Transcripts For CSPAN3 Cory 20240705

So tonight, of course, we have cory and brian merchant here to talk about bryans new book, which is out yesterday called blood in the machine. And coreys new book is out just a couple of weeks ago called the internet con. Its very exciting stuff. People. So theyre going have a conversation and then well open at the end for some questions. So of something penetrating, hard hitting, but also a question not a long story. And then well have book signing to finish out the night. So i think everybody is familiar, these two gents up here. But for sake of, you know, the ritual cory doctorow, a Science Fiction author, activist and journalist, hes on the stage, left side here. Up here. The internet con is the most recent book. It is called a big tech disassemble manual, which is the coolest subtitle ever. Hes also a prolific writer of fiction as well. His latest novel is red team blues, a techno thriller finance crime. Hes also the author of the International Young adult a little brother series. And i think a very cool note in 2020, he was inducted into the canadian science and fantasy hall of fame. Yeah. Yes. Well, i like to blame him when you cant. We also have brian merchant here of he is the Technology Columnist for, the l. A. Times, and hes the author of the national the one device the secret history of the iphone. Hes the cofounder of terra forum vices Science Fiction outlet, founder of gizmodos automaton examining a. I. And the future of work which is not relevant these days his writing has appeared in the new york wired, the atlantic, all of the good places. Hes also a of l. A. And of course, in l. A. Tier two. So locals. Nate, thank you so much for being here. You handed over to these guys. Thank yeah. Thank. So the order of service. This is this is bryans first event for this book. Ive done a couple of these, but the Order Service tonight is bryans going to introduce and talk about his book. Im going to introduce and talk about my book. Were going to entertain questions, as youve heard a question is a single sentence that has one pertinent to it goes on the end. It has never more of a comment than a and then were going to make your books non returnable with sharpies. And so im going to im going to hand it over to bryan now and but before i do i beg your pardon, i want to thank the folks here at chevalier as it is an odd privilege to have great independent bookstore in your neighborhood. This something a lot of people in this country and all around the world no longer have. As a recovering bookseller, i hope you support them tonight. Whether thats by getting our books, which you should do. But also they have many other books written by many other people, some of whom are even better than us. So you should you should really shop around. Yeah, ill second that. Cheers. Thanks for having us. Okay. Well, thanks everyone for coming out. I am pretty thrilled to be doing this first talk with with corey putting this book in dialog with with his book. I as will become clear a lot of these themes do some pretty heavy overlapping and we will be talking about tech titans and exploitative tech lot of people regimes and how. Resist and smash both so a few words about blood in the machine which is as of 24 hours ago or so this book has been about five years in the works. I have been researching and writing about the luddites and the modern day luddites for for for about that time, the research me to england to the Industrial Districts where a lot of this took place. I stayed a with with luddites scholar who lives in an weavers cottage that was only partially electrified so. That was fun for a week i got the true luddite experience experience and what became clearer and clearer to me, and i think lot of people over that period of time as we saw the election of donald trump and facebook misinformation and utter consolidation of. Big tech which corey is going to speak to much more eloquently than i. And then the results of all of that, which is punitive technological regimes that control and exploit labor. The rise of the algorithmic work platform. And now this year the introduction of generative ai which is being used often as a tool by employers and and managers to as leverage workers. Right. As a, as a way to automate work or to threaten automate work. Its been a major Sticking Point in the just resolved strike. If anyones here cheers to that. The wga. So without belaboring the point too long, i just want to say it just could not be more. Im so thrilled. Of course im so thrilled for the writers who stuck it out in this protracted battle. But what they were doing and well get into it more, is essentially letting them it letting them in way that it was meant to be in the way that it was actually carried out, practiced not as the terminology of today has led us to believe. It is a refusal to be exploited by a technical object. And the writers and now and the actors and, everyone else whos followed suit have done a Great Service by drawing a red line and saying, part of our contract will be that the studios will not use ai to produce our work or to or to be used as a tool that they will then take the output and then offer us less less fees, less have less control over the product less and less economic benefits. As a tool, as technology so often is, to again to disrupt a work regime and to suppress wages. So they done us all a great debt of we owe them all great debt of gratitude for standing up and kind of pointing the way because will enter our all of our workplaces its weaseling its way into mine as a journalist and the l. A. Times its i can i can hear, you know, the rumblings at the gate. So all of that put together this the book is the story narrative story of the luddites the people whose lives were affected by this first disruption and the lessons we can draw from from from that story. Sorry if i went long, but no, that was great. Yeah. So i brian and i have known each other for many years. And in fact, he bought a book from me when he was at medium. He bought a little book called how to destroy surveillance. That started as a review of Shoshana Zuboff book about surveillance capitalism and turned into a book all on its own. Because it turned out i had thought and and i needed to write them down and i that the book ive just published, the internet con kind of continues on those themes. So for more than two decades ive worked in digital human rights with, the Electronic Frontier foundation. And thank you very much. And if youre not an f member, i hope your consider joining and my work at tff has been hampered by a couple of different factors. One is that a lot of the issues that we care about are quite abstract until theyre not. And like a lot of technical questions like how much carbon can we released into the atmosphere they can seem like boring and abstract until everythings on fire and then it might be too late. So a lot of my work is has involved trying to get people to care about stuff but another part of my work and this is where how to destroy surveillance capitalism comes in and this book too is when do start to care about it. They sometimes care about it in ways that are counterproductive. And so, for example, i think we should be very worried that our bosses have like rock persistent for firing us and replacing us with shell scripts. But i dont think we need to worry that ai is going be better at us, better than us at writing. I think that just like the bosses who fired all those people who are good at answering phones and directing your call and replace with Interactive Voice Response systems, you say no. 17 now, 17, 17 no. One seven. Operator. Operator. Operator. I think that that they are perfectly willing to fire all our and make something defective and then try and get you to buy it. And i think that that is a reason we should worry. And i think thats thats really coherent. The story of the luddites. So for me, the book that i wrote now ties in with brians book and with both our interest in Science Fiction. So there is a great villain of history, a woman called margaret thatcher, whose favorite motto was there is no alternative. And the point of there is no alternative to dress up a demand as an observation and to really say stop trying to think of alternatives. And my job as a Science Fiction writer is try and think of alternatives, right . To say what if we had the same machine, but who would did things for and who things to were different. And a lot of the people who are critical of technology in ways that i think are counterproductive are unable to imagine that. So the foundation there are a bunch of people who are the internet has been reduced to five giant websites filled with of text from the other four. As tommy spence says. And the real problem there is the wrong people are running those websites right. Mark zuckerberg is the wrong person to be the unelected social media czar for life for 4 billion people. We need someone better or we need to make him better at that job. And theres another current in technology criticism that i think is the luddite current that like maybe that job shouldnt exist, maybe we should dismantle. Maybe no one came down off a mount with two stone tablets and said, zuck, stop rotating your files and start mining them for actionable market intelligence. Right . Maybe theres a way that we can talk to each other without being spied on. And so that the trick that the mill owners who prosecuted their vicious war against the textile workers played, its the same trick that the tech barons today play is to insist that the menu they presented to us cannot possibly be to be decomposed into an ala carte menu, that if want to search the internet, youve got to get spied on. If you want to have a computer thats safe, youve got to let a giant company in cupertino decide which software you can install on and take 30 out of every dollar if you want a taxi. The person driving has to be on food stamps and there is no other way. There is no alternative. And the cool thing about Digital Technology, the exceptional thing about Digital Technology that my book really tries get into in some technical detail is that we really only know how to make one computer. And its the universal turing complete von document machine, which has a lot of fancy words that mean the only you know how to make is the computer that can run every program we can write. And so you can always write a program that will do the thing the shareholders it wouldnt do. And the third party ink or let you install Third Party Software or block the ads or let you talk to your friends without being spied on or leave twitter, but continue to send messages to the people who arent ready to go and thats the thing that stands in our way is policy. And the luddite book that that brian wrote blood in the machine talks a lot about. Policy is very contingent. And fragile, right. That the luddites when they rose up they were angry the law said that the mill owners allowed to put in these machines without talking to them first and Parliament Said we dont care. We passed the law. We dont care. In fact, were going to make a new law that says that if you take an oath to support the luddites, were going to hang you. Right. And i think the lesson here is that when industry is so large that its too big to fail and too big to jail the law ceases to protect us. But the corollary is that if we can cut the firms down to size, if we can bleed off the users that are their sources of profit, if we can rein them in on a technical level, then we can make them weak enough to rein on a legal level. And so most of my book is about establishing a shovel ready technical program, doing just that, describing policies that we can use to do it. And ill finish in a minute. Maybe we can go back and forth. But i want to explain the theory of change that comes from one of margaret thatchers favorite, a guy called milton friedman. He is my archenemy. He was architect of neo liberalism and he was a freak. And he wanted to rollback all postwar gains and get people to start tugging their four locks for their social betters again. And people would say, milton, people like sending their kids to university and like having retired in weekends and overtime and health. How are you going to convince them to like go back to the victorian age . And he said, you know, in times of crisis things that are on the periphery can move to the center very quickly. Our job is to have good ideas lying around so that when the next crisis strikes, the impossible can become the inevitable and i like to quote friedman because i like to imagine that he looks up from that spit hes been roasting on since satan took him to hell in 22 and gurgles a curse around the red hot iron bar protruding his jaws while the demons laugh and more molten on his skin. But more to the point, there is no stable configuration or technology in one mediocre doofus. Mark zuckerberg is in charge of 4 billion peoples lives, which means that we are lurching crisis to crisis and because we lack any good ideas, lying around with each one of these crises, we do the same thing we did last time, but harder and hope for a different outcome. And i think there really is a version of the future that comes about because we start to talk about and think about how things could be different, what the alternative could look like. So when the moment opens, the alternative we can demand it. And i think thats a maybe a kind of wishy washy to do. I think a lot of us would like to be able buy something, makes the world better or like our recycling better and save planet. And i think ultimately like you cant shop your way out of the monopoly like. Ultimately, these are problems that we solve as a polity because their structural problems and we solve them socially. Yeah. So bryan yeah. No, absolutely. And i think that is such an important point because if you, you know think about the luddites, if you knew who the luddites were, you know, what, what was our baseline understanding of the luddites, right . Its theyre theyre dummies who didnt understand the technology that was being developed all around them, the awesome technology. And they hated it. And they smashed it because they didnt understand it because they knew not they did. Right. And this is this is a fiction as sort of carefully constructed as any of coreys fictions are, because it really behooves the the the the elites, the the folks that we like to think of as, you know, as sort of the tech titans of our day. I like coreys book opens with a brief look this this idea of of tech exceptionalism, right. As as these prime movers who, you know, are handing down technological and we should just thankful for them and if you were able to question part and parcel what they were doing or ask that maybe we the system so theyre not you know handed hundreds of millions dollars in Venture Capital to do as see fit or to pull levers and change the configuration as they see fit then they might run into some problems they might have to contend with ideas like the that that are central to terrorism book which i think we should touch on specifically which is which this idea of of interoperability because so of the digital problems we have have today you whether its on a social Media Network or its a you know, or on the web writ large on on amazon, on or on uber or lyft. So many of these these these these services, as courageous pointed out, have consolidated into unassailable monopolies that we just, you know, feel like if want what theyre whats on offer, we have no choice but to kind of play by the increasingly, increasingly punitive rules that are on offer. So especially on the social media and some of the digital platform front, interoperability is, such an idea that that is one of those ideas. You know could that could very well count as leftism that why people might want to you not have the true idea of on offer which is questioning or protesting the machinery thats hurtful to commonality thats they would say and the machinery that we have right now running our lives is pretty hurtful. The commonality and interoperability is a really interesting way to just sort of fix that can yeah yeah so you know interoperability on the one hand can be a very kind of mystical like anything can work with anything else you can sit in anyones chair and read a book. Someone else under a light bulb from a yet a third party. And no one gets to tell you what you can wear anyones socks with, anyones shoes and so on. But, you know, when it comes to digital, theres this like and profound interoperability that cant escape from try as we might. I mean, you know, as as a pretend computer scientist, i like to imagine that someday it would be great if we could make a printer that couldnt run viruses, because it would be great if we could make a printer that was a computer that could just spray ink on paper and not also infected with malware crawl your network and compromise all the computers on it and we dont know how to make that computer. We can only make the universal computer that can run all the programs. But if you think about a world in which we are broadly permitted, write those programs and run those programs, especially on the systems that we use and we own or that are part of our lives. You imagine how this might impose a third discipline on companies, so companies are disciplined by two forces. Normally, one is competition open and the other one is regulation. And really you cant have one without the other. If firms dont compete, they take the regulators right. When an industry is like five giant companies or three giant companies, no can regulate them. Any time you ask them a question. Is Net Neutrality good or can we use this concrete in our buildings and will they fall down in england . Knows what im talking about because other concrete buildings are falling down this year or you know, are these medical safe . We have amy ziering, who who made a wonderful documentary about how medical implants are. And i thought about it with every moment as both of my hip replacements being installed last year. All of those questions are questions that regulators want to know the answer to. But when ask it of an industry with only three companies and they all show and they go, no, its fine, its fine and everyone who disagrees is like a muckraking documentary filmmaker or an activist working for a nonprofit or an academic or someone running a micro company with seven customers and the regulator who, when the sector is down like three companies, is probably a veteran of at least two of them are the regulator goes yeah, its probably going to be fine. And then we all end up in a world of pain and, and so we have landed and so so firms are disciplined by either competition regulation. Without one, you dont get the other. But a third one, which is reconfiguration right. Its the possibility that if you do something that is to the interests of your customers, users or workers or society, that they might just seize the means of computation, they might just reprogram whatever gadget youre using in order to impose this, this, this taking on them. And they might just unilaterally reconfigure it, like in indonesia, the gig riders use these apps called tool apps to you while. They reverse engineer the the gig delivery apps and they just add stuff onto them like the gig delivery app wont let you get a fair at the train unless youre right in front the train station. But when the train station comes, when train comes in, that is like a killing zone, right . Its just a massive traffic jam. Super dangerous. So they just spoof the gps. They go around corner, they spoof the gps, they tell the gps that theyre in front of the train station, wait to get a fair and then zoom up and get it. Because it turns out that the person at the coalface knows about how to do their job than their boss does. And so this third discipline not provides a remedy for individuals who might be put in harms way by technology, but it also so in the event that the people the show are not, you know, zero executive function toddlers with millions of other peoples money to play with it might stop them from doing the bad thing right. Might it might not they might actually say. Hey, we can do this. But if we do that, then. The the the people were going to do it too are going to are just going undo it. So like if any of you remember the early days of the web, we had these things called pop up ads and you would open a browser and then like 25 Little Windows would open up. Theyd run away from your mouse and theyd autoplay and some of them would be one pixel square. And we didnt. To legislate against pop up ads, we just put pop pop up lockers and all the browsers write opera did it then did it. Then everyone followed suit because back then we had competition in browsers and then the pop ups went away like i was running a web publisher. Then we had lots of advertisers who at one point were saying, you must have pop up ads or we want to advertise with you and. Then once we got to say to them, well, you know like youve got the money, well do it. If you ask. But you have to know, like nobody sees the pop. So theyre like, okay, no pop patterns. Yeah, yeah. I mean, it is, it is interesting. Think about this era reconfiguration. I mean, this year has has, as far as im concerned, as a as a tech writer had two sort of major three lines. And that has been the rise of the generative a. I. System, whether thats, you know, openai ai or chalkbeat or mit journey and then the social pressures, thats concerned and alongside it and sometimes related and sometimes less related, often linked in interesting ways, this this incredible labor uprising or whether its the Writers Strike and that and the sag strike are still out there or ups or uaw, which has a component of of automation and the making of electric cars as a as a point concern. Nevada in nevada, the Culinary Union has just authorized a strike and of their chief complaints is about automation and. I think the commonality here is these are people who are seeking a of control over their their own destinies just like the people who are hacking those apps. And i was reminded of people of uber drivers who would be on a private discord because they knew that they would all wait long enough, like when they were at the airport just here at lax. This is a tactic that they would do if held out long enough. Then uber, would it install a surge price, make more money so theyd all be on this discord . So like accept any rides, dont accept any rides. And theyd all team up until the wage, the rate lifted up and then boom, all of a sudden all accept the rides and they all, you know, make five more dollars per ride. So theres a lot of power in that of collective action. And i think as i mentioned earlier, the writers is kind of, i think, broaden the horizons of whats there. And the Culinary Union, which hasnt really gotten quite as much attention, quite yet. They havent actually gone on strike. But i actually at them as an example in the book as im kind of, weve between the story of luddites and then some of the the parallels as i mentioned. And one of the big parallels as i was writing was, was happening in the gig work sector. So five years ago, the Culinary Union really drew a hard line also against it wasnt. No, you cant do any automation, but i dont know if any of you have been to las vegas recently, but they have just automating the hell out just about everything you know, you want food, you order it from a from a from a kiosk or a, you know, a screen instead of a bartender, go to a roulette table. And its like a weird avatar where thats all glitching and you know, there are a number of problems with this that i think are comparable to whats going on with the with with the writers and hollywood here and thats that these robots do not do as good of a job like nobody who wants to go to vegas you know, to the to like the escapism for three weeks and then to stare at like a poorly 3d figure thats glitching out as they deal you the cards. And in fact. Jason kepler whos here a reporter, just went over to vegas to check out because when when hackers were able to sort of infiltrate this automation heavy regime and and exploit fact that so much had been digitized and like hackers do with hospitals, unfortunately, and a lot other places, they held it for ransom. They said going to paralyze your entire casino. So if you dont if, you dont pay us 50 million. I think one of the casinos did immediately the other didnt anyways what im saying is that there are all these new vulnerabilities all, these new issues. When Something Like that happens, guess who has to pick up the slack . The remaining who are still on the floor, who it was in no way their job to serve the roulette tables. Do you also serve as the food . But theyre running around working double time because of this over reliance on automation culinary did win up some interesting protections years ago and they reclaim some some some control like retraining programs. They have to get notified six months in advance of again things that were just really not taught to think about with regard technology. Were not supposed to, you know, engage with it from this end, Tech Technology is supposed to be inflicted upon us by, again these the powers that be, the tech giants. And were not supposed to be able to sort of democratically navigate how we want to. And that is where this crack. And thats why i think, you know, corey, reverse engineering Milton Friedmans quote is so important is that were seeing now these you know theyre not always huge but there are these cracks of possibility. And again, thats what drew me to the luddites story, is that they were making this argument in a thunderous front and center way before it was obscured by decades and decades of ideology that is equal to technology. Good development. Yeah. You know, in Science Fiction circles, we often joke that cyberpunk was a warning, not a suggestion. But the part of cyberpunk that was a suggestion was seizing the means of computation. And so our bosses got the part where they use the computers to discipline, but they decided to rule out the part we strike back. You know, i think one of the things thats underappreciated about Writers Strike and and the air settlement is that while theres a bunch of stuff about how the studios will have to use ai in the event that they want to use that now that theyve theyve gone in with the writers. Theyre giving the writers what they want. Theyre not going to use ai anymore. Right. The the reason they were prepared to buy a. I. Was so that they could fire writers. Right. It wasnt like they were like sitting around going like, well, okay, sure they were. Because the median studio executive wants a writer to act like an 11 prompt. Right. Like write me but the hero a dog and theres a romance in the second act and it ends with a gunfight. Im going to the smokehouse. Im going to have three martinis. I come back. I want to see that. Right. That is like that. That is the dream of every of every studio exec. If you actually try to do that, then everyone has to stop for 10 minutes and look for the writers eyeballs. Theyve fallen out because they were rolling them so heavily while you were giving them this dump. So there is a thing that they actually want that looks like an al elm, but its not a thing that theyre willing to pay for the reason theyre willing to pay for it. And they paid 140 some days that strike its going to cost them hundreds of millions of dollars. The reason they were willing to spend hundreds of millions of dollars is they thought they could fire hundreds of millions of dollars of writers, which they cant so the amount of money that theyre going to on ai to help writers in the writers room is going to zero or near zero. So effectively what this did was ended a guy in the writers room, i mean, writers might use chatty beauty, but that studio executives arent going to go by giant multimillion dollar licenses for chalkbeat to help writers increase their productivity. Its just not going to happen. Right . Exactly. And also why all year long been seeing this sort of apocalyptic fever pitch of promising on what i can do. Its you air is going to become sentient and oh we got to be you know you see sam altman out there going i just i just im just so worried that this thing could become so powerful. I knew i was a wizard. I didnt know i was an evil wizard. Exactly like, oh, why do i have to keep building this. I just have to release another upset. Why do i. Oh, theres an enterprise tier now. Oh, god. Its those guys who show up the emergency room and say, like, i tripped on the shampoo bottle, just went right up there. Yeah, yeah. You know, obviously these could stop it if they were terrified of it, they could stop. Orienting their entire business around it. But not what they want to do. And you look at where the real business is, you know, all of the language is around, oh, wow, look at all this creative stuff you could do, like check out mid journey and make paintings and but were all the real money is is selling enterprise Tier Software to managers who are going to use that to try to squeeze or or trim heads in that department and look not that theres no use for this stuff. So like my friend patrick ball founded a nonprofit called the human rights Data Analysis group, h. R. Dawg, and they are the worlds leading forensic statisticians for war crimes tribunals. And they go in and they look at the fragments re evidence of human rights crimes during wars and civil wars and so on. And they try to assemble a larger picture based on this fragmentary, which is what statistics are for. Right that you have an incomplete picture and you try to extrapolate whats missing there. And they use that. They used it with milosevics trial in east timor and in guatemala and in south africa, and right now theyre in chile and they have 100 databases of extrajudicial killings during. The dark, the civil war there. And they are trying to characterize the likelihood that each of those killings was carried out, either by a death squad funded the cia and overseen by the wealthy people who are currently running the country or oh, sorry, not chile, colombia, i beg your pardon . Or whether it was carried out by the guerillas or whether it was carried out by Government Troops or whether it was unrelated. Right. It was just a bar or something. And theyre using large language to characterize the probability that each report comes from one of those and then theyre able produce a kind of this is the most killings could be attributed to these entities and this is the least and theyre using that in the human rights tribunals. Now this is on the kind of bleeding edge of of understanding the nature of crimes against humanity, using statistics and math and, computational linguistics. And its really cool. And im glad that theyre able to do it. Its really important work even they were paying for licenses for these at all times and even if there were 10 Million People doing what theyre doing it wouldnt cover like a days bills running open and i right so the the valuation when you see Morgan Stanley saying this is a 13 trillion industry over ten years, theyre not talking about kids making pictures of dead characters. Right. They are talking about finding ways to non consensually replace workers with robots that do the job worse but that we all have to go with it because anyone who pays a human do that job will be out competed by the people using the robots. And then we will just live in a world where everything acts like voice response system when you call the switchboard, right . And that will just be everything you use. Yeah, thats right. Thats why again, to go back one more time to the contract, the writers just won and then the comment you made, you know, most writers arent going to use a. I. , but they now can. Now they are empowered, you know, not in silicon valley. You know buzz language way, but if they find it interesting, if they can find a way to experiment, to make art and control their creation, how can do that . And without it, without the threat of it being used, this tool thats thats, you know, ultimately going to make them redundant. So thats ultimately what we want with a lot of these tools that are interesting on their on their own. You know, i dont again its not about being Anti Technology itself. I think its about making sure that we put it in the right hands and seeing that most people benefit maximally. The most important thing about a technology is not what it does, but who it does it for and who it does it to. And are socially determined. And we should get to say, yeah. So i think now its time to open it up to questions. Are there any people who questions . I know all of that was very noncontroversial and selfevident, so i wouldnt be surprised if a nobody had any questions. Yeah, go ahead. So saw someone on twitter say about your book, theres a really interesting on on extremism and how yeah would you talk about that. Sure. So theres so i do not think that the internet is a mind control. Right. And this is going back to the book. I wrote for brian. I think that whos ever claimed to have a mind control rea whether that was like rasputin or mesmer or m. K. Or those sad pickup artist dudes were all like either kidding themselves or, everyone else or both. And so this does raise this question like where do the people with the odd ideas come from . Where, where, like, how have we seen this explosion and things like in flat earth or, a new antisemitism or a new or where does all this stuff come from . How do people there . And i think that what we need to understand is that the internet is very good at helping people obscure ideas that resonate with them it is a very good way to move the from the general to the specific. And the example i give in the book is that if you are like out shopping for kitchen cabinets, you find yourself looking at the joinery and you go home and you type how do carpenters join cabinets you will learn the word joinery, then youll learn the word like fine finished joinery. And then youll get a bunch of videos and if you click through those videos, youll get suggestions for like no nail japanese joinery, and if you click on one of those, youll get progressively esoteric versions of no nail japanese joinery, and eventually youll be in these and i cant pronounce the word i had when i read the audio book. I needed a pronunciation and guy, but you end up with these unbelievable cool, super esoteric forms of japanese no nail joinery, right . Thats extremism right. Like that is the path into extremism and the reason why people are susceptible to conspiratorial accounts of whats going on in our world. Right. So the they find the conspiratorial accounts because thats how the internet works. Its like the dewey decimal system. It just drives you into ever more specific versions these general queries. The reason people are susceptible to believing conspiratorial accounts in which they maybe all the people in charge you know secretly meeting to screw us all over and they dont give a is because theres a lot of evidence that thats really going on. I just help naomi klein launch her new book, doppelganger at the apple. A couple of weeks ago. And its about naomi wolf, this person who often gets mistaken for its why its called doppelganger theres a theres a poem at the naomi klein. Youre doing just fine if the naomi be wolf. Oh, buddy. Oof. And naomi wolf has become super conspiratorial. Steve bannon regular and and shes gotten sort of adjacent to all these antisemites and all these other people and this amazing quote in naomis book, naomi kleins book, antisemitism is the socialism of fools, right . That if you like if you are disgruntled at the idea that rich and powerful people are running the world and then someone comes and whispers in your ear, you know its the. Then you become the socialist. You become a socialist, a false. You embrace this bonkers mirror world version of something thats not untrue. Right . Like to say the the the Vaccine Companies are conspiring to kill us all because they dont who they murder. And the fda doesnt doesnt watch them i think is untrue. Think vaccines are good. I just signed up to get my booster but on the other hand like the Pharma Companies totally do conspire kill us all and the fda is asleep at the switch. Lets them get away with it. Right. Opioid epidemic medical implants, right. There are so many institutional failures and zero accountability for any of the people involved that when someone comes along and says you cant trust the truth seeking exercises by which we know things because they are corrupted and, i have thing that maybe sounds plausible to you. I think you can fall down that rabbit hole. I think you can become. A conspiratorial list as result of the live trauma of watching friends die, of opioid overdoses or watching the banks take your house or watching any of these other things happen that are so manifestly unfair and then that primes you when get prompted to fall down a conspiratorial rabbit to explore that really cool japanese except its a drainer chrome theories i think a to to fall down that rabbit hole. Ive never right here but i read some of your a long quantum right i got my start with technology with so so so early books around more Science Fiction versus history in such i kind of fell into being an engineer a midsized startup i then took over as things went on and such and something been kind of lost at as a poor person that was more mobilized in political activity activism almost a decade ago now is i mean the joke be was the role of computer engineers in the revolutions or the just but in more actual thing is interoperability easy is it to essentially challenge the existing monopolies . Is it just to, you know, build technology and let people and try to make it profitable, profitable and let people do what they like with it . I like i feel like our platform theory is really within what is and i dont know if, thats what were doing right now is correct or not on some kind of loss where to take to take things. Yeah its a hard so you are youre currently youre running the Company Currently are you. Yeah congratulate. Since that. I mean i think its very situational at this point. I mean theres a number of of things that that you could that you could do or that you could be putting your resource is towards it also very much depends on on the nature of your business. Around the building and you just try to make something that people take away and play with. So so i would say that having alternatives that are good, thoughtful and made by good people is very yeah, but its insufficient because so long as the people who are running the Current Services wont build the gateways that you to leave the Current Service and go to the new one. So many of you will have heard this kerfuffle about unity is a platform for developing video games. The people who ran it turn around to the people who made the video games and they said from now on, every time you sell a game, youre going to have to cut us in for a fairly substantial chunk of money and people got angry theyd already built their games they hadnt planned for that it was and many cases enough to tip them over from economically viable to going out of business and there was a huge fight about it and end the company did a partial climb down and they the climb down is really quite remarkable because. At the end they say, look, weve heard you were we just want to find Sustainable Way that we can get paid every time the things you make with our tools get sold. And this is like weve, heard you, were sorry. We just want to get paid every time a house that you built with my get sold weve heard you were sorry we just want to get paid every time rembrandt sells a painting that he made with my paintbrush right. There is nothing wrong with intermediaries theres nothing wrong with platforms. Theres nothing wrong with someone who between the buyers and the sellers right. I grew up in toronto. There was a guy called crabbe kolodny who wrote these great little chapbooks of weird science or short fiction, and he would stand a Street Corner with a sign around his neck that said very famous canadian author buy my books or if he was feeling frisky. Yet another sign that just said Margaret Atwood and and he would make secret recordings of the drunks that argued with him and sell those too, was he was a media pioneer and like i love crowd i think his work is great rest in power. But there are a lot of writers with to say who are not prepared to stand in front of a bar with a sign around their neck that says Margaret Atwood, sell them. Right. Its okay that there booksellers and printers and publishers and distributors and, all of the things that sit between creators and audiences, the problem is that when they when theres those help meets in the chain, the problem is when the intermediary seizes control of the arrangement. The problem isnt the existence of the intermediary. Its the power relations is between the intermediaries, the end users and the producers. And, you know, there are of ways that we moderate that. So if it were lawful to reverse engineer unit ether. In the book i go into a lot of detail about laws that stand in the way of this, but you know broadly speaking, it would be section 12, one of the dmca, which is about reverse engineering. It would be the Computer Fraud and abuse act, it would be theories about contract, theories about, torture, torture, it tortious interfere fence and probably some copyright and patent, maybe some trade secrecy thrown in there. If it were legal to reverse engineer it, then, as i said, like this might stay their hand, right . If they were like, oh, we do this, someones just going to make runtime. You can just take your unity game and stick it into someone runtime. And then you dont have to be a unity anymore and you go back to selling your game. And if they didnt, well, then you could just go ahead, do it right there could there could be some discipline imposed on them. So thats one way we can impose on them. Another would be for the company itself to take some irrevocable step so that if that changes hands in the future, if theres a different i mean people keep asking me why im not on blue sky and im like, well, it is like managed the guy who sold twitter to elon musk right. Like didnt george bush us fool me once . Shame on me me twice we dont get fooled again, right . And so so if it changes right, maybe it maybe it goes bad. There are irrevocable ways that you can commit to not going bad. Right. Like so that. All the Free Software and Creative Commons licenses are irrevocable. Once you license your software that way, you cant unlicensed it. Lots of people think this is a bug. Its a its what economists the ulysses pact you know ulysses when he wanted to sail through the infested waters instead of filling his ears with wax like a sailor did, he tied himself to the mast and he told us, sailors dont, dont on time until were clear the waters. I want to hear the sirens. He was a hacker and so he took this step in a moment where he was strong to guard against a future moment in which he would be weak. And there are lots of ways that do this in our daily life. Right. We we turn over management to nonprofits. We make binding covenants. We put things trusts. We make permanent arrangements, we throw away all the oreos that night, we go on a diet, right . There are all ways that we make these that we premium set to an outcome in a moment of strength against a future moment of weakness. And so, you know, if youre asking like what does someone whos managing a Technology Firm who wants to be good to their users do well, like you know, contemplate the possibility within in the future you might be talking to your financiers who will say this is all very nice, but if you want to keep those 50 people who quit their jobs and put their kids College Funds on the line to come work for you if you want to keep them paid next week, youre going to have to do something terrible to your and ask yourself if think you know, being able to say, well youve got all the money. But ill tell you what, i do it like not because i dont want to weve taken an irrevocable step that us from doing it and if that might stay your hand maybe stay hands too. I have a one. Put it to the luddite test. Is your machinery hurtful to coming if its not, then youre in good shape and. Then go one better. Is your, you know, is your workplace empowered or organized or you know, are there measures to for them to share in the gains. Those are things to explore to on a more social level. Yeah, thats true. I think that workplace democracy is a real hedge against ceos talking themselves into doing bad things. So this will cover them. Great. All right. Other questions, maybe well do one or two more in the back first. Yeah. Hello so i wanted to know, i work at a private school and i actually happened to have the ceo start friend. So i wanted to the question were academe here how it kind of fits in to possibly you know the Luddite Movement were seeing because talked about policy and to some degree thats affected by academia and education as well. You know when they go to congress at least in the states and you know in elementary. Now, kids are learning technology they actually have a course. But i had whereas i had the benefit of i majored in communication and i actually had an entire course about technology communication. So i understand the history and the impacts but thats that was like one class and it seems like now we need have kind of a National Conversation about that in terms of Critical Thinking and possibly prepare people in school to to think about the consequences. But so i just want to know like, you know, because even in elementary kids we google classrooms so we literally have one of the monopolies, you know, that were dependent on. So like when one of the questions i have and you dont have to answer this, but its just like, when do we start the Critical Thinking to think about the impact . How it is affecting the commonality and really kind of, you know, the structure. So any comments about that. Yeah, i mean, its a there are all kinds of problems that that that stem from you the monopoly duopoly Tech Companies being like primary vendors for services and even hardware. We just saw a win because in a particularly egregious case you know that the chrome books that like google is handing out to selling not selling right sorry not handing out yeah. For profit were preprogrammed to to stop working. So they would have to they would have to trash these, you know, the story as well as they do or better. Im sure they would just have to trash thousands of computers because of this preordained life cycle. And again, thats not something that would happen if you had any kind of a holistic relation in ship, you know, with technology or an interest in developing a technology that actually serves. So i would say that its a real imperative right now because and the Tech Companies have recognize how profitable it is to to to be vendors to education around the country. Theres theres a lot of really worrying byproducts of that surveillance to, again, you know, the use of a. I. In classrooms to of reliance on proprietary apps that have very poor data privacy and. You know, the way that a lot of that is structured is, is worrying in part because, you know, we dont really get a lot of say a lot of times are kind of no bid contracts where. They just, you know, where we have its like, you know, we have a tech giant or a monopoly making this product. Thats who, you know, the lausd goes to. And then that that happens. Now we have to download a dojo or whatever this weird app is where you use a particular service. And then were, were in thrall to it. So its actually a particular thorny issue and one where a lot of them really, really is called for and maybe corey has some. Yeah, ive got an idea lying around for you, not for private schools, but for Public Schools and for other public institutions. So in the last part of the book, i talk how we get from to a world in which we have policies that encourage and permit interoperability. And its a lot of legal like i spent a lot of time like i spent 20 years just fighting one law the dmca were like we just got knocked back in the d. C. Circuit like our case dead. And so reforming like 20 of these laws. This thicket of laws that, you know, basically felony contempt of business model, if you do something the shareholders dont like, they can bring the full might of the u. S. Government down on you. Thats its a long project but there are some shortcuts. So one of the shortcuts i talk about in the book is altering the procurement rules. So in in that civil war, Abraham Lincoln said, that he would only buy rifles and ammo from gunsmith that used tooling for some pretty reasons. Right. Like, you know words canceled today boys with the gun factories not make it any guns. Right. So thats prudent procurement, right. To say to your vendors, you have to use standards or you have to at the very least covenant not to bring action against entire operators who are contracted to Public Agency in order to improve, modify, extend the life of or otherwise, make good on the Public Investment is huge. And you know, weve kind of forgotten this art and im a military abolitionist, so this examples a little weird, but like the military is an area where weve really forgotten it so and david dianes book monopolized he talks about how these private equity girls figured out that there were like four giant primary Aerospace Suppliers and they all bought their parts from bunch of different companies. And a bunch of those companies were Single Source suppliers, various parts. And so these. Private equity guys went and they bought all of these source suppliers and then they dropped the price of the parts in the primary market to effectively nothing they were subsidizing them. So you could put as many these widgets as you wanted in your boeing jet and it wouldnt cost anything more. But when uncle sucker needs to fix it, the Replacement Parts stream comes about 10,000 markups. So i tell that story not because i want us have a better army, but i tell story because like this is a thing that youd think could get angry about too, right . I think that every republican, every motor pool, every google classroom, every chromebook, every phone, every computer, every server that procured by any Public Agency should come on terms that require the firm to covenant, not to block interoperability. And i think its going to be impossible to block that from leaking out into the into the private sector as well. Theres just no way for all those agencies to be doing this without the the private sector also, it kind of at the periphery and, you know, the vendors are going to squawk. Right. But like, if youre too emotionally fragile to sell to the Public Sector on terms that are accord with good Public Public procurement, that is a huge problem, not an us problem. And you should find another industry work in. Theyre doing the publics business. They should do the publics business in a way that that benefits public last before we call on jason. All right jason go ahead we for the mic so the here theyre taking names no this is cspan booktv with the fact that we live in a city with delivery scooters, Autonomous Cars, theyre increasingly attacked with baseball bats, graffiti and stuff like that, good or bad and to support how to if you go well, i mean, do you have a baseball baseball . I yeah. I mean i think there it comes down to intent. There is that famous story right, that of like the friendship that this was like ten years ago where they built this just to send as an ambassador on behalf of as an experiment, it was just kind of like hitchhike. It was like the hitchhiker. So it like made its way down from canada through, like and then it and then it hit philly. Now ive in philly and it god bless philly, but it not make it out of philly. I having that documentary with will smith fresh prince of bel air. I understand that. Thats right. Ran into the wrong so like look theres always to be some impulse just you know knock robots around a little bit. Its satisfying and cathartic for some people, but that doesnt really to a lot of them necessarily on other hand, if theres a group like safe street rebel up in San Francisco that figured out if you put a cone on the on the hood of a of an autonomous car, then it tries to read it and, it freezes up and it cant make it cant it cant navigate. It just shuts. Now that i would say is is perfectly respectable zoom especially coming as it does on the heel of a pretty sketchy vote by the Utility Commission where that was just kind of flooded with representative from the Tech Companies in the Car Companies are really trying to ram this thing through and meanwhile all the emergency providers of San Francisco are saying no way, not ready yet. Theyre Autonomous Cars are driving on to our fire hoses and cutting them off. When were trying to put out a fire, theyre blocking traffic. When were trying to stop a crime. But they got overrule and unleash them anyways. So theres this real sense in the community that we dont want them there. We dont were not ready we dont want to be and i actually just interviewed one of the same street rebel and his quote was like we want to be guinea pigs, right . Like right. Do these companies have to treat us as guinea pigs . So yeah, put the cone on the roof of the car, an act of, you know, as act of protest, as a as its its completely know harmless to the car it just the has to go and find someone to get run out there and take it off so when it comes to scooters. Yeah so if the concern is that those are blocking, you do more by blocking well and you also see this thing like they want to be guinea pigs. But what is the guinea pig test . Theyre right. Theyre not. Well the guinea pig test is you share a street with a robot sometimes accelerates when a pedestrians the crosswalk. Yeah right and they kill them one in San Francisco right. Yeah. No i dont think theyre i dont know if they know theres in arizona killed someone. Yeah. That walked out onto a highway thats a story that they put out but then they also wouldnt reveal their camera. I thought i saw the footage of it. Sure. She walked out onto a space thats not a question. My apologies. Oh, no, no, no, its fine. So let me i its an excellent point. We are at the end of the evening, so i dont want to id i think the question about about what makes it a guinea pig so whether someone has been killed is not the important question. The question is whether the robots have behaved in a way that could have killed someone. And i think the is an unequivocal yes. Right. When theres lots of theres lots of them accelerating through red lights and doing all of its a really good question. I think it comes down to again that that that component that i was talking about earlier where if theres a legitimate sense that the community has weighed in and said this is a technology that we want in our community that we that we have some degree of control over and a and not a tech company that is refusing to all of its crash data with independent auditors or is is not. Yeah but google both google and cruise have they they you know they release their data but they dont let third parties but that was part what what a lot of the officials wanted or requested to have is more transparency in the data of how they were operating they claim its a trade secret trade rather the the the the the community wanted wanted more access. So again, i think if you its we can debate each action one by one but it is an of protest over concerns over safety of a community you know and the luddites were not in every case you know. Correct im sure to strike this mill owner or that owner. They they got it right. Most of the time. They who was who was offending. But its about using a new tactic, developing a new arsenal, you know. Yeah, maybe it maybe it blocks traffic for a second, but its also powerful show that people arent just to be sort of run over or to accept things in our lives. And, you know, i think the conduct of large firms that Bring Technology to our cities is often on its own, very antisocial and i think that its not, uh, untoward to greet that antisocial conduct with antisocial conduct of your own. So i was thinking of here bird scooters who at one point every sidewalk was covered in bird scooters. Their plan was basically just let the ones that got impounded get impounded they wouldnt bail them out of the city pounds because. It was too expensive. Their plan was just like these are cheap enough to make in china that we can just account for the ones that get sucked up. So wheelchair users, people with strollers and so on. They were finding them to be great obstruction cities were spending a lot of money scooping up and impounding them and then the same time people started to traffic in kits that would let you buy them at the pound for a dollar during the auctions and turn them into your scooter. And when i wrote about this bird threatened to sue me under the dmca. Right so this is theres a of having cake and eating too here where they just like just the mill owners who said, well, we dont like the law that says we cant bring in machines without consulting with the craft guilds. But we do like the law that says that if the craft guilds threatened to break the machines, we can have them rounded up and hanged public and their commitment, law and order was a highly selective one. And ill stipulate i also have a highly selective commitment to law and order, but i think they started it okay all right. Now, now is the time when we make books not returnable. Okay,