problem, right, like the overcollection
Speaker 1: of our private data, the mishandling of it, the abuse
Speaker 1: of it, that genuine problem will eventually produce tangible effects
Speaker 1: that are undeniable, right that that the our ability to
Speaker 1: ignore it just goes monotonically down. It's the thing about
Speaker 1: the climate emergency. You know, even if Shell had not
Speaker 1: our Exon had not hidden the data it had on
Speaker 1: the role that it's products were playing in climate change
Speaker 1: in the seventies, it would have been hard to muster
Speaker 1: a sense of urgency in the seventies, right because the
Speaker 1: story is that in fifty years something bad's going to happen.
Speaker 1: But here we are, fifty years on something bad is
Speaker 1: really happening, and a lot of people are caring about it.
Speaker 1: They still don't seem to care about it enough, or
Speaker 1: maybe they've slid into nihilism. There's certainly, i think on
Speaker 1: the part of the elites, a kind of nihilistic sense
Speaker 1: that maybe they can all retreat to like mountaintops and
Speaker 1: build fortresses and breathe their children by Harrier jet you know,
Speaker 1: and and and you know that nihilism, I think is
Speaker 1: is what you get when the point of no return
Speaker 1: is passed before peak denial. Uh and the privacy um
Speaker 1: catastrophe that is looming in our future that we haven't
Speaker 1: quite reached yet. I mean, we've just had the first
Speaker 1: kind of trickles of the dam breaking that's in our future.
Speaker 1: It hasn't been enough yet to shift people away from it,
Speaker 1: but but we might be getting there right. We might
Speaker 1: we might eventually be able to do something about it.
Speaker 1: And one of the things that will hasten that moment
Speaker 1: is um restoring competition to those industries. That one of
Speaker 1: the reasons that uh, the industry that spies on us
Speaker 1: is able to foster denial and indifference is because it
Speaker 1: is a monopolized industry. To companies control eighty percent of
Speaker 1: the ad market, Google and Facebook, and as as monopolists,
Speaker 1: they're able to extract huge monopoly rents. They're among the
Speaker 1: most profitable companies in the history of the world. And
Speaker 1: some of those monopoly rents, rather than being returned to shareholders,
Speaker 1: can be mobilized to distort policy, to to make us
Speaker 1: think that there's nothing wrong with the way that they
Speaker 1: collect data and use it to forestall regulation, to pay
Speaker 1: Nick Clegg four million a year to go around Europe
Speaker 1: and the world and say, as the former Deputy Prime
Speaker 1: Minister of the United Kingdom, I'm here to tell you
Speaker 1: that Facebook is the friend of the democratic regimes of
Speaker 1: the world. And and you know, if if the anti
Speaker 1: monopoly movement, which is a thing I've become very involved with,
Speaker 1: is able to go from strength to strength, it's surging now,
Speaker 1: then one of the things that we might do is
Speaker 1: is destroy the ammunition that's being used by these large
Speaker 1: monopolistic firms to distort our policy and harm us in
Speaker 1: these ways with impunity. And and then maybe we can
Speaker 1: actually take the the nascent and natural alarm that people
Speaker 1: do feel about the invasions of their privacy and and
Speaker 1: actually turn that into privacy policy that is meaningful in
Speaker 1: respect of these big companies that actually reigns them in. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and I think I like that you frame it as
Speaker 1: a privacy catastrophe because I think, I mean, what I
Speaker 1: just exhibited earlier in this episode, is this this tendency
Speaker 1: that I certainly see in myself and I see in
Speaker 1: other people to get kind of beaten down by the
Speaker 1: continued um excesses of this industry and the continued kind
Speaker 1: of failure of anything to be done to curb it.
Speaker 1: And I think you're right, it has to be viewed
Speaker 1: as um as a calamity. And I and nothing I
Speaker 1: think makes that clearer than some of watching some of
Speaker 1: the stuff Facebook in particular has put out about their
Speaker 1: plans for the metaverse, and kind of thinking back from
Speaker 1: all of these sensors they want to store in your house,
Speaker 1: all of the ways in which they want to map
Speaker 1: everything around you. Um, they never you know, they they
Speaker 1: kind of advertise as like you'll be able to play
Speaker 1: basketball with somebody who's in a different state. But really
Speaker 1: what it is is you're giving Facebook access to every
Speaker 1: measurement of your body and you know, the pulse of
Speaker 1: the beat of your heart and all this this stuff
Speaker 1: that like maybe we don't quite know what it would
Speaker 1: be useful for from a financialization standpoint, but it's unsettling
Speaker 1: to think that they'll have to find a way because
Speaker 1: they'll have it. You know, I don't know. I don't
Speaker 1: know what is to be done about that, other than,
Speaker 1: as you say, kind of breaking up these monopolies. Well,
Speaker 1: and and I mean breaking up is like one of
Speaker 1: the things we can do to monopolies, and and it
Speaker 1: takes a long time, you know, Um A T and T.
Speaker 1: The first enforcement action against it happened sixty nine years
Speaker 1: before it was broken up in N two. I don't
Speaker 1: think we can wait that long. But there's a lot
Speaker 1: of intermediate steps, right, Like we can force them to
Speaker 1: do interoperability, we can block them from from predatory acquisitions.
Speaker 1: We can force them to divest of companies and engage
Speaker 1: in structural separation. We can do all kinds of things.
Speaker 1: It actually looks like the United King it was going
Speaker 1: to stop them from buying Giffey, which might seem trivial
Speaker 1: after all, it's just like animated jifts, but um, what
Speaker 1: it actually is surveillance beacons in every social media application,
Speaker 1: right because if you're hosting a Jeff from Giffey in
Speaker 1: your message to someone else, Facebook has telemetry about that message. Um.
Speaker 1: And so the the the not the i c O,
Speaker 1: the Competition Competition and Markets Authority in the UK was like, yeah,
Speaker 1: this is just gonna strengthen your market power. That's why
Speaker 1: you're buying this company. You have too much market power already.
Speaker 1: We're not gonna let you do it. Um. It was
Speaker 1: almost the case that the Fitbit merger was blocked. Google's
Speaker 1: Fitbit merger. I think it's still not too late to
Speaker 1: roll it back. And Lena Cohn, who's the new fire
Speaker 1: breathing dragon in charge of the FTC, who is an
Speaker 1: astonishing person who was a law student three years ago.
Speaker 1: Uh she has said, oh yeah, this this like one
Speaker 1: point three trillion dollars worth of mergers and acquisitions that
Speaker 1: you're doing right now to get in under the wire
Speaker 1: before we start enforcing. Guess what, We're going to unwind
Speaker 1: those fucking mergers if it looks like they were anti competitive.
Speaker 1: And not only are you going to lose all the
Speaker 1: money you spent on the M and A due diligence
Speaker 1: and the paperwork and the corporate stuff, but all that
Speaker 1: integration you're going to do between now and then, you're
Speaker 1: gonna have to de integrate those companies when we tell
Speaker 1: you that you don't have uh, you don't have merger
Speaker 1: approval and you're on notice. You can't come and complain later, right, Like,
Speaker 1: you can either get in line and wait for us
Speaker 1: to tell you whether or not your merger is legal,
Speaker 1: or you can roll the dice. But I tell you
Speaker 1: what if you come up sneake, guys, you are fucked.
Speaker 1: And that is amazing, right, that is a powerful change
Speaker 1: in American industrial policy that really makes a difference. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean, and that is a beautiful thing to think
Speaker 1: of being in place and actually hitting as hard as
Speaker 1: it could. Obviously, the concern is that like who will
Speaker 1: be you know, picking the head of the FTC in
Speaker 1: three years in change, and like how how how much
Speaker 1: influence is Peter You're going to have their in the like, um, yeah, well,
Speaker 1: and Peter Tiel of course love's monopolies. He says, competition
Speaker 1: is for losers. So you're right, I mean, obviously, elections
Speaker 1: have consequences, but you know, one of the ways that
Speaker 1: you win elections is by making material differences in people's lives,
Speaker 1: and so you know, if people are policy, then uh.
Speaker 1: One of the most important policies Biden has set so
Speaker 1: far is hiring Lena Khan and her colleagues Canter at
Speaker 1: the d J and Tim Wu and the White House. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean, I would I would love nothing more than
Speaker 1: to see particularly like Facebook reigned in at this point
Speaker 1: because I'm one of the casualties of the of the
Speaker 1: of the the ad market, like crash of started in
Speaker 1: like two sixteen seventeen. It feels like the odds of
Speaker 1: them being able to like, I don't know, We've got
Speaker 1: three years where we know, you know, theoretically these policies
Speaker 1: will be in place, and and I don't know, I'm
Speaker 1: well like when I when I because the Republicans are
Speaker 1: talking a lot about regulating social media too, about even
Speaker 1: breaking up these companies, but they often tend to be
Speaker 1: talking about it in a very different way and with
Speaker 1: a very different kind of end goal in mind. Um
Speaker 1: And I guess you know obviously they know that, right Facebook,
Speaker 1: they are well aware that like this might be a
Speaker 1: weight out the clock situation for them, and they have
Speaker 1: some arrows in that quiver. I mean that may be so,
Speaker 1: but also remember that Facebook's users are outside of the US,
Speaker 1: and that even a change in administration here won't won't
Speaker 1: um put Margaret vest Dagger, who's the Competition commissioner in
Speaker 1: the EU, back in the bottle. And she's another fire breather, right,
Speaker 1: She's another amazing person, And so you know I wouldn't
Speaker 1: be too quick to write that off. I mean Facebook
Speaker 1: needs its foreign markets, Yes, It's U S customers are
Speaker 1: worth more to anyone else because we have the most
Speaker 1: primitive privacy frameworks, so it can extract a lot more
Speaker 1: data for like we're the we're the richest people with
Speaker 1: a worse privacy, so that's that's um. You know, it's
Speaker 1: a real home court advantage for Facebook, but it needs
Speaker 1: that other eight percent of its users. It wouldn't be
Speaker 1: what it is without them, and that makes it subject
Speaker 1: to their jurisdiction. And you know, one of the things
Speaker 1: about ad driven firms like Facebook, UM is that they
Speaker 1: really need sales offices in country. Uh. So you know,
Speaker 1: even before we we had the proliferation national firewalls, which
Speaker 1: don't get me wrong, I don't think it's a good thing. Um.
Speaker 1: These large global firms that operated UM sales offices in country,
Speaker 1: in every territory they worked in, were vulnerable to regulation
Speaker 1: because if you have staff in a country, then you
Speaker 1: have someone that can be arrested, right, And so it's
Speaker 1: not like they can just be like I don't know,
Speaker 1: like the Tour Project, which just you know, it has people,
Speaker 1: um who who sit in hack on tour who are
Speaker 1: close to lawyers who can defend people who sit on
Speaker 1: hack and on tour. Uh. You know, if the Tour
Speaker 1: Project had to have staff full time in Turkey and
Speaker 1: China and Russia and Syria in order to operate, it
Speaker 1: would be a very different project. But you know, Facebook
Speaker 1: and Twitter and Google they all have staff in those
Speaker 1: countries and it makes them vulnerable to regulation. And so,
Speaker 1: you know, China is really interesting because because um she
Speaker 1: Jin Ping, for his own reasons which are not my
Speaker 1: reasons and distinct from the Democrats and the Republicans reasons,
Speaker 1: is doing stuff to rein in big tech in China.
Speaker 1: And it's actually quite interesting because you know the argument
Speaker 1: that Nick Klegg makes when he says why we shouldn't
Speaker 1: break up Facebook, as he says, uh, you know, China
Speaker 1: is coming for your UM, for your I P and
Speaker 1: for your industrial competitiveness with its big tech giants that
Speaker 1: it treats as national champions that projects soft power around
Speaker 1: the world. Meanwhile, China is like these tech giants. We
Speaker 1: hate these tech giants. They present a countervailing force to
Speaker 1: the hedgemony of the the Communist Party and the and
Speaker 1: the executive branch that she should bring sets at the
Speaker 1: off of we're gonna neuter them and we're gonna we're
Speaker 1: gonna disappear their founders like Jack Montt fucking googlogs right like,
Speaker 1: they're like, we don't want national champions because the nation
Speaker 1: that you know, we bow and Ali Baba is the
Speaker 1: champion four is we Bow and Ali Baba and tense
Speaker 1: that they're not They're not champions for China by any
Speaker 1: stretch of the imagination. They don't give a shit about China.
Speaker 1: And so you know, they're all of these companies are
Speaker 1: going to face regulatory pressure, anti monopoly regulatory pressure all
Speaker 1: over the world, and you're you're so much more um optimistic.
Speaker 1: I guess about about the potential for that to bite
Speaker 1: than a lot of people I talked to, and I
Speaker 1: think more knowledgeable as well. And I kind of wonder
Speaker 1: because there's this very strong, obviously influenced by decades of
Speaker 1: cyberpunk attitude that like, we're in this age of mega
Speaker 1: corporations whose power is you know, there's nothing that can
Speaker 1: stop Amazon from doing what Amazon wants to do, right,
Speaker 1: Facebook is going to keep doing whatever they want to
Speaker 1: do forever. You clear really don't believe that, and I
Speaker 1: you know, you clearly know your stuff. I'm wondering why
Speaker 1: you think that that image is still persist, so persistent
Speaker 1: that like attitude in our heads of these these these
Speaker 1: are kind of monolithic forces in our society that um
Speaker 1: just have to be endured. So I think it's a
Speaker 1: belief in the great forces of history, right, um, and
Speaker 1: the great man theory. You know that the the these
Speaker 1: um Uh you know that these rich people are driving history. Yeah,
Speaker 1: these these these powerful figures are driving history. They're in
Speaker 1: charge there in the driver's seat. I mean, that's kind
Speaker 1: of what's behind Trump arrangement syndrome, right, the idea that
Speaker 1: Trump is uniquely powerful and talented demagogue as opposed to
Speaker 1: just like a demagogue shaped puzzle piece that fit in
Speaker 1: the demagogue shaped hold that was left by the collapse
Speaker 1: of credibility of capitalism. Uh. And you know, a man
Speaker 1: who is clearly too stupid to be a cause of
Speaker 1: any thing and will only ever be the effect of something.
Speaker 1: And uh, you know the for me, the theory of
Speaker 1: history and how it goes was really transformed by an
Speaker 1: exercise that my friend Ada Palmer does. So. Aida is
Speaker 1: a science fiction novelist. She's she's just published the fourth
Speaker 1: book of her Terra Ignota series, her debut series. It's
Speaker 1: in an incredible series of books. But she's a real
Speaker 1: like kind of multi talented, multi threat. So she's a
Speaker 1: librettiston singer who has produced album length operas based on
Speaker 1: the Norse mythos. She's also a tenured history of um
Speaker 1: a tenured professor of Renaissance history in Florence at the
Speaker 1: University of Chicago, where she studies heterodox information, pornography, homosexuality, witchcraft,
Speaker 1: and so on. During the Inquisitions and every year with
Speaker 1: her undergrads, she reenacts through a four week long live
Speaker 1: action role playing game, the Election of the Medici's Pope,
Speaker 1: and each of her students takes on the role of
Speaker 1: a cardinal from a great family and the in the
Speaker 1: actual election of the I forget what year was, uh
Speaker 1: fourteen ninety or something, I forget, but they each take
Speaker 1: on this role and they have a character sheet and
Speaker 1: has motivations like a dinner party, murder mystery. But for
Speaker 1: four weeks they make alliances, break alliances, stab each other
Speaker 1: in the back uh stage surprise reversals. And at the
Speaker 1: end of the four weeks there's this u faux Gothic
Speaker 1: cathedral on campus and they dress up in costume. Aida
Speaker 1: has a a Google alert for theater companies that are
Speaker 1: getting rid of their costumes, so she clothes them in
Speaker 1: the garb of the Medici's cardinals and they gather and
Speaker 1: they go into a room and then a puff of
Speaker 1: smoke emerges and you get the new pope. And every
Speaker 1: year four of the final candidates, Uh, there are four
Speaker 1: final candidates rather, and two of them are always the
Speaker 1: same because the great forces of history bear down on
Speaker 1: that moment to say those people will absolutely be in
Speaker 1: the running for the for the papacy, and two of
Speaker 1: them have never once been the same, because human action
Speaker 1: still has space to alter the outcomes that are prefigured
Speaker 1: by the great forces of history. And so for me,
Speaker 1: the idea of being an optimist or a pessimist has
Speaker 1: always felt very fatalistic. It's this either way, this idea
Speaker 1: that the great forces of history have determined the outcome
Speaker 1: and human action has no bearing on it. And I
Speaker 1: think that rather than optimism or pessimism, we can be hopeful.
Speaker 1: And that's the word you use before. Hope is the
Speaker 1: idea not that you can see a path from here
Speaker 1: to the place you want to get to, but rather
Speaker 1: that you haven't run out of things that you can
Speaker 1: do to advance your your goal, right, Because if you
Speaker 1: can take a step to advance your goal, you can
Speaker 1: ascend the gradient towards the heat that you're trying to reach,
Speaker 1: then you will attain a new vantage point, and from
Speaker 1: that vantage point, you may have revealed to you courses
Speaker 1: of action that you didn't suspect before you took that step.
Speaker 1: So so long as the step is available, there's always
Speaker 1: another step lurking in the wings that you can't see
Speaker 1: from where you are. And the reason I'm hopeful about
Speaker 1: this is I can think of like fifty things that
Speaker 1: could improve the monopoly picture that we're living in now,
Speaker 1: and it's up from thirty things last year. And so
Speaker 1: even though I don't know how we get from here
Speaker 1: to a better future, and even though I absolutely see
Speaker 1: the blockers you're talking about Trump landslide, uh losing Congress
Speaker 1: because they let Joe Mansion and Christmas Cinema Newter the
Speaker 1: build back better Bill, Um, you know all of those
Speaker 1: things that can happen. I have hope, you know, which
Speaker 1: is not the same as optimism or a belief that
Speaker 1: things will be great, or even even like a sense
Speaker 1: a lack of a sense of foreboding. I have that
Speaker 1: in spades. But I have that when the next phase
Speaker 1: of the fight begins, that we will have many um
Speaker 1: vulnerable spots we can strike at, and that we can
Speaker 1: capitalize on whichever victories we attain to find more vulnerabilities
Speaker 1: and move on. I think that's so important and I
Speaker 1: think it goes in line with to bring up climate
Speaker 1: change again. The idea that like one of the most
Speaker 1: toxic things you can think are e climate change is
Speaker 1: that there's nothing to do. We're already past every point
Speaker 1: of no return and there's no there's no positive action
Speaker 1: because it just leads you to doing the same thing
Speaker 1: as the people who deny it. Um. And it's Yeah,
Speaker 1: I think it's it's very important to um recognize that like,
Speaker 1: not only are there things you can do, but when
Speaker 1: you do those things, you start taking those steps, other
Speaker 1: steps reveal themselves. Yeah. Um. And you know what, if
Speaker 1: you're feeling nihilistic about about climate I'm nearly through Saul
Speaker 1: Griffith's book Electrify Uh. Saul's an old friend of mine.
Speaker 1: He's MacArthur Winner's electrical engineer, and he's just done the
Speaker 1: He's it's a popular engineering book. It's one of my
Speaker 1: favorite genres. They're like popular science books, except instead of
Speaker 1: telling you about how science works, they tell you about
Speaker 1: how engineering works. And he's basically like, here is why
Speaker 1: all the estimates of how much renewable as we need
Speaker 1: are hugely overestimated, And it's basically that like keeping uh
Speaker 1: fossil fuel power online requires a lot of fossil fuel, right,
Speaker 1: so something like of that estimate is just it's the
Speaker 1: energy that we need to make the energy and it's
Speaker 1: not present in electrical models. Here's how we can manufacture it.
Speaker 1: Here's how we can distribute it. Here is basically how
Speaker 1: if we can figure out the financing, Americans can uh
Speaker 1: spend less money every year than they do now to
Speaker 1: get more stuff that they love every year that we
Speaker 1: can do this without hair shirts. It's a spectacular book. Um,
Speaker 1: And you know, I don't agree with everything Saul says
Speaker 1: every all the time, but he is very careful about
Speaker 1: is technical facts. There aren't technical errors in this. There
Speaker 1: might be assumptions that we disagree with, but as a
Speaker 1: technical matter, he's basically written a piece of design fiction
Speaker 1: in which, over the next fifteen years, using clever finance
Speaker 1: and and solid engineering, we really actually do avert the
Speaker 1: climate emergency. And yeah, as always, kind of the main
Speaker 1: barriers to doing the best version of the thing is
Speaker 1: the political realities on the ground. You know, you have
Speaker 1: to but I think that's the that's the value of
Speaker 1: at least trying to make it clear that there are options.
Speaker 1: I wanted to shift for a moment um. I was
Speaker 1: thinking recently about I think probably the earliest back book
Speaker 1: of yours that I've read, Pirate Cinema, which is heavily involved.
Speaker 1: I think I'm going to you know, if you're one
Speaker 1: of the folks like me, uh was on the Internet
Speaker 1: back when you know, file sharing sites, when that was
Speaker 1: a huge topic of discussion, when the r i A
Speaker 1: Was going after people, when like copyright was kind of
Speaker 1: a a much more prevalent part of kind of the
Speaker 1: online discourse. Um. It deals a lot in that and
Speaker 1: these kind of I think there's elements of it that
Speaker 1: kind of prefigured what Disney has done buying up every
Speaker 1: imaginable fictional property in the world. And that's kind of
Speaker 1: the the elements of dystopia that book deals with is is,
Speaker 1: you know, the attempts of these this these giant multinational
Speaker 1: entertainment corporations to shut down the free tape trading of ideas,
Speaker 1: remixing and all that stuff. And then kind of thinking
Speaker 1: about the difference between the focus of that and the
Speaker 1: focus of books like Attack surface where you're really delving
Speaker 1: more into you know, I the fictional versions of real
Speaker 1: life companies like Tiger Swan that do it uh the
Speaker 1: surveillance on protesters and all around the world, and that
Speaker 1: are kind of using tactics that were and yeared by
Speaker 1: other contractors, and like Iraq and Afghanistan years earlier. I
Speaker 1: guess kind of the things that I find interesting about that,
Speaker 1: as I can remember when I was first on the Internet,
Speaker 1: the big social kind of crusades online with the people
Speaker 1: that that I paid attention to at least was all
Speaker 1: around copyright. It was about not just you know, the
Speaker 1: attempts to stop people from remixing and sharing copyrighted work,
Speaker 1: but about um attempts to like buy up copyrights and
Speaker 1: like into these these ever kind of larger uh UM agglomerations,
Speaker 1: and and that's kind of hit. It seems to have
Speaker 1: hit like a terminal point with the you know, movies
Speaker 1: like Ready Player one and kind of a lot of
Speaker 1: the stuff we're seeing in Marble where everything is showing
Speaker 1: up everywhere, Space Jam two UM. I guess the part
Speaker 1: of it that feels less dystopian the days attempts to
Speaker 1: crack down on file sharing, which I don't think went
Speaker 1: kind of in the worst case scenario. I'm interested actually
Speaker 1: in your thoughts on that, um, because I can remember,
Speaker 1: you know, when the r I A would be threatening
Speaker 1: people with years in jail and whatnot over sharing stuff
Speaker 1: on kaza we seem to be I don't know. Is
Speaker 1: it just that it gets less like I'm interested in
Speaker 1: your in your thoughts on that. Is it just that
Speaker 1: it's less publicized when they cracked down on people, or
Speaker 1: has kind of the nature of their response to that
Speaker 1: really changed. Well, I think that what's happened with the
Speaker 1: kind of steady state of the copyright wars has been
Speaker 1: the introduction of brittleness and fragility into our speech platforms
Speaker 1: like Twitter, uh and and Facebook and YouTube, where it's
Speaker 1: very easy to get material removed by by making copyright
Speaker 1: claims um. And you know, we see that with the
Speaker 1: sleazier side of the reputation management industry, where they use
Speaker 1: bogus copyright claims to take down criticisms. You you know,
Speaker 1: there was a group of leftists who are really celebrating
Speaker 1: the idea that if you if Nazis were marching in
Speaker 1: your town, you could stop them from uploading their videos
Speaker 1: by playing copyrighted music in the background, and I was like,
Speaker 1: you have no idea, what a terrible fucking idea that is.
Speaker 1: And you know, within a couple of years, cops and
Speaker 1: Beverly Hills were doing it. Whenever people tried to film
Speaker 1: the police there, they would just turn on some Taylor
Speaker 1: Swift to try and stop uploading. Um. You know, the
Speaker 1: thing about the copyright wars is that the real action
Speaker 1: turned out to be in um wage theft through monopolization. So,
Speaker 1: you know, the neutering and destruction of label independent music
Speaker 1: distribution platforms like Kazah or Groxter or Napster, and the
Speaker 1: Supreme Court decision, the Groster decision that supported that meant
Speaker 1: that the only um way that you could launch a
Speaker 1: service like that was in cooperation with the big labels,
Speaker 1: and the you know, most successful one is Spotify. Spotify
Speaker 1: is actually partially owned by the labels, and the labels
Speaker 1: use that ownership steak to negotiate a kind of formalized
Speaker 1: wage theft where they allowed for a lower perse stream
Speaker 1: rate because when they get royalties for a stream, part
Speaker 1: of that money goes to their musicians. And that meant
Speaker 1: that the firm Spotify retain more profits which it returned
Speaker 1: to it in the form of higher dividends, and dividends
Speaker 1: go just straight to their shareholders. They don't that there's
Speaker 1: no claim that musicians can make on this. And because
Speaker 1: they set the benchmark rate, it meant that everyone, irrespective
Speaker 1: of whether you were assigned to one of the big
Speaker 1: three labels, ended up getting the same per stream rate
Speaker 1: as as Universal's artists, so they were able to structure
Speaker 1: the whole market. In the meantime, in the industrial side,
Speaker 1: UH copyright laws, notably Section twelve of one of the
Speaker 1: Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which is a law past that
Speaker 1: makes it a felony to remove DRM to bypass a
Speaker 1: technical protection measure UM that has become the go to
Speaker 1: system for blocking, repair, interoperability UH and to prevent third
Speaker 1: parties from um UH from from creating services or add
Speaker 1: ons that accomplish positive ends like improved accessibility, improved security,
Speaker 1: um AD blocking and privacy and so on. They just say, well,
Speaker 1: you know, we we put a one molecule thick layer
Speaker 1: of DRM around, say YouTube, and when you make a
Speaker 1: YouTube downloader for archival purposes or whatever, UM you you
Speaker 1: just create a um A. UH you bypass our technical
Speaker 1: protection measure, and so you're committing a felony and you
Speaker 1: can go to prison for five years and and pay
Speaker 1: a five thousand dollar fine. And so you have this
Speaker 1: like relentless monotonic expansion of DRM into like automotive tractors.
Speaker 1: Medtronic uses it to block people from fixing ventilators. UM.
Speaker 1: So you know this, this UM assault on the ability
Speaker 1: to reconfigure a technology that is ever more prevalent in
Speaker 1: our lives and that recently holds our lives in its
Speaker 1: in its hands right its choices determine whether we live
Speaker 1: or die has been really consequential. And I know, we
Speaker 1: don't really think of it as a copyright problem. We
Speaker 1: think of it as right to repair. We think of
Speaker 1: a security auditing our accessibility. But the rule that is
Speaker 1: being used to block into operability is a copyright law.
Speaker 1: It's what printer companies used to stop you from buying
Speaker 1: third party inc um. It's what Apple uses to stop
Speaker 1: you from installing a third party app store. And you
Speaker 1: know the absence of a third party app store is
Speaker 1: why when Apple removed all the working VPNs in China,
Speaker 1: Chinese users couldn't just switch to another app store that
Speaker 1: had working VPNs in it. And so you know that
Speaker 1: this um endgame of the copyright wars is I think
Speaker 1: a lot more dystopian than merely suing college kids. Uh,
Speaker 1: it's it's actually really screwed us in ways that are
Speaker 1: that are hard to fathom. Yeah, it's a fascinating example
Speaker 1: of kind of Dystopi creep because, at least kind of
Speaker 1: from my more more ignorant position, when I was nineteen,
Speaker 1: I was like worried that all of these these people
Speaker 1: remixing music and movies that I liked, like we're going
Speaker 1: to get cracked down on or have their stuff pulled
Speaker 1: um And the kind of thing that I didn't I
Speaker 1: don't think a lot of people saw coming until it hit.
Speaker 1: I certainly didn't, was what you were just talking about
Speaker 1: the fact that kind of the logic of how these
Speaker 1: these entertainment companies were looking at like an album or
Speaker 1: you know, a movie and and cutting up pieces of
Speaker 1: that they've they've applied to like a tractor, you know,
Speaker 1: and now you can't like repair your John Deer or
Speaker 1: modify your John Deer so it works better. And then
Speaker 1: you know, you you get situations like we just kind
Speaker 1: of averted with the John Deer strike, where there was
Speaker 1: a very real possibility that we wouldn't be able to
Speaker 1: get a large chunk of a harvest because there wouldn't
Speaker 1: be parts and you can't put your own in. And
Speaker 1: that's to think that that the thought process that let
Speaker 1: us there started with like trying to protect Metallica. In
Speaker 1: some ways, it's kind of funny. And this is why
Speaker 1: the anti monopoly critique is great because it shows you
Speaker 1: that there's cause for solidarity between John Deere tractor owners
Speaker 1: and John Deere tractor UH makers the workers who work there.
Speaker 1: Because the same force that has allowed John Deere to
Speaker 1: cram down its workforce for forty years is the is
Speaker 1: the force that allows it to um uh take away
Speaker 1: the agency and economic liberties of farmers who own John
Speaker 1: Deere tractors. And it's it's the it's the political power
Speaker 1: that comes with monopoly. And so you know, if John
Speaker 1: Deere were a smaller, weaker firm, it would be less
Speaker 1: able to resist both the claims of its workforce and
Speaker 1: the claims of its um UH customers. Mhm yeah, I
Speaker 1: mean that makes that makes sense, and it is like
Speaker 1: I like that idea of of because it's not just
Speaker 1: kind of solidarity between John Deere purchasers UM and and
Speaker 1: the people who work in the factories. It's also there's
Speaker 1: kind of solidarity between a wide like anyone concerned with
Speaker 1: UM copyright. It's a much broader base of solidarity than
Speaker 1: just people who are worried about you know, what's happening
Speaker 1: uh to fiction or like what Disney is doing to
Speaker 1: like copyrights around Mickey Mouse or whatever. Like it's it.
Speaker 1: You can you can draw in concerns from right to
Speaker 1: repair to a bunch of other things, which potentially means
Speaker 1: there's there's a greater body of people available for action
Speaker 1: if you can make them see kind of um converging
Speaker 1: interests there, which is I think is an interesting idea. Well,
Speaker 1: I think you're getting something really important and this is UM.
Speaker 1: This comes from James Boyle, who's a copyright scholar at
Speaker 1: Duke University and was really involved and found in creative
Speaker 1: commons and in those early copyright fights and and Jamie
Speaker 1: makes an analogy to the coining of the term ecology.
Speaker 1: He says that before the term ecology came along, you know,
Speaker 1: someone us cared about owls and someone us cared about
Speaker 1: the ozone layer, but it wasn't really clear that we
Speaker 1: were on the same side. You know, it's not clear.
Speaker 1: If you're Martian looking through a telescope, you might be
Speaker 1: hard pressed to explain why. You know, the destiny of
Speaker 1: charismatic charismatic nocturnal birds and the gaseous composition of the
Speaker 1: upper atmosphere were the same issue. Right in the term ecology.
Speaker 1: Let all these people who cared about different things find
Speaker 1: a single point to rally around. It turned a thousand
Speaker 1: issues into one movement. And I think that in the
Speaker 1: in the course of resisting corporate power, which is to say,
Speaker 1: resisting monopoly, we have the potential to weld together people
Speaker 1: from very diverse fields. You know, farmers and people who
Speaker 1: make tractors. Sure, but you know, if you grew up
Speaker 1: watching professional wrestling and now you're aghast that the wrestlers
Speaker 1: that you loved are begging on go fund me for
Speaker 1: pennies to die with dignity, you know once someone explains
Speaker 1: to the reason that that's happening is that thirty wrestling
Speaker 1: leagues became one wrestling league that was able to practice
Speaker 1: worker's classification, turn those performers into contractors, take away their
Speaker 1: health insurance and leave them to die. Then suddenly you're
Speaker 1: on the same side of the people who were worried
Speaker 1: about big tech and big tractor, and the people are
Speaker 1: worried about the fact that there's only one manufacturer of
Speaker 1: cheerleading uniform uniforms, and two manufacturers of athletic shoes, and
Speaker 1: two manufacturers of spirits, and two manufacturers of beer. One
Speaker 1: manufacturer of eyewear that also owns all the eye wear
Speaker 1: stores and the eyewear ensure. You know that Duff Beer
Speaker 1: thing from the early Simpsons, where there's like Duff Beer,
Speaker 1: Rispberry Thing, Dulci, Gabana, Oliver, People's Bauschan, Loam, Versaci. Every
Speaker 1: eyewear brand you've ever heard of is one company coach
Speaker 1: all of them. And they also own Sunglass Hut and
Speaker 1: uh Target Optical and Sears Optical, and lens Crafters and
Speaker 1: Spec Savers and every other eyewear story you've ever heard of.
Speaker 1: And they bought all the labs that make the lenses,
Speaker 1: so more than half the lenses in the world come
Speaker 1: from them. A division called and they bought Imed, which
Speaker 1: is the company that bought all the insurance companies that
Speaker 1: ensure I wear and so they're also the company that's
Speaker 1: ensuring glasses your your eyes one company, and I Wear
Speaker 1: costs a thousand percent more than it did a decade ago.
Speaker 1: They stole our fucking eyes. Right, So people who care
Speaker 1: about that have common cause with people who care about
Speaker 1: wrestlers and people who care about beer and big tech
Speaker 1: and the fact that there's four shipping companies and they
Speaker 1: have no competitive pressure and so they just keep building
Speaker 1: bigger ships that gets stuck in the fucking Suez canal Right,
Speaker 1: we're all on the same side. Yeah, And I I
Speaker 1: like the idea that I like. I like hoping that
Speaker 1: that kind of inherent solidarity, if you can point it
Speaker 1: out to people, is potentially an antidote to, or at
Speaker 1: least a partial antidote to the level of the layer
Speaker 1: of politicization that's fallen down over everything, um that stops
Speaker 1: people from actually considering matters but instead considering like, I
Speaker 1: don't know, is this owning the libs? Right? Like if
Speaker 1: you if they if if you can get them to
Speaker 1: see that, like, yeah, their favorite wrestler is like dying
Speaker 1: because he couldn't afford insulin, and that that that's t
Speaker 1: i'd to the issue of like the reason his dad
Speaker 1: can't get tractor parts this year or whatever, um, and
Speaker 1: that that's tied to other issues that are maybe championed
Speaker 1: by people he would reflexively dismiss. But like, yeah, I
Speaker 1: I I find that really inspiring. It's still a significant
Speaker 1: there's a significant challenge for people who are trying to
Speaker 1: make those connections, for folks who are who are trying
Speaker 1: to like inform them of that state. I mean, yeah,
Speaker 1: that's true. And you know, like Steve Bannon will tell
Speaker 1: you that the reason to do cultural world culture culture
Speaker 1: war bullshit is because politics are down downstream from culture,
Speaker 1: and there's probably an element of truth to that. But
Speaker 1: I also think the reason that people find culture war
Speaker 1: bullshits so attractive is because they got nothing else. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I think we we talked about that a lot within
Speaker 1: the context of conservative for politics. I grew up very conservative,
Speaker 1: and I do remember how the tenor of things I
Speaker 1: was hearing through the bush ears changed from advocation of
Speaker 1: policies to just all culture war, all the time, all
Speaker 1: all striking the dims all the time. And it was
Speaker 1: the kind of um it. And that's not the only
Speaker 1: place that's happen. You see it on the left to
Speaker 1: absolutely like it's it's endemic now it's it's a poison
Speaker 1: and kind of the discourse. But I think that there's
Speaker 1: a lot that needs to be I think there's a
Speaker 1: lot to be discovered still for like how to break
Speaker 1: people out of that. I'm kind of bullish when we
Speaker 1: talk about these issues like you were bringing up with
Speaker 1: sort of the monopolization of these industries you wouldn't expect
Speaker 1: to be monopolized. I'm hopeful about the future that stuff
Speaker 1: like three D printing presents for that. We have an
Speaker 1: organization in Portland that does kind of three D printing glasses,
Speaker 1: frames and stuff and is helping people with that sort
Speaker 1: of stuff. And I'm in conversations with like the Four
Speaker 1: Thieves Vinegar Collective. I think it's called UM. Yeah. Some
Speaker 1: of the folks doing like ing to do working on
Speaker 1: pharmaceutical hacking making at the moment like lower cost UH
Speaker 1: kind of home scratch brood versions of like different AIDS medications,
Speaker 1: and the Holy Grail is doing that with um insulin
Speaker 1: effectively UM and I think it is. And I do
Speaker 1: think one of the things that's exciting about that is
Speaker 1: because the way in which the way in which collaboration
Speaker 1: on three D printing works in the way in which
Speaker 1: actually spreading, like the ability to do stuff works. I
Speaker 1: think it synergizes nicely with the ability of people to
Speaker 1: kind of reach other folks through writing or other forms
Speaker 1: of content, because they can both spread through the same
Speaker 1: You can have a video or a story, and you
Speaker 1: can have like kind of embedded guides on how to
Speaker 1: do that. Um I I I don't know that I've
Speaker 1: I've runned into a lot of your writings on kind
Speaker 1: of the potential of three D printing in this space,
Speaker 1: But I'm interested, like to what do you do? Are
Speaker 1: you looking at that as kind of an area of
Speaker 1: hope or do you see that still is kind of
Speaker 1: too too niche and labor focus to really actually take
Speaker 1: off in the way that it would need to to
Speaker 1: crack some of these nuts. This is where I do
Speaker 1: my my Woody Allen. You know nothing of my work
Speaker 1: stick because I had this novel Maker Makers in two thousand.
Speaker 1: It's it's why uh Bree Pettis went out and founded
Speaker 1: Maker bought uh and it's you know, credited with like
Speaker 1: kickstarting the homebrew three D printed revolution. Blah blah blah blah,
Speaker 1: blah and um, and it was a very bullish novel
Speaker 1: about three D printing. I Um, you know, the reality
Speaker 1: hasn't lived up to the hype yet. It may just
Speaker 1: be that we're in the long trough of despair, as
Speaker 1: the Gardner hype cycle model has it. Uh. But you know,
Speaker 1: I think the problem with UM three D printing was
Speaker 1: that the patents had been concentrated into the hands of
Speaker 1: two large firms that had bought all their competitors, including
Speaker 1: Maker Bought and UM. When those patents finally expired, the
Speaker 1: big one was the laser centering of of powder patent expired.
Speaker 1: It just wasn't a big bang. And I think it's
Speaker 1: because the supply chain for it still had a lot
Speaker 1: of proprietary elements, and so producing the powder and producing
Speaker 1: the components that allowed for that powder printing remained a
Speaker 1: very high bar, and so we just didn't see the
Speaker 1: kind of new industry emerged that we would have hoped for.
Speaker 1: And you know, it's like seven years since those patents expired.
Speaker 1: Five years since those patent expired. Now we're seeing a
Speaker 1: few more of those powder printers. You get a lot
Speaker 1: more like you've cured epoxy printers because those came off
Speaker 1: patent earlier and they have a less complicated supply chain. Um.
Speaker 1: But still, I mean mostly when we talk about printers,
Speaker 1: we're talking about filament, and just filaments just not a
Speaker 1: great technology. It's been pushed in ways that you wouldn't
Speaker 1: even believe, and people have figured out how to do
Speaker 1: absolutely incredible things with it. But it's not It's not
Speaker 1: something that you would make aerospace components for, you know,
Speaker 1: It's it's something that you make um novelty dungeons and
Speaker 1: dragons dice out, Yeah, which is an important industry to disrupt.
Speaker 1: Don't get me wrong, but I'm with you. I can
Speaker 1: remember paying thirty bucks for a set of dice as
Speaker 1: a kid and thinking, somebody's gotta fix this scam. I
Speaker 1: can produce something for Christmas, Robert, thank you, Garrison. And
Speaker 1: you know now I I own a I bought a
Speaker 1: comic con a couple of years ago. I bought a
Speaker 1: tiny little D twenty made out of meteoric or I
Speaker 1: have a sky metal D twenty. Oh now that's yeah,
Speaker 1: that's that's classy. Um. I'm curious. We've got a little
Speaker 1: bit of time left and I wanted to ask in
Speaker 1: your your novel Attack Surface. I know it was released
Speaker 1: right October, if I'm not mistaken. UM. And obviously a
Speaker 1: lot of that deals with again these kind of like
Speaker 1: corporations that have been contractors for the D O D
Speaker 1: doing like fucked up surveillance shit in Iraq and Afghanistan
Speaker 1: bringing that technology to crack down on like US, uh,
Speaker 1: sort of dissident left wing political movements. Him's out the
Speaker 1: year that we have a nationwide kind of uprising. UM
Speaker 1: that a lot of fucked up surveillance ship that had
Speaker 1: been kind of demoed state side around it, like standing
Speaker 1: Rock and whatnot, gets gets really put into its own
Speaker 1: How much of that was written before ship went down?
Speaker 1: And I and I'm assuming, like, I don't know exactly
Speaker 1: how your process works, but I'm wondering, like, I assume
Speaker 1: you started the project before everything went the way it
Speaker 1: did last summer. How much did kind of what happened
Speaker 1: last summer affect the way you imagined that technology in
Speaker 1: those tactics functioning in that book. Yeah, the the timeline
Speaker 1: goes the other direction. I wrote that book before the
Speaker 1: summer uprising, UM, long long, long long before that, And
Speaker 1: I wrote it about things like UM, the surveillance technology
Speaker 1: we saw in Belarus and chev and also at Occupy
Speaker 1: and Standing Rock and at other Black Lives Matter demonstrations
Speaker 1: and uprisings in Americus, Assimila, and if you you know,
Speaker 1: also the monotonic expansion of surveillance leagues right where you know,
Speaker 1: first we learned about MC catchers, and then we learned
Speaker 1: about dirt boxes, which are MC catchers on airplanes, and
Speaker 1: you know, like we just all of that stuff leaked
Speaker 1: like crazy because you know, these surveillance giants are are
Speaker 1: not good at what they do, right, which isn't a
Speaker 1: reason we should be hopeful. A company that's bad at
Speaker 1: what it's it does is in some ways even worse
Speaker 1: because one of the ways that they're incompetence expresses itself
Speaker 1: is that they often gather a bunch of data on
Speaker 1: innocent people and then leak it right, not maliciously, just
Speaker 1: through incompetence. Um. And so you know, the this expansion
Speaker 1: of surveillance has like been on my mind for a
Speaker 1: long time, and I've been writing about it, well at
Speaker 1: least since Little Brother, right, so two thousand and six,
Speaker 1: I wrote that novel, and I've had my finger in
Speaker 1: that Yeah, So I've had my finger in that for
Speaker 1: all that time, and and working with the f F,
Speaker 1: it's impossible to miss. Sure. Was there a degree to which, um,
Speaker 1: I don't know. I guess we're you surprised by anything
Speaker 1: that happened last him? Or did it just kind of
Speaker 1: comprehensively feel like these are everything slotting into place that
Speaker 1: I knew was heading in this direction? Because yeah, I mean,
Speaker 1: you're right, I did, like there was like everything was
Speaker 1: kind of presaged um years before. Yeah, I'm wondering if
Speaker 1: if there was anything that kind of surprised you, um
Speaker 1: or was it? Was it all just sort of what
Speaker 1: you've been braced for. Yeah, I don't feel like there
Speaker 1: were any kind of surveillance surprises. I mean the reverse
Speaker 1: the use of reverse warrants. I think we all kind
Speaker 1: of assumed was going on. There had been hints of
Speaker 1: it in Google's warrant canarias beforehand. But you know those
Speaker 1: geofense warrants, which again, if you're like sitting there going oh,
Speaker 1: geofense warrants are awesome because they're catching the one six rioters, Like, dude,
Speaker 1: you are going to be so disappointed, Holy sh it,
Speaker 1: that's not where they're going to keep using this. Yeah. UM,
Speaker 1: so you know, learning more about those reverse warrants I
Speaker 1: think was was interesting. UM, but I don't feel like,
Speaker 1: I don't well off the top of my head, I
Speaker 1: can't say that there was any new technical stuff that emerged,
Speaker 1: you know. I I, um kick started the audio book
Speaker 1: for Attack Surface UH, and I offered as like the
Speaker 1: top tier you could commission short stories in the Little
Speaker 1: Brother universe, and there were three of those and I
Speaker 1: just finished the first of them, and it's about um
Speaker 1: future pipeline protests and uh. You know, I spent a
Speaker 1: lot of time in my research looking at the surveillance
Speaker 1: that was done on the pipeline protests, and a lot
Speaker 1: of it was provocateurs and undercovers who were just terrible
Speaker 1: at their jobs, right, like the intercepts, long publication of
Speaker 1: of uh, you know, long documents about how those operators worked.
Speaker 1: We just like showed up in military haircuts and combat
Speaker 1: boots and then we're like, Hey, I'm from Portland and
Speaker 1: I'm here because we're gonna funk up some bad guys.
Speaker 1: Let's go do it. Let's go do violence and save
Speaker 1: Indian country. And like everyone was like you, like, does
Speaker 1: anyone want to buy drugs and and the actual protesters
Speaker 1: were like you're a provocateur, like go away, you know,
Speaker 1: like they could tell I mean, I guess you know,
Speaker 1: there are a lot more effective in the UK and
Speaker 1: infiltrating the climate movement. You know, they impregnated several protesters,
Speaker 1: so you know, and had long term relationships with them
Speaker 1: and raised kids with them. So there is no here stories.
Speaker 1: Yeah here, it was not that we did just didn't
Speaker 1: see that incredible efficacy. Yeah, And I do think that
Speaker 1: that's I think kind of the message I took out
Speaker 1: of it because I I was I started reporting on
Speaker 1: like dirt boxes back during Standing Rock, just having them,
Speaker 1: like it explained to me by people who were on
Speaker 1: the ground when I showed up that like, yeah there's
Speaker 1: this your like phones don't work the same out here,
Speaker 1: and like we're trying to figure out what's going on,
Speaker 1: but like everything is is in it's not just that
Speaker 1: we're out in the sticks or anything. And I think
Speaker 1: the only surprise, the big surprise for me last year
Speaker 1: was how I think how little the technology accomplished for
Speaker 1: them and how much it just it just wound up
Speaker 1: back down to violence. Was like that was kind of
Speaker 1: the for all of the toys they had, the toys
Speaker 1: that actually made the most difference was gassing and beating
Speaker 1: people and violence and like old fashioned informants that was
Speaker 1: that was the stuff, and just having a dude there. Yeah,
Speaker 1: they were really relied on. And the fact that you
Speaker 1: that that you, Corey, weren't super surprised, but anything last year,
Speaker 1: I think kind of just more shows kind of the
Speaker 1: strength of your work in terms of how you're very
Speaker 1: good at seeing the trends that are already happening but
Speaker 1: taking them to their next logical place. Um. And it's
Speaker 1: a really great way to kind of get a sense
Speaker 1: of what is something, what what will something maybe look
Speaker 1: like in the next decade or so, because it's it's
Speaker 1: all based on already existing stuff, just in different kind
Speaker 1: of original ways. So that's why I think it's it's
Speaker 1: so useful to look at your books as as an activist,
Speaker 1: specifically around like surveillance and stuff, because it's it's just
Speaker 1: really it's it's really good for kind of keeping keeping
Speaker 1: an eye on keeping your head, yeah, and keeping an
Speaker 1: eye on what's keeping an eye on you, um, and
Speaker 1: all that kind of stuff. This was a really lovely
Speaker 1: conversation was a lovely last thing to do in my
Speaker 1: home office in because I leave tomorrow and won't be
Speaker 1: back until the next year, and then I'm actually gonna
Speaker 1: be offline for a month after a joint replacement, so
Speaker 1: it was it was really lovely to meet you all
Speaker 1: on to chat with you. Thanks so much for chatting
Speaker 1: with us today. Glory My pleasure. It Could Happen Here
Speaker 1: is a production of cool Zone Media. For more podcast
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Speaker 1: for listening.