How Do We Imagine a Better Technological Future? A Q&A With Cory Doctorow
Civics of Tech Announcements
Our blog posts are a little off schedule this week and next, but we’ll be back to our regular Sunday blog posts after the new year.
Next Monthly Tech Talk on Tuesday, 01/09/23. Join our monthly tech talks to discuss current events, articles, books, podcast, or whatever we choose related to technology and education. There is no agenda or schedule. Our next Tech Talk will be this Tuesday, January 9th, 2023 at 8-9pm EST/7-8pm CST/6-7pm MST/5-6pm PST. Learn more on our Events page and register to participate.
Critical Tech Study Participation: If you self-identify as critical of technology, please consider participating in our study. We are seeking participants who self-identify as holding critical views toward technology to share their stories by answering the following questions: To you, what does it mean to take a critical perspective toward technology? How have you come to take on that critical perspective? Please consider participating in our study via OUR SURVEY. You are welcome to share with others. Thank you!
by Jacob Pleasants
On December 3, 2023, I shared a review of Cory Doctorow’s most recent nonfiction book, The Internet Con. As I wrote in that review, the book is full of valuable insights and useful ideas, and is absolutely worth the read. I was sufficiently excited by the book that I reached out to Doctorow to do some Q&A around the themes of the book and how we might bring some of those ideas to educational spaces. It was an amazing and wide-ranging conversation, and we ended up digging deeply into the question of how we can help people imagine better technological futures.
I hope that you find this conversation as thought-provoking as I did.
(Note: The text below has been edited for clarity and brevity)
Jacob: A big theme of the book is interoperability, and this concept really does a lot of work for you in the book. How did you begin to understand and recognize the centrality of that idea?
Cory: It's really the outcome of 20 years of policy work and watching technology decay. All of these fights that I've gone into about digital rights management and about user lock-in and vendor lock-in and open source and free software and so on. They all boil down to interop. Self-determination flows out of the barrel of an API. If you can't alter the service that you're using or leave the service that you're using, and if that service that you're using has something important to you, like your data or a bunch of other people that you want to talk to, then there's an invitation to mischief. Like a moral hazard that invites the people who are running that service to do bad things to you.
Since I wrote that book, I've been giving this a lot more thought. One way to understand this is that within the microeconomics of the firm, you have different actors, some of whom are more committed to the welfare of users, and some of whom are more indifferent to it and prioritize shareholder interests at the expense of user interests, or short-term interest at the expense of long-term interest. I think that if you were playing a regulatory role and wanted a good internet, one of the things that you would want to do generally is resolve debates within firms in favor of people who preference the long-term health of the firm and the overall health and utility to its users and suppliers. I think that’s relatively uncontroversial to say at a macro level. From a micro level, you have firms that are not challenged by competition because they're able to buy their competitors or use predatory pricing to keep them from entering the market or to extinguish them if they try. You have them doing regulatory captures so that they can avoid privacy and labor and consumer protection laws, and also doing regulatory captures that they can prevent interoperability. Just in the months since I wrote that book, operating in an environment with historic labor scarcity, the tech sector has really reversed itself so that workers are far more replaceable, precarious, than they were. The normal forces that discipline firms and prevent them from doing bad things go out the window, because you don’t really have to worry about competition.
I always think of the Lily Tomlin sketch where she’s the phone operator on Laugh-In doing an AT&T commercial, and it would end with, “We don't care. We don't have to. We’re the phone company.” Companies that don't worry about you defecting don't have to treat you well. They also have effectively unlimited latitude to harm you.
Think about the boardroom calculus about say, making ads 10% more intrusive to get 1% more revenue. That only makes sense if you think that users will tolerate it. But if one of the things that is available to users is an ad blocker, then if you make the ads 10% more obnoxious, the change in revenue that you get from me is not neutral. You don't stay at 100% of the current revenue. Instead of going to 101% you get zero revenue for me for the rest of time. Interoperability is one of these things that allows people in the board room to win arguments by saying, “Look, if you do that, you invite a competitor to enter the market. You invite a user to take a self-help measure, potentially with an interoperable tool that a competitor will offer for this purpose, in order to eat our lunch.”
Why stick with Apple with their green bubble users? Here's our blue bubble tool that you can just download and it'll work. And now you don't have to use Apple's messaging tool anymore, and maybe you can piggyback services on that and gradually start to ease people out of Apple's walled garden.
Finally, you don't have the disciplining force of labor anymore. If a worker says, “If you make me do this, I'll quit,” the answer these days is, “Don't the door hit you on the way out.” They just fired 12,000 Googlers two months after doing a stock buyback that would have paid their salaries for 27 years.
Interop hits every one of those layers. Interop is how we protect privacy. Interop is how we protect consumer and labor rights. Not the only way, but it offers a form of immediate remedy. Regulation, while it might be more durable or more sweeping, is going to be much slower. If you’re an Uber driver and it changes its wage pricing algorithm as they did in the last couple of years, so that if you take lots of rides, your offered wage per mile goes down because the algorithm is basically figuring that you're someone who doesn't have a choice, that you're taking all the rides. Whereas if you're a selective driver, then they pay more ride until you become less selective and then they drop your wage. That's the point at which you've given up all your other side hustles and you're locked in. Yes, that's illegal wage discrimination and it is unlawful. But the gears grind slowly.
Meanwhile, while you're waiting for the NLRB [National Labor Relations Board] to act, drivers could collectively install an app that just auto turned down rides through a whole geographic region unless the offer per mile was high enough to make it worth all of their while. You could have what amounts to an app-coordinated strike, right? This is not a substitute for muscular labor enforcement, but it is a very powerful adjunct to muscular labor enforcement. And it's one of those things that keeps people in eating money while they pursue an NLRB intervention, so that they don't go, “Oh my God, I'm too broke to spend any time chasing this intervention.”
It slides in at the level of improving enforcement. It also slides in at the level of labor discipline. If you are disgruntled with how your boss is degrading the product that you put your soul into, what you can do is quit and start a rival company that offers modifications to the product. If you don't like how HP is wrecking their printers, you can quit and start a third-party ink company and target HP customers. That's a much lower capital proposition than beating HP. And so now when you say, “If you do this, I'll quit,” maybe that stops your boss from saying, “Fine quit.” If it doesn't, then you can go and start the company. So now we're back to competition.
Jacob: So, this is clearly a profound insight, and it’s not something we ever teach young people about. We teach them how to use technology, but we don’t teach them about any of this. On the one hand, I would love young people to read your book, but we might not be able to pull that off. In lieu of that, what should we be teaching our young people that might help them recognize some of the insights that you've expressed here?
Cory: I think when people encounter something that is unpleasant about an app or a service that they use, they don't even realize the remedies that interoperability offers are within the realm of possibility, that there's something they could ask for. Whatever practice was used to inject interoperability in the days of Microsoft Office fighting with the Mac or Facebook fighting with Myspace, those are forgotten arts. The imaginative realm of how you might address this stuff is foreclosed.
One of the proximate inspirations for this current in my work, is that the University of Waterloo, which bills itself as Canada's MIT (and which I’m proud dropout from), had a 50th anniversary for its computer science department (which my dad graduated from back when it was called Applied Mathematics). I went back to the keynote for the CS grads and for the CS faculty. I talked about how all these bad things have happened, how digital regulations are important and how policy gets it wrong, and the roles technologists can play. So at the end of this, one of the grad students in the room said, “I hear all that stuff you're talking about. But I despair because can't figure out how to convince all my friends to stop using Facebook. They just don't understand that Facebook is not good, or they do understand but are too lazy or too stuck to leave.”
I said something like, “Look, you're a computer science grad student at the University of Waterloo. You don't have to beg your friends to leave Facebook. You can build a service and give them scrapers that bring all the stuff that's keeping them on Facebook into your new service. For most people, that's not an option. Most people cannot do the self-help to just unilaterally modify the service, to part the Red Seas and lead your people out of bondage and to a promised land. You've paid hundreds of thousands of dollars and spent years in this institution learning to do this. And yet you can't even imagine it.” That was where this all started.
The point is that it's not just “normies” whose imagination has been foreclosed on it, it's the nerds. It's weird because on the one hand you got all this move fast and break things nonsense. But on the other hand, the only good version of that idea has been absolutely cauterized from the technologists’ imagination. You've got, “Let's disrupt refugee detention with new electrified ankle bracelets.” But nobody’s saying, “Let's disrupt student debt predation by coordinating debt strikes or automated complaints under the National Fair Credit Act against debt collectors who buy debts from private student debt holders to get massive amounts of debts nullified.” That is somehow just not in their imaginary.
Jacob: It seems like we have a crisis of imagination in many ways. One of the things I was thinking about is how you write fiction and nonfiction. Is fiction what we need to be able to expand people's imaginaries? Is that part of your broader project?
Cory: Yes, it’s both. It’s an “and” not an “or.” If you don't even know that it was possible, you can lose track of the fact that it was taken from you. And lose the outrage of having something precious taken from you. Just think about the public domain. Jennifer Jenkins at the Center for the Public Domain just published her annual roundup of works that are going to enter the public domain in the coming days. Every January 1, the public domain gets new works, and that's very recent. It wasn't true until 2019 because we had two successive copyright freezes. Now we’re reopening the public domain for the first time. All kinds of stuff is going in there including Mickey Mouse, the Steamboat Willie version. He's got pupils but he doesn't have gloves. People don’t even know, can’t even think that you can use stuff the way that Walt Disney did. It's like a lost art or legend. People are like, well, when Walt Disney did it, obviously he was making good art. But do we want just any person to be able to do this? Shouldn’t we have some system of licensing or something? And have that licensing controlled by Disney? Then we can just say to Disney, “You decide who can make things with your copyrights.” And just like that, imagination has been extinguished. The idea that there are things made in living memory that just belong to all of us is gone from our imagination.
I'll give you like a much more narrow but emblematic version. I have a cousin who I love. She became a mom really young. One day she was talking about how her kids want to be able to watch DVDs, but they scratch them. She wished she could just make copies of them the way we did with our records and stuff, and it's a pity that it’s technically impossible to copy a DVD the way it was possible to copy a VHS cassette.
Well, it's not technically impossible. But there was a consortium that created a cartel, that created an agreement that none of them would build that capability into a DVD player. DVD players could have worked exactly like VCRs. My cousin didn't know that, so she made a fairly reasonable assumption that when you switch from a cassette to a shiny disk, there's something that shiny disc can't do because it’s a shiny disc, not because of a conspiracy. You assume that the reason that it's different now is something intrinsic in the technology. Like, it’s physics or something about optical drives.
So, back to your question, what would I teach kids? I would get them to understand what was stolen from them. I would get them to think about all this stuff that was taken away, that could be here, all the cool junk we could have. What would it be like if you could leave Facebook and still talk to your friends?
And it's not just kids, it's policymakers. The European Union's Digital Markets Act has a mandate for it, which comes into effect on March 6 next year. They're phasing it in service by service, starting with end-to-end encrypted messaging, which is a crazy idea. Yes, it’s very important. Yes, there are real problems with the way that gatekeeper platforms maintain dominance by controlling blue bubbles and green bubbles or whatever. But also, boy is it easy to screw up, and people can really get hurt. Jamal Khashoggi was lured to his death by Saudi Royals when they bought a piece of software that exploited a defect in the encrypted messaging platform WhatsApp. They tricked him and his friends into thinking that they were communicating with each other when the Saudis were listening in and that was how they killed him. If you wanted to destroy all credibility for interop while simultaneously inflicting lots of harm on people all over the world, you could do nothing better than just say, oh, we're going to start this interop mandate with end-to-end encrypted messaging and we're going to put a ticking clock on it, so it's going to have to be done in a year and a half or whatever.
Having spoken to a bunch of European officials, I think the reason that they're doing this is because they literally can't imagine interoperable social media, like they're all either too young or too normal to have ever used Usenet. They never saw it. It's like “not wet water,” it just feels like a complete oxymoron. All of them have done interoperable messaging because if you're a German who is in Brussels sending a text message to a Dutch colleague who's on holiday in Spain, you're like, oh yeah, operability for messaging. Sure, yeah. But SMS is a dumpster fire! Of course it's possible --- if you don't care about security or integrity.
I think that we need to fix the imagination of all of us so that we can have better things so that we can know what to ask for. If you don't know what to ask for, you can't get it.
Jacob: I'm thinking back to all conversations I've had with students, trying to get them to expand their imagination. I'm curious to get your story of this. Clearly, you came to be able to see the alternatives. So, how did you get there? What’s your origin story?
Cory: It's because I grew up with it. Like the primitive, early computers that we got in the late '70s. My dad was a computer science teacher. We got Apple II Plus in ‘79 because Apple was smart enough to give all the computer science teachers II Pluses to take home for the summer. The Apple II Plus didn't do much, it was very primitive. In order to get it to do stuff, you had to program it. Oftentimes that took the very weird form of getting a computer magazine that would have a program in it that you would type into the computer. We literally spent days typing programs into computers. And I'm not saying that this is a good way to use a computer. But if you want to understand how a computer works, you could do worse than have everything that your computer does come about as a result of you having to program it. Then I got to watch computers of increasing sophistication and there was no discontinuity. The skills that you developed with the previous generation of computers would carry over so that you could take advantage of the more sophisticated capabilities of the new computer to do more.
When the iPad came along I wrote this essay called “Why I'm Not Getting An iPad.” I looked at that model of app-based lockdown computing, and I thought it was the Rubicon because I knew about the DMCA [Digital Millennium Copyright Act], because I knew about the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, because I knew about all the other ways that firms had tried to stop people from improving the services that they used. Especially how they had been having increasing success where those services were networked. If there was a component of a service that ran on someone else's computer, it was really hard for you to modify how that service worked if it had to leave through a server. Everything on the iPad works this way.
What we have now is a long-term shrinking of the space where you can exercise technological self-determination. I think the person who really nailed it was Yanis Varoufakis and his focus on Technofeudalism. It identifies this current in the way that our policy works. Owning things is something reserved to large firms and the rest of us pay rent on the goods and are not able to alter how we work with them in ways that are adverse to the interests of these large firms.
In a feudal system, rents are immune to competition. If you are the landlord of a coffee shop that goes out of business because a better coffee shop opens across the street, you win because now you have a store front that's worth more because it's near a better coffee shop, and you can charge more rent for it. Capitalism is making money the hard way, rent is making money the easy way. What a lot of this represents, this stripping way of technological self-determination is a triumph of rent over profit. It's not that profit is abolished. The way to understand whether you live in a system that is capitalist or feudalist is not whether there's no profits or no rents. Rents persisted after the capitalist revolution. It's what happens when there is a contest between rent and profit. If rent wins, then it's feudal, and if profit wins, it's capitalist.
And so, where you have Apple saying to all of its independent software vendors, 30% of every dollar you make goes to Apple, and it's a felony to offer your users an alternative to the app store or a means to install it, this is the triumph of rent over profit.
The dominant motif right now and the thing that underpins all of this foment about Digital Rights Management and interop and big tech boils down to the fact that the rentier economy is antithetical to all forms of self-determination. That's why feudal lords had to bind peasants to the land. If peasants could leave, feudalism stops working. All forms of self-determination are incompatible with feudalism. And so we get the current high tech technofeudal, Tayloristic society in which Amazon Warehouse packers wear haptic bracelets that buzz if they're not picking fast enough.
Jacob: Clearly you had the experience getting to see what self-determination could have been and that it was a possibility. What's troubling is when you're the kid who's been raised on the iPad, and all you've ever seen are walled gardens where you're a captive. How do we help our young people envision that there is something over the fence and they can build it?
Cory: I do this with science fiction. And one of the things that science fiction can do in the age of search engines is to describe things that exist or could exist, then leave it as an exercise to the reader to search out how to do it. This strikes a nice balance between pedantic fiction that includes like actual instruction and fiction where the plot keeps rolling along. My novel Little Brother is like this. It's full of stuff that if you just type keywords into a search engine, you'll be able to do a lot more with your technology. I’ve heard a lot of technologists say, “I got my start because I read of something in Little Brother and said, hey, I wonder if that's real? And then I looked it up and it was, and that's where I got my start.”
It's like a new freedom of motion that we didn't used to have. When I was a kid, knowing stuff was hard. I remember we all figured out virally that if you unscrewed the earpiece of a pay phone and popped out the speaker, then you shorted them by touching them to the chrome on the cradle, you got an open dial tone and you could call anywhere for free. We would go and meet someone at a party and be like, “Do you know the pay phone trick?” It was cool. These days, you don't need to know how to hack the pay phone. You need to know that pay phones are able to be hacked. Once you know that pay phones are hackable, you just type, “How do I hack payphones?” into the search engine and you’re in business.
We need to teach young people how to hack, that they can be hackers.
Yeah. Go check out Mimi Ito at UC Irvine Connected Learning. She has designed a whole curriculum around this stuff and the ways to teach it.
What would be your recommended entry point into your fiction?
If you want an open access text for people who are teaching young people, it would be Little Brother.