Become a Creator today!Start creating today - Share your story with the world!
Start for free
00:00:00
00:00:01
Episode 22 - An Interview with Daniel Dacombe & Cory Doctorow
144 Plays1 month ago
In this episode, Humanist Canada's Daniel Dacombe interviews Cory Doctorow. Cory is a science fiction novelist, journalist, and technology activist. He is a contributor to many magazines, websites and newspapers, and his novels have been translated into dozens of languages. He is also the one who coined the term, "enshittification".
Books:
"Little Brother", "Picks and Shovels", "Radicalized", "Red Teams Blues", "The Bezzle", "In Real Life", "Walkaway", "Homeland", "Chokepoint Capitalism".
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction and Themes
00:00:01
Speaker
to help them ah get up to speed on the rest of the conversation, could you describe a bit about what inshittification is? Sure. Well, you know, the short explanation
00:00:20
Speaker
Welcome to The Voice of Canadian Humanism, the official podcast of Humanist Canada. Join us as we delve into thought-provoking discussions, explore critical issues, and celebrate the values of reason, compassion, and secularism through the humanist lens.
00:00:37
Speaker
Welcome to the conversation.
Corey Doctorow's Background
00:00:41
Speaker
Hello, everyone. My name is Daniel Daycomb, and I'm one of the hosts of the Voice of Canadian Humanism podcast. I'm very pleased to be joined by today's guest, ah writer, activist and journalist, Corey Doctorow. Corey, welcome to our humble podcast.
00:00:55
Speaker
Thank you. It's a real pleasure to be on. Well, we're very glad that you're here. ah One of the things that we like to do when we start these interviews is to ask our guests a bit about themselves, namely what sort of cultural and religious environment they grew up in. Could you tell us a bit about your background?
00:01:13
Speaker
Sure. So ah my dad and his parents were Soviet refugees. they ah my My grandmother grew up in Leningrad and was a child during the siege of Leningrad, was a civil defense worker, sort of a child soldier.
00:01:27
Speaker
And my grandfather was a young teen when the Nazis marched on the part of Poland slash Belarus that he grew up in. And then he was inducted into the Red Army when they tried to go east to Kiev to to get further back from the front.
00:01:39
Speaker
So they met in Siberia. uh in the in the um red army and they deserted and they went to azerbaijan where my dad was born and then after the war they made their way west and got to frankfurt to a displaced persons camp and got a boat to toronto where one of my grandfather's brothers lived and so that's how i came to be a torontonian my mom's side her family are ukrainian and romanian jews um who are not particularly observant a little bit uh and my my Grand my father's father was rather observant.
00:02:11
Speaker
My father's mother was quite funny. She thought she was observant, but she couldn't remember because she basically left her family environment when she was 12 or 13. She didn't know what parts of her culture were Russian and which parts were Jewish.
00:02:27
Speaker
and So she would say things like don't whistle in the house. Jews don't whistle in the house. And then she'd go, maybe that's Russians who don't whistle in the house. I'm not sure, but you shouldn't whistle in the house. i my folks are atheists.
00:02:41
Speaker
ah My dad was and is a very clever guy and had a real scholarly and intellectual aptitude, which was a first in his family. So the, he was, you know, broadly speaking, the first person in his family to be literate.
00:02:57
Speaker
ah And that's largely true of my mother too. You know, my grandmother graduated from Central Tech in Toronto, but never read a book in her life, except for school. And my grandfather, her husband, dropped out of school when he was 13, when he was the oldest of 10, and his father died, and he went into work.
00:03:16
Speaker
And so he was not um very intellectual either. And my father really was And it was something that was very important to his family. And he was a good arguer.
00:03:28
Speaker
And when he was 18, he and his best friend were walking around somewhere in Toronto and they came across a union picket line. my dad picked a fight with a picket captain who was a Trotskyist revolutionary named Ross Dowson, who had been a decorated World War II veteran,
00:03:46
Speaker
And was quite a quite a character. he's actually successfully sued the RCMP for calling him a subversive and sued them for libel. One one a judgment against them. His offices were burgled during the War Measures Act in 1970.
00:04:01
Speaker
And they took his files of of his membership and called them all subversives, published a subversive list. ah And so my my dad picked a fight with Ross. And he lost the argument.
00:04:12
Speaker
And he'd never lost an argument before. and So he went back the next day and he lost the argument again. and he kept going back. And like within 60 days, he and his friend had renounced Judaism and become lifelong Marxist revolutionaries.
00:04:27
Speaker
And they never stopped. And so by the time I came along many years later, i was I was raised in an atheist home with mildly religiously observant Jewish grandparents. We went for Passover and so on.
00:04:41
Speaker
I went, instead of Hebrew school, I went to socialist Yiddish school at the workman's circle, where there was a small amount of religious education, mostly about understanding the context of major religious festivals. But um mostly it was linguistic education. So Yiddish before the rise of of the Haredim, the Chassids, was the language spoken primarily by radical European Jews. Rosa Luxemburg wrote in Yiddish.
00:05:06
Speaker
ah And there were you know Yiddish socialist and anarchist newspapers published all over the world. And so I went to Yiddish school. I learned Yiddish. I was bar mitzvahed by a rabbi who gave as close to a secular bar mitzvah service as you could get and advocated for a two state solution.
00:05:22
Speaker
And my grandfather's friends stormed out of the hall, the workman's circle hall, where we had the service when when he got to that part of the service. ah And I myself am an atheist.
00:05:34
Speaker
um my My wife is a third generation atheist. I'm a second generation atheist. And our daughter, ah we call her Jewish-ish because she has a Jewish father, and ethnically Jewish father. And ah and a I guess her parents would have been Church of Wales mother.
00:05:52
Speaker
ah And a few years ago, my wife said, our daughter doesn't know anything about her Jewish heritage. I want you to start doing some Jewish holidays with her. And so we do Hanukkah. So I buy her eight presents. We have a menorah. It's shaped like a space shuttle, but we don't sing the Hanukkah song. Like we don't sing the bracha. We don't sing the blessing. We just sing a song.
00:06:13
Speaker
Often that song is I'm a lonely Jew on Christmas from South Park. And we light a candle and she opens a present and I do a Passover Seder. I've done two or three of them. I'm going to do one this year.
00:06:24
Speaker
And my Passover Seder, I cook for a week. I make a big brisket. I do, ah you know, heroseth and I make my own horseradish. Top tip, if you are pureeing your own horseradish, do not smell it after you do that to make sure that it's okay. Because you will ice pick yourself in every orifice in your face and keel over gasping for air and not being able to see or smell or hear.
00:06:46
Speaker
ah But um we use these ah anarchist Haggadahs from the UK called the Jewdas, J-E-W-D-A-S Haggadahs. And they're very funny. And in place of the service, as you might be familiar with it, it takes place mostly as a set of participatory dramas where people take the parts of like union organizers who are trying to sign up the pyramid builders for a general strike. And then the pyramid builders, and then their overseer and so on. When you come to hide the Afakam and the piece of matzah, the...
00:07:16
Speaker
the, uh, the the book ruminates on the, um, the problems of hiding a thing in a house that you've lived in for many years and where your kids know all the hiding places. And they say, in order to hide this adequately, you must put yourself in the mindset of a banker hiding their fortunes in the Cayman islands.
00:07:33
Speaker
And then, and only then will you find the hiding place you're looking for. It's very funny. We listened to radical music. Uh, we, uh, drink a lot of non-kosher wine because kosher wine is gross.
00:07:45
Speaker
Uh, and, um, I think last year someone brought bacon wrap dates and we had those for dessert. So it's not the most religious of services. It's a very cultural one.
00:07:56
Speaker
So that's more or less where I sit culturally and religiously. Well, ah I am not personally or ethnically Jewish, but hey, nobody's perfect. ah But I will say the little that I do know ah tells me that doesn't sound like the average bar mitzvah experience, especially that the advocating for the two-state solution. And I think that's...
00:08:17
Speaker
ah a A whole bunch of things in your books make a lot more sense suddenly. My rabbi's synagogue was vandalized by um the by like Zionist thugs who they spray painted anti-Semitic things on his synagogue ah in in retaliation for his his views on on Palestinian autonomy and justice.
00:08:45
Speaker
You know, I bet a lot of people who would retaliate and who would speak out
Understanding 'Inshittification'
00:08:50
Speaker
against those things are also people who enjoy the benefits of those who have fought on places like the union lines and for workers' rights and for five-day work week and things like that. There's a bit of a disconnect, I think, in our culture for a lot of people who benefit from these things and yet are also trying to pull up the ladder behind them.
00:09:11
Speaker
Yeah, i we say in the in the technology policy wars where you often have these companies that made their fortune by um you know doing something that was quite disruptive to the people who came before them that are now very furious that someone's doing that to them. This is the history of all entertainment technology. You know you have the first phonographs that were, you know, hated by the no composers.
00:09:34
Speaker
And then you have radio that was hated by the people who made the phonographs. And then you have ah ah cable that was hated by the broadcasters. And then you have VCRs that was hated by the cable operators. And you like it all ends with an Napster where it's the first time they lost and in every other instance. They just like that We just legalized the new technology and told people to figure it out or had a levy or or a statutory license or something.
00:09:57
Speaker
And we always say in those cases, every pirate wants to be an admiral.
00:10:02
Speaker
Yeah. It reminds me, I don't know if you're a Doctor Who fan. I can see some of the you know sci-fi ah paraphernalia around you. um And you can probably see mine as well.
00:10:13
Speaker
There's this great ah scene in one of the Peter Capaldi episodes where he's talking, he's don convince people not to go to war. And this these great revolutionaries are trying to get their revolution on. and And he says, okay, so what happens when you win?
00:10:26
Speaker
what are you going to do with the people like you? Because nobody wins for long. What do you do with the next revolution? Well, now you're the establishment. I think, yeah, that's a really interesting way to look at it. never really thought about Napster being the first time that actually got stopped.
00:10:42
Speaker
Yeah. napsters like the Napster is the end of history. yeah and it's And it was a wildly successful, popular, I mean, sort sort of hard to overstate how popular Napster was when they shut it down. There were 52 million users and the Neither candidate in the 2000 presidential election got more than 50 million votes.
00:11:04
Speaker
So, you know, like there was there was enough there were enough Napster users to, you know, overturn the election. And yet they never coalesced as a political force. It's it's actually one of the questions I really think about a lot when I think about.
00:11:18
Speaker
how we got here is that users just never co or at least not then did not coalesce into a force that fought for the things that matter to them. They just scurried, you know, it's like you turned on the lights and they scurried under the fridge.
00:11:31
Speaker
Well, I was one of those Napster users back in the day. ah i want to circle back to ah that idea of users coming together and the sort of the community of of users. But Before we get there, um i'm not sure I'm not sure how many of our listeners will know or be familiar with a lot of your work.
00:11:48
Speaker
I actually got introduced to your work, I think about two decades ago, through an XKCD comic. That's a science and technology comic strip that's been running on the internet for a while.
00:12:00
Speaker
If I recall correctly, in the comic strip, you show up in a hot air balloon and you talk about peer-to-peer networks. I don't recall entire context. it's it's There's a character who, there's it's a meeting between a time traveler and a contemporary person.
00:12:15
Speaker
And the time travelers come from the future. ah And um he is ah he is asking this person from the contemporary world whether it's true that bloggers all blog from hot air balloons wearing capes and goggles and they say, no, no, no, that's not true. And then they think about it for a frame and they say, well, Cory Doctorow does, but no one else does, which is very funny. And it was very kind of, of, uh, random and row who did this, uh, who made that comic strip.
00:12:43
Speaker
I, I'm at pains to point out that I am in fact afraid, afraid of heights and I do nothing in a hot air balloon except for cling to the floor and whimper. So, That describes my singular hot air balloon experience as well.
00:12:56
Speaker
Well, that's, and yeah, it's terrifying and we never should have done that, ah especially not around the world for 80 days. um ah Over the two decades since that comic, um i I read several of your blog posts. I read a couple of your novels. Usually my older brother was the one who gave them to me.
00:13:16
Speaker
ah He gave me Eastern Standard Tribe. i I can't recall when, but I remember reading it. and ah but my big kind of reintroduction to you and your your place in the current dialogue about technology was last year when you came to Winnipeg.
00:13:30
Speaker
And my brother is, ah like I said, a big fan of yours. so he and I went to see you together, ah which is where you and I actually met very briefly when my brother was getting a small stack of books signed. ah Anything to make a book non-returnable.
00:13:44
Speaker
Well, absolutely. Well, i don't I can't tell you how many books I've found in ah you know used bookstores that have had inscriptions and I will ever find them. I think, gosh, I hope that person's dead.
00:13:56
Speaker
i really, you know, I would hate that they gave a book away after it was signed. It's fine. you It has to happen. You eventually just end up with like, there's just as someone who's moved continents many times and owns a lot of books, this is just a thing that happens.
00:14:09
Speaker
i I have a funny story. i I found a friend's first novel in a used bookstore with a an incredible inscription and a poem and a drawing. oh And I asked the bookstore owner who I knew where did this conference said, Oh, it's an estate sale.
00:14:23
Speaker
And so I wrote to my friend and I said, I don't know how to tell you this. Clearly this person really meant a lot to you and they're dead now. I don't know if you've heard And he wrote back and he said, I have no idea who that was. It was my first novel. I signed them all like that.
00:14:37
Speaker
I actually once founded a used book sale, a a pre-release copy of a novel by, don't know if you, you probably know who Guy Gavriel Kay a Canadian author.
00:14:48
Speaker
A pre-release version of one of his books. I think it was of Under Heaven, you know, one that you're supposed to read. And then, you know, you're as a beta reader, you never give away. and I actually took it to get signed by him. And in the line, I,
00:14:59
Speaker
was really nervous I suddenly thought what if he takes it away like what if he's really genuinely upset by this and and he wasn't he thought it was funny so I was relieved by that. You know what those they that those it's weird because publishers are quite uh they're very uh jealous about distributing those they cost a shocking amount of money to make the the way that the printing technology works they just As someone who worked in pre-press for a long time, I'm always amazed at how much those things cost.
00:15:26
Speaker
But um then they send them to kind of all kinds of reviewers without really much regard for whether it makes any sense to do that. Like I get them for for book two of a series where I didn't review book one.
00:15:39
Speaker
It's very clearly silly to send me this book. And yeah. You know, I have a little free library and it's full of those advanced review copies because yeah I feel stupid putting in the garbage, you know.
00:15:53
Speaker
Right. Well, I'm just quietly making a note over here that I better send you book one and not book two if I ever get around to writing. That's right. Well, and if I don't review book one, don't bother sending me book two because, okay yeah you know, the fact that I didn't review book one doesn't mean I didn't like it. probably meant I didn't have time to read it. But if I didn't review book one, there's no way I'm going to review book two because haven't read book one.
00:16:15
Speaker
Right. Well, i don't have a lot of time to read these days. I work full time. am in PhD studies. I have children. i try to see my children on occasion.
00:16:28
Speaker
But when I do read, i think you said you've had a daughter, you have a daughter. And i don't know if it's just the one daughter, if you have more than one kid. Just one. So you you still probably want to see her at times. and Every now and again. she's It's her last year at home. She's going away to university in the in the fall. So yeah, we're very keenly aware yeah of the passage of time for sure.
00:16:49
Speaker
Yeah. So I don't get a lot of time to read ah for fun anymore, but I have been working my way through a stack of books so and ah and your name has been in that stack as well.
00:17:00
Speaker
One of the things that stuck out to me when I heard your talk, and it's been actually since your talk that you your books have found their way into my ah my stack of reading, ah was this concept that you developed.
00:17:13
Speaker
ah came up with to describe the current state of social media and the internet. And it's it's probably my favorite made-up word in as much as all words are you know made up. Sure. It was the idea n-shittification, which the first time I heard it, I immediately thought...
00:17:30
Speaker
i'm I'm on board. I understand 100% where you're going with this. It makes sense. It describes my experience. I was wondering if for those in our audience who haven't read some of your work yet to help them get up to speed on the rest of the conversation, could you describe a bit about what in shitification Sure. Well, you know, the short explanation is it's just a ah fun, dirty word that you can use as an epithet to describe services that, you know, you you love and rely on that have become really nasty.
00:17:59
Speaker
But what hangs off of it is a pretty detailed technical and political and economic critique that... I often use the metaphor of a disease to describe how to understand insidification.
00:18:11
Speaker
And so when when you when a doctor encounters someone who is poorly, who's sick, they start by ah creating a natural history of the illness, right? What is the progression of the symptoms? So you can differentiate it from other kinds of illness.
00:18:27
Speaker
And the progression of symptoms and insidification will be very familiar to people who've been on the internet for a year or two here. Which is that first you have a platform that's good to its end users, because platforms, they have end users and business customers. So Uber's got drivers and riders and Amazon's got buyers and sellers and so on.
00:18:44
Speaker
First, it's good to its its end users and it finds a way to lock them in. Maybe it's like Uber and it bankrupts all the cab companies. So it's like the only game in town. Or maybe it's... Like Amazon, they pre-sell you a year's worth of shipping. So you'd be nuts to buy something from somewhere else. Or, you know, maybe it's Facebook where you and your friends are all locked in because you love each other more than you hate Mark Zuckerberg, but you're all pains in the ass. You can't agree on when it's time to leave Facebook or where you should go next. And so you just like if you want to keep hanging out with each other by default, you're just stuck on Facebook.
00:19:11
Speaker
So once the users are locked in, the platform can start to alter the deal and they can make things worse for those end users and better for the business customers. And that brings the business customers in. You know Facebook starts spying on users to target ads to them. It starts doing content recommendations. So publishers pile in to get their articles in front of a lot of people.
00:19:29
Speaker
You know, Uber ah subsidizes drivers as well as riders and starts to shift some of the subsidy from riders to drivers and so on. So things get um ah worse for the end users, they get better for the the business customers, but then the business customers become reliant on the platform. They rely, they're relying on those customers.
00:19:48
Speaker
And those customers can't leave because they're locked to the platform. And at that point, the platform can start maltreating those business customers as well. And this is where i think the critique yeah differs from the one that you might be familiar with. Like people will say, oh, if you're not paying for the product, you're the product.
00:20:03
Speaker
But and this implies that like end users are the product and business customers are the ones that the platform is being solicitous of. But the reality is the platforms are not solicitous of those business customers.
00:20:18
Speaker
You know, when you look at any of the people who are supposedly the customers for these platforms, you know, the advertisers who advertise on Google or on on Facebook or what have you, they're getting like horrifically abused and ripped off.
00:20:31
Speaker
by these companies. you know ad fraud is rampant, the costs are going up, the fidelity of targeting is in free fall. you know So the platforms are not good to anyone except themselves. And that's where the third stage of unshittification comes along, where the platform claws back all the value from end users and from business customers.
00:20:49
Speaker
they try to leave behind just like the bare homeopathic residue that is necessary a value to keep everyone locked in. And they allocate everything else themselves. And one of the things that's so awful about this is that at this point, sometimes platforms actually get it wrong and they keel over. Cause you know, the difference between like, I hate this platform so much, why can't I leave? And I hate this platform so much I am leaving.
00:21:12
Speaker
It's a very thin difference, right? And so, you know, when that happens, the platforms, they pivot. um which is the Silicon Valley euphemism for panicking. And so like Mark Zuckerberg, you know, a few years ago, you'll remember he kind of called a press conference and said, brothers and sisters, I've had a revelation.
00:21:28
Speaker
i know for years I've told you that the future is that you're going to argue with your racist uncle using the primitive text interface that I invented so that me and my fellow creepy students could non-consensually rate the ability of Harvard undergraduate girls.
00:21:42
Speaker
But yeah, As you do. But last night, I realized that the real future is that I'm going to convert you and everyone you love into a legless, sexless, low polygon, heavily surveilled cartoon character to populate a virtual world whose name I stole from a 25 year old satirical dystopian science fiction novel. I call it the metaverse. Right.
00:22:02
Speaker
and And, you know, when that happens, the whole thing really is a pile of shit. And, you know, that's the symptomology, the progression, the natural history. But the next thing a doctor will want to understand is what's going on inside the body that produces these symptoms.
00:22:18
Speaker
And I think the thing that makes inshidification a uniquely digital phenomenon is that this shell game where value is moved from one kind of user to another, business customers and users, shareholders,
00:22:31
Speaker
is a shell game that would be very labor intensive to play in a hard goods environment. If you're Galen Weston and you wanna raise the price of it eggs for 10 minutes, you know just just when you think people are coming in to buy the emergency eggs to bake cakes or whatever, right you need like an army of teenagers on roller skates with pricing guns, right? But if you're Jeff Bezos and you're running Amazon Fresh, the digital grocery store, you can give a different price to everyone.
00:23:00
Speaker
I call this twiddling. And twiddling broadly affects prices, costs, search ranking, recommendation, all of the business fundamentals such that every time you use a service, you're actually using a different service. It has different weights, different physics about how it works. And you know an example of this is and something that that Vina Dubell, the legal scholar calls algorithmic wage discrimination.
00:23:29
Speaker
So I live in the United States now, and here in the US, hospitals are are increasingly and now almost exclusively hiring nurses through ah Uber-like platforms. They literally call them Uber for nurses.
00:23:41
Speaker
ah And um these platforms, because we have such a poorly regulated privacy environment, these platforms can, on the open market, buy up to the minute scores telling them how much credit card debt each nurse has.
00:23:58
Speaker
And if a nurse has a lot of impending or overdue credit card debt, that nurse has offered a lower wage. on the grounds that they are more desperate for work. right Now, this is not like, you look at the history of, i don't know, the Winnipeg general strike, right? And you look at the belligerents there, the bosses there that they fought against in that strike. yeah Those bosses were not above this kind of tactic.
00:24:20
Speaker
They just weren't capable. of this kind of tactic, right? It requires a degree of automation. And of course, as digital services merge with physical services, you're seeing in shitification everywhere. you know Cars are big in shitification platforms because a car is just a computer you stick your body into these days. and and you know grocery stores are doing E-Ink tags on the shelves. And in Norway, where this has been a big thing, they're repricing goods 2,000 to 3,000 times a day, right? Using using algorithmic repricing.
00:24:51
Speaker
So we are seeing the the the what William Gibson calls the eversion of cyberspace, where cyberspace is everting into the real world. ah and And so that's the that's the mechanism.
00:25:04
Speaker
And then the final question is like, why is this happening now? Because greed isn't new. We've had digital services for a long time. But this seems to be happening to all of them right all at once.
00:25:15
Speaker
And so this is the epidemiology of it. And in epidemiology, you often look not at what is causing the spread, but what used to prevent it. Like what has changed that allows for an easier spread? you know If you look at say HIV, HIV, we have evidence of it going back to the nineteen twenty s I believe,
00:25:33
Speaker
Right. It was a set of it wasn't ah so much a mutation in the disease as a change in our social arrangements that produce the rapid spread of HIV in the global AIDS pandemic. So what's causing the insidification pandemic?
00:25:47
Speaker
The thing that used to stop companies from insidifying first and foremost was competition. because a firm that made its products worse had to fear that a competitor would steal their customers.
00:25:58
Speaker
But for 40 years, we have effectively stopped enforcing competition law. Indeed in Canada, we barely enforce competition law ever. you know The Competition Bureau in Canada in its entire history has attempted to block a grand total of three mergers and has successfully blocked a grand total of no mergers.
00:26:18
Speaker
ah But in the United States, which Canada more or less drafted off of, they did have a very robust enforcement regime until the Reagan Mulroney years. And then they just sort of dismantled it.
00:26:30
Speaker
And they just let companies buy each other and use predatory pricing and do all the other things that are just banned under the law that they didn't enforce the law. So 40 years of failure to enforce competition law has produced this kind of inbred corporate Habsburg jaw where these companies just suck.
00:26:46
Speaker
but there's no way nowhere else to go. Right. And then one of the things that happens when sectors merge to monopoly like this is they capture their regulators. And the second force that disciplines companies is regulation. you have markets and governments.
00:27:00
Speaker
But, you know, when there's five companies in a sector, it's really easy for them to figure out what they all want from their regulator and they can suborn that regulator. Indeed, when there's so few companies in a sector, chances are like everyone at the CRTC either used to work at TELUS or Bell or Rogers.
00:27:14
Speaker
Right. Because like they are the only people who understand the sector come from the triopoly or the duopoly or the cartel. And so you see incredible regulatory capture. And in the UK, they just fired the head of the competition markets authority is overseeing this digital transformation where they're really tackling big tech.
00:27:30
Speaker
And they replaced him with a former head of Amazon UK. Right. So that's just like naked regulatory capture. And this is what happens when when your sector, when your economy is monopolized.
00:27:43
Speaker
But there was a third force that used to discipline these companies that was unique to digital technology. And is rooted in the same phenomenon that gives us twiddling, which is the flexibility of digital tools.
00:27:55
Speaker
Because toolss are digital tools are so flexible, there's only one kind of computer we know how to make. Computer scientists call it the Turing complete universal von Neumann machine, which is just means every computer can run every valid program.
00:28:08
Speaker
That's what I i'll call my computer all the time. i call it all that all the time. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's like, I said, bring, bring, ah honey, are you still having problems with your Turing complete universal von Neumann machine? Bring it over here. Let's see if we can get it to it correctly interpret some valid programs.
00:28:22
Speaker
So, you know, the, the, the, the main computing unit in your car, the little computer on a chip in your ah printer cartridge or your singing greeting card, your laptop and your phone, they can all run the same programs.
00:28:36
Speaker
every valid program. Now, some of them might take longer than others. And there's a very old computer and a very complicated program. It might take a trillion years to run it. But every computer is technically capable of doing this, which means that every inshittifying program can be met with a disinshittifying program. If someone's raised the price of ink, someone else, and and then used a ah ah digital lock in the printer to stop you from installing third-party ink, someone else can just undo that lock, just just reverse that lock and and and sell you cheaper ink and make a lot of money from it.
00:29:05
Speaker
ah And so what's happened over 20 years is we've expanded and expanded IP law to make that kind of digital aftermarket illegal, those interoperable products illegal.
00:29:17
Speaker
So, for example, in Canada in 2010, Tony Clement, the noted sex pest and PPE grifter, and James Moore, who were both ministers in Stephen Harper's government, consulted on whether we should make it illegal to reverse engineer digital locks and remove them.
00:29:34
Speaker
And they got 6,500 comments that told them this was a terrible idea. And they got 50 comments who told them that it was a good idea. And James Moore gave a speech and he said, the people who oppose my bill are babyish and they are expressing ah radical extremist views.
00:29:48
Speaker
And so I'm going to discard all those comments opposed to it. So we made these laws that made it illegal to like jailbreak, reverse engineer, improve, modify products. And then companies just started putting digital locks on everything. So you had to use them in ways the shareholders preferred and combine that with monopoly. So there's not a lot of competition. You get these really grotesque things like it's illegal to change your printer so that it will take third party ink. Well,
Corporate Practices and Power Dynamics
00:30:12
Speaker
HP now sells you ink at $10,000 a gallon.
00:30:14
Speaker
It is the most expensive fluid you can buy as a consumer without that a special permit. You print your grocery list with fluid that costs more than the semen of a Kentucky Derby winning stallion.
00:30:26
Speaker
Right. So this is, you know, the completely foreseeable outcome of telling companies that if you put a digital lock on something, it'll be a felony to use it in ways that you don't like. Everyone's going to put digital locks on everything.
00:30:38
Speaker
So that was the third constraint, right? This interoperability it just fell away because of the growth of IP law. And then finally, you had tech workers who were in such high demand that even though they weren't unionized, they could they could really tell their bosses to go to hell.
00:30:51
Speaker
Because, you know, what were their bosses going to do? Fire them? No one else could do their job. And so tech workers often held the line for tech users because they cared about them. They felt like they were, you know, like that like the the motto of that movie Tron, you know, like i fight for the user. yeah right They felt like they were fighting for the user.
00:31:13
Speaker
And 2023 comes by, 260,000 tech workers are shown the door by their bosses in the United States. 2024, another 150,000 join them on the breadline.
00:31:24
Speaker
Tech workers don't tell their bosses to go to hell anymore. but They say, yes, sir, and how high? and so once you lose all of these constraints, that stopped the same people who are always sociopaths who were trying to figure out how to make as much money as possible by sharing as little value as possible with their workers, their suppliers, and their customers.
00:31:44
Speaker
Once you take away the constraints, right? Once you take away all the stuff that gums up the giant and shitification lever in the C-suite, the next time they go and they yank on that lever, instead of it not budging or barely moving the way it did for 20 years, it just glides very freely all the way up to 100. And that's in shitification. That's what we're living through right now.
00:32:03
Speaker
okay Well, knowing the kinds of guests we typically have on, I can say with confidence, no one has ever brought up ah comparing printer ink to a Kentucky Derby Stallion sperm before.
00:32:14
Speaker
So this is a first. ah Good. Congratulations to you and to me as well for this historic moment for our podcast. that was ah That's really something. like to do my best. I like that i like to to to to class the class, the join up a little. We're broadening everybody's horizons here. Yeah. And leaving aside how cartoonishly evil all this just sounds, and I say cartoonishly because i i remember watching Saturday morning cartoons, you know, as a kid that had plots like this, where this guy It's the real Captain Planet shit, isn't it?
00:32:44
Speaker
It is. And I'm listening to this and thinking, well...
00:32:49
Speaker
you're You're quite right about, the well I think, that the piece that nobody's really noticing, which is that once you get past the the algorithm, which is what everybody's talking about these days, and they talk about the algorithm like it's the antichrist. They have the same kind of tone of voice, like, oh, the algorithm showed me things. you know and ah And they talk about how like the ads have all changed on social media. That's what everybody that's the part of in shitification, I think, that the end users like myself notice. And I even caught myself to the other day like noticing that a lot of my ads are were for cruise lines.
00:33:17
Speaker
And all of the videos that showed up in the feed were rich people showing off their yachts. And I caught myself thinking, well, I did look at a picture of a boat the other day for a few seconds. So I really did bring this on myself.
00:33:29
Speaker
We all just kind of accepted that but and accepted that you know we're being spied on and they're giving money and they're giving our our stuff to to advertisers. The advertisers are targeting us. And that's where people notice it at the end user level.
00:33:43
Speaker
But it's not really for the way you describe it. It's not really about there's more and more intrusive ads on social media. It's a method of vast wealth transfer into a very few powerful pockets done at both the expense of the end users and the expense the business users that are attempting to survive by using social media. Do I i have that right?
00:34:03
Speaker
Yeah. And so, you know, one of the implications of this, you know, speaking as a red diaper baby, is there some natural class alliance between both ah sides of the platform, right? Business customers and end users.
00:34:15
Speaker
They do have divergent interests, ultimately. You know, a good example of this is in the UK when the Competition Marks Authority was in investigating ad tech. A consortium of advertisers suggested that one of the problems of the monopolization of ad tech, which is very dire, right? It's it's the monopolization of ad tech is very bad. Two companies really control it, Google and Meta.
00:34:35
Speaker
um They said, well, one of the reasons that it's so hard to start a new ad tech platform is that um we all really value this thing called attribution. And attribution is you see an ad on the Internet.
00:34:45
Speaker
And then data brokers sell information about the places you went to, the stores you went to, and the things you bought. And then they try to link those two and say, we showed you an ad for this mustache wax. And then you went to Shoppers Drug Mart and bought the mustache wax.
00:35:01
Speaker
And that tells us that our campaign was good. And the only companies that have a surveillance net so broad and and intrusive that they can do attribution are Facebook and Google, right? Meta and Google. And so the this ad tech...
00:35:15
Speaker
ah consortium in the UK said what we need to do is have at that point, her majesty's government assign every Britain at birth, a permanent advertising of ah identifier so that we can democratize attribution and smaller platforms can compete with Google.
00:35:34
Speaker
Now, obviously this is the limit of the, of the class Alliance that, ad tech ah ah companies, business kind business users of facebook and meta are Facebook and Google and end users have, because this is not a thing that any user wants.
00:35:52
Speaker
Right. Right. You know, you democratizing the invasion of their human rights is not a thing anyone is asking for. ah But we do in fact have a confluence of interest when it comes to making the tech platforms weaker.
00:36:06
Speaker
And there is scope for us to sort of work together on that project, even if we don't agree on what we should do after we declare victory. And, you know, I think anyone who's watched like Donald Trump come to power will understand that there's a lot of political ah ah potential in forming coalitions among people who don't agree on everything, but agree on some things.
00:36:30
Speaker
and um And, you know, when it's when it's over, when you've attained victory, well, then you do have a very sticky business of figuring out what who gets the spoils. But um right you can get a lot further with these alliances. And so, yeah, I'm saying like,
00:36:44
Speaker
and And not every business user is a user you don't like. I think Uber drivers and Uber riders actually have a lot in common. Right. You know. Well, ah speaking of Donald Trump.
00:36:54
Speaker
um That's a terrible transition. ah I'm noticing that this is a really politically charged time. And ordinarily, i would just love to sit and chat with you about your blog and your books and your novels, especially.
00:37:08
Speaker
i finished The Lost Cause earlier this week, which i i do want to talk about it a little bit. But currently, we're about 48 hours after the declaration that Guantanamo Bay is going to be turned into a migrant internment camp. And ah federal loan programs are off and now they're on again. And I know this is happening in the States, but the States is our closest neighbor and is also about to implement a whole bunch of tariffs and things like that. I know talking politics can be really challenging, especially for someone like yourself, who has been ah labeled in some medias as like a reluctant prophet about future tech and these sorts of things.
00:37:46
Speaker
um But i I couldn't help but notice a few weeks ago at the inauguration of Donald Trump, ah a number of the most rich and powerful ah tech oligarchs, if we can call them that now, I think we can, ah sitting with the family section at the inauguration. Now, I don't throw the word portentous around a lot, ah mostly because it's kind of hard to pronounce.
00:38:11
Speaker
But if anything has made me feel a sense of ominous dread for the future, ah For increasingly technology all ge focused species, it was that moment, ah seeing all those faces behind Donald Trump and recognizing many of them from Amazon, Meta, ah Twitter slash X or whatever, sitting like foreign dignitaries.
00:38:32
Speaker
I recognize them from Senate antitrust committee hearings. Oh, yeah. Well, we've seen them there, too. And and now ah and now they're sitting ah in positions of power, very, very clear positions of power.
00:38:45
Speaker
um So a slightly unfair question ah that I have the freedom to ask in this moment, I guess. What does it mean when the CEOs of the tech oligarchs of those biggest technology companies in human history, the richest people in the history of the solar system, are seated like foreign dignitaries at the president's inauguration?
00:39:06
Speaker
Well, I think it tells you that um they are ah correctly assessing that while Donald Trump is not above using laws that curb corporate power to attack his rivals,
00:39:22
Speaker
ah that he does not use it to attack the people who toady up to him and that these men being completely bereft of any principle or scruple right are interested in making sure that they're on his good side and not on his bad side especially since they are all facing antitrust investigation in the US and of course a couple of days before they all sat on the dais Donald Trump went to Davos and ah shouted at European regulators to stop being so mean to these great American companies whom the American government was suing or investigating or had indeed in the case of Google won a judgment against and was getting ready to punish.
00:40:03
Speaker
And so i think that they made that that they made the predictable call. And I think it's important to remember that yeah know these guys owe their fortunes to being terrible.
00:40:17
Speaker
You know, look at Tim Cook. Everybody likes Tim Cook. because Apple's supposed to be the good company. So, you know, they say, oh, we don't spy on you. They gave you that one click button that you could tick to not be spied on by Facebook. ninety six percent 96% of Apple users, iPhone users, tick the opt-out of Facebook spying button.
00:40:37
Speaker
I always say the remaining 4% were either confused, drunk, working for Facebook, or drunk because they worked for Facebook, ah because I think nobody really wants to be spied on by Facebook.
00:40:49
Speaker
But you know at the same time, Apple turned on non opt out surveillance for all of those users that spied on them in exactly the same way Facebook had been doing in order to target ads to them with Apple's competing based advertising system.
00:41:04
Speaker
But Facebook or or rather Tim Cook, it's not just that he spies on you in exactly the same way as Mark Zuckerberg does. The way that Tim Cook got his job, right? The reason that he is Steve Jobs' successor, his accomplishment that got him elevated to the CEO ship, he's now worth over $2 billion dollars as a result, was that um he figured out how to make iPhones in China and how to offshore Apple manufacturing of precision goods with a high degree of quality assurance
00:41:35
Speaker
to China. And it turned out that the way that you do that is by building iPhone City, which is Foxconn's manufacturing facility for iPhones in the Pearl River Delta, and operating it in such a way that you need to install suicide nets because so many workers try to jump to their death after working one too many shifts in iPhone City.
00:41:54
Speaker
This is what Tim Cook did, right? This is where his bill, he got paid billions of dollars to drive workers to their death, literally to suicide. And, you know, I think a lot of people are like, but he treats his Apple workers so well, right? The people who work here don't subcontract for him.
00:42:13
Speaker
And I don't think that, and and it's true, right? Working for Apple is apparently very nice. You get a daycare and a kombucha and massages and all the stuff you get. was thinking about kombucha, yeah. Yeah, that that nice that nice you know tech workplace that they have the set dressers come in and turn into a kind of whimsical campus.
00:42:28
Speaker
But um he doesn't do that because he likes programmers and hates Chinese factory workers. He does it because he doesn't think he can replace his programmers if they commit suicide.
00:42:39
Speaker
But he thinks that he can replace his Chinese factory workers if they do. And so he treats everyone just as well as he is forced to treat them. That is the mark of ah sociopath.
00:42:51
Speaker
Someone who only refrains from abusing you if they think they'll get caught and punished is a bad person. And that, when you look at how all of those men on the dais treat their workers, the workers who aren't in America or the workers who work in warehouses or delivery vans, what you see is a boss who, if they think that they can get away with it, will literally drive you to your death if they can.
00:43:19
Speaker
not because the cruelty is the point. They're not sadists. They're just sociopaths. A lot people don't understand the difference. I mean, we in mental health. People will say like a psychopath or a sociopath, you know, same difference. I think, ah you know, a sociopath someone who doesn't care.
00:43:35
Speaker
it just doesn't matter. And so recently we saw, you know, Elon Musk ah give ah so a very specific looking salute in front of a huge crowd of people. gave a Nazi salute.
00:43:45
Speaker
He gave and a Nazi salute that some have said was Roman. Some have said was autistic. I i don't see either... ah of those being reasonable explanations.
00:43:56
Speaker
I love the idea that there's an autistic salute. hail ah Hail fellow autistic person. Well met. I just, I love that. You know, from what some of my friends have told me who are ah on the spectrum, ah their autistic salute is they go up and start talking about dinosaurs to each other.
00:44:13
Speaker
Right, or trains. Yeah, or trains, or, you know, Star Trek, which I love. So I'm happy to, you know. Sure. ah But i I look at Elon Musk giving a Nazi salute and people saying he's a Nazi.
00:44:26
Speaker
i'm ah If he is or if he isn't, I think that a sociopath would absolutely give that salute ah for reasons that have nothing to do with Nazi ideology, but everything to do with what they can get away with and what they think is going to benefit them at the expense of the maxim maximum number of people and the most amount of benefit.
00:44:45
Speaker
And there's a saying about this, right? So the the Germans had a name for people who didn't believe in Nazi ideology, but participated Nazism in order to kind of get along or advance their cause.
00:44:57
Speaker
The word for that that they used in Germany was Nazi. right yeah so i don't think it matters yeah if elon musk is giving a nazi salute because my compass is favorite book or if he's giving a nazi salute because he thinks that it's going to advance his personal fortune i don't think it matters in the slightest i think that you are a nazi irrespective of why you why you give the nazi salute giving the nazi salute is what makes you the nazi Yeah, and like the saying goes, if you have ah nine people eating a table with one Nazi, you have ten Nazis at the table, right? That's right.
00:45:36
Speaker
Yeah. A Nazi bar. And so I think that the sociopathy that leads them into, they start ah embracing these ideologies that are um objectively like the worst things that have ever happened on planet Earth.
00:45:52
Speaker
It's got everything to do with ah with their bottom line. ah Because like you said, it's that's always been the point. It's always been the point that their bottom line is ah improved and protected.
00:46:06
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah, I think that's right. and And I think that what's interesting about this, to bring this back to in shitification, is that these same people oversaw periods by and large in their corporate history in which their products were actually quite good.
00:46:21
Speaker
Right. And I don't think they had like an inverse road to Damascus conversion. Right. Where like they maybe they all became evil. I think these flawed. Deeply morally vacuous.
00:46:36
Speaker
Mm hmm. terrible people under the right constraints were capable of, if not making a company that does something good, at least not fucking up that company. So it does something bad that they were that, that it stopped them from doing the wrong thing. And, you know, so much of our,
00:46:55
Speaker
literature, our moral parables, our moral philosophy, turns on the idea that without constraint, without someone checking your power,
00:47:10
Speaker
that even the best of us go awry. You know, the problem of a benevolent dictatorship isn't that the dictator isn't always benevolent. it's that they're not always right. doesn't matter if they're always benevolent, right? yeah The reason we have peer review in science is not because scientists are trying to fool other people into thinking that they've discovered something that doesn't exist.
00:47:33
Speaker
It's that they're trying to fool themselves. Right? Yeah. Right. That unless someone is out there who can call you on your bullshit, you will crawl up your own ass and die. Yeah. And we see this over and over again. Power without constraint produces these ghastly outcomes and under conditions of constraint, even people who are very broken and who are very, um,
00:47:56
Speaker
cruel and who want ugly things they don't do the same degree of damage that they do when i mean think of when trump was more constrained when he wasn't president he did his his you know the the lack of constraint he has as president is a main source of the mischief that he is able to get away with this reflects, I think, some of the commentary that I've been hearing, ah hearing reading, seeing online.
00:48:26
Speaker
And I kind of was, you know, earlier trying to trying to mock those who downplayed Elon's Nazi salute and saying, well, autism was this, was that. Now people are talking about conservative values and saying, well, these guys are just starting to enact conservative values. They're seeing where the winds are blowing and they're allowing themselves with, you know, the religious right.
00:48:49
Speaker
And because they're actually they've been conservative all along yeah because they've actually apparently been religious all along, which I think is a weird kind of convoluted way of, you know describing things for them.
00:49:02
Speaker
ah When I read people saying things like, well, when do these guys get to be so conservative? Yeah. you know thinking about conservativeism, like fiscally conservative, what usually you know people who would describe themselves as conservative is, ah i start to think that maybe we don't quite understand what it is they're allying themselves with.
00:49:23
Speaker
These are people who, ah you know, meta had many like different transgender flags you could put on your profile and things when it was you know meaningful to do so for them. And now they now they don't. now Now lots of things are coming down the pipe. And all those companies that are much more regressive.
00:49:40
Speaker
i think that conservative doesn't really mean what a lot of us think it
Conservatism and Economic Systems
00:49:43
Speaker
means. And I've heard you talk about that a little bit. was wondering if you might jump in on that. Yeah. You know, I, I have, uh, as someone who is a non-denominational leftist, uh, have spent a lot of time thinking about what the difference between the left and the right are.
00:49:59
Speaker
And, um, and, and more broadly, what's the difference between a conservative and someone who's not a conservative is, and I've, I've heard some really good ones. My friend, Steven Bruce, it's great fantasy writer and, and, and he's a Marxist who's Trotskyist. He says, uh,
00:50:14
Speaker
that um the way you can figure out whether someone is on the left or on the right is you ask them what's more important, human rights or property rights? And if they say property rights are a human right, then they're not on the left.
00:50:26
Speaker
And so that takes all liberals and all conservatives and it puts them in one bucket and it puts leftists in another bucket. And, you know, how that cashes out is if you've got an empty house and I am homeless and you don't want to live in it, but you also don't want homeless people living in it, that we should just take your house away and give it to the homeless person.
00:50:45
Speaker
right That's human rights trumping property rights. Now, on the other hand, if taking away your house would make you homeless, right if if if violating your property rights would would violate your human rights, then we can respect those property rights.
00:50:56
Speaker
But in a kind of stack that you make of what is subordinate to what, if you're a leftist, you put property rights below human rights. ah And um I think that there are other definitions. Corey Robbins great political scientist, wrote a book called The Reactionary Mind, where he says that ah the thing that unites all different flavors of conservatism which are quite varied when you think about it. You know, you have libertarian isolationists who don't want to spend money on military adventures and you have imperialists who wanted to to spend the whole treasury, you know, going abroad and seizing territory and you have men's rights activists and, and, you know, Christian nationalists and you have racists,
00:51:42
Speaker
and But you also have like Hindu nationalists whom white nationalists abhor sort of definitionally who still call themselves conservatives. In fact, there are, i think the number is something like 30 times more evangelicals who identify as Zionists in America than Jews.
00:52:03
Speaker
right And the evangelicals who identify as Zionists, the specific kind of Zionism that they endorse is the reestablishment of the state of Israel to bring along the end times, at which but Christ will return and throw the Jews into the fiery pit for all eternity.
00:52:19
Speaker
right And yet, they're co, you know, Zionists are conservatives and Christian Zionists are conservatives and they're on the same side. And Corey Robinson said, what is it about all these different groups that they have in common?
00:52:32
Speaker
You know, male chauvinists and racists and white nationalists and Hindu nationalists and imperialists and libertarians. And he says what they all have in common is the belief that some people should be in charge and the rest of the people should be in charge of.
00:52:44
Speaker
And that um this is a thing that is fixed. It's an aptitude that comes as a result of who you are. Sometimes it's the color of your skin or your gender. Sometimes it's, you know, if you're libertarian, it's that you're just born with that zhuzh that makes you Ayn Rand character. right And that moreover,
00:53:03
Speaker
and that moreover When you put the people who shouldn't be in charge in charge, they screw up and everything falls apart. If this is sounding like the panic over DEI, that's exactly what it is.
00:53:16
Speaker
Right. Right. And. They all disagree about who should be in charge, but they all agree that someone should be in charge and everyone else should should shut up and take orders. Right. And when you when you look at these definitions of conservative and leftist, they have a lot of explanatory power for why someone who says, like Tim Cook, right, who came out as gay and says, I believe in gay rights.
00:53:42
Speaker
Right. why that is not enough. Why Clarence Thomas, who in fact identified, and I believe still identifies as a Black nationalist, why Clarence Thomas is not an anti-racist?
00:53:56
Speaker
Because he thinks that men should be in charge of women and that certain people, um whether they're Black or white, are born to be in charge of other people. not on the basis of race, right? But on the basis of that kind of libertarian zhuzh, bosses should be in charge of their workers.
00:54:13
Speaker
um And it is often the case that even the people who espouse the most principle when describing their commitment to conservative values are are have a secret but not hard to discern hierarchy of conservative values. So couple of years ago,
00:54:35
Speaker
I heard a supporter of Maxime Barnier, who was a listener to the Canada Land podcast, who had written in to say that they were being unfair to Maxime Barnier be interviewed on the politics show that they do, the Backbench show.
00:54:50
Speaker
And the host... said, tell me about your politics. And he said, well, I'm a libertarian. I believe that personal freedom is the most important thing in the world. And she said, okay, but Maxime Barnier wants to ban abortion.
00:55:03
Speaker
right And he said, well, he wants to lower my taxes. And I think that abortion should be legal. but I shouldn't pay taxes.
00:55:15
Speaker
And when you uncover this hierarchy of freedoms that matter matter to people who claim that they stand for all freedom, then a lot of these contradictions cease to be contradictions. Tim Cook thinks that gay people should be able to get married and shouldn't face sexual discrimination and so on.
00:55:32
Speaker
But he also thinks that bosses should be in charge of their workers. and right And if the boss says no gay people allowed, you know, like Henry Ford had a sign on the door that said no no Jews or dogs, right? If the boss says no gays allowed, that is more important than the freedom of of gay people, right?
00:55:51
Speaker
And... it It is why a liberal and a conservative are actually, if you think of a Cartesian plane with leftists at one side, the liberal is not halfway between the conservative and the leftist.
00:56:04
Speaker
The liberal and the conservative are standing pretty much next to each other. Hmm. If what you're talking about is kind of how you think about power relations and what do you think is fair.
00:56:16
Speaker
And, you know, I think that another way to view this, that's a very leftist right way of of thinking about this is in the world, there are people whose living derives from doing work.
00:56:31
Speaker
And there are people whose living derives from owning things that people need to do work. And of course, lots of people who do, you know, my parents are teachers and they have a pension, so they own something that other people need to do work.
00:56:44
Speaker
But the way that they earn their living, right theyre their their raison d' d'etre, the role they play in society isn't owning things, it's doing things, right? And um if you split the world into people who own things and people who do things,
00:56:59
Speaker
Uh, then, and the, you put the, one of those groups on top of the other, you get a pretty good predictor of what kind of society you're going to have.
00:57:11
Speaker
So if you put people who own things ahead of people who do things, we actually have a name for a society where whenever people who do things conflict with people own things, the people who who own things win. It's called feudalism.
00:57:22
Speaker
right A market economy is to a certain extent the partial triumph of of activity over ownership.
00:57:34
Speaker
And, you know, the enclosure movement, the um turning the peasants off the land, the creation of a working class, the ah transformation of of hereditary lands from lands that op that generate a steady return because peasants are bound to the land and have to pay a fixed rent to lands that are ah turned over to the production of inputs for industrial processes, wool,
00:57:59
Speaker
ah That is the triumph of of profit over rent, right of doing things over owning things. ah But rent never goes away. right Rent still is the the lurking at the foundation of our economy.
00:58:14
Speaker
And every capitalist wants to be a rentier. You know, why, why, you know, operate the coffee shop, which means that if a better coffee shop opens next door, you'll get put out of business.
00:58:27
Speaker
When you could own the building the coffee shop is in, which means that if your tenant, the coffee shop goes out of business, you now have an empty storefront next to a really cool coffee shop that you can rent out for more. Right. Capitalists hate capitalism.
00:58:38
Speaker
Right. And I think that once you understand that, right, once you understand that the goal here is to take the people who were born with the right zhuzh and put them in ta and charge by dint of owning things instead of doing things, then what the tech bosses are doing makes complete sense.
00:58:55
Speaker
And why they're aligned with Trump makes complete sense. It's why Trump is is talking about his good blood all the time. Yeah, right. Yeah. and And there's a level of historical revisionism and the way that people look at you know, the the way things ought to be. They kind of romanticize a certain type of past in which things were going well and they ought to have been done that way all the time.
00:59:19
Speaker
It's the same way we historically revise ah off the top of the head, you know, atrocities. now as this This was just a momentary blip. The Holocaust was a momentary blip in the 20th century.
00:59:32
Speaker
Never mind the Rhineland massacres and the 700 years of ah you know, violence towards Jews in Europe that took place over a long period time. You don't read about unless you buy medieval history book.
00:59:45
Speaker
And then you go ahead. or Or even that that fascism was only a problem once the war started. You know, there there there was prosecution of so-called premature anti-fascists who were by and large communists who opposed Franco.
01:00:01
Speaker
And, you know, you were ideologically suspect if you opposed fascism before America opposed fascism because you opposed fascism for the wrong reason. You opposed fascism because they were ah persecuting ah workers and union organizers and communists and not people on the basis of their racial identity. It was only OK to hate fascism once they prosecuted people on the basis their racial identity.
01:00:23
Speaker
Yeah.
Hope and Human Agency
01:00:24
Speaker
I know we're getting close to the end of our time. i did have one more question to ask you, and there's a very short setup for it. um i I've really struggled. I mentioned i'm ah I'm a big reader. I've really struggled finding speculative fiction that I can enjoy because so much of it these days is set in a bleak dystopian future.
01:00:43
Speaker
And we're sort of living through this bleak dystopian present where I remember growing up when Nazis were the bad guys in Indiana Jones movies, seeing actual... Nazism on display in society where I'm raising two kids.
01:00:58
Speaker
I'm filled with genuine despair. And I'm not even Jewish. I'm just watching all this horror show happening and thinking, what on earth? how How are we going to get out of this?
01:01:09
Speaker
And then I read your book, The Lost Cause, and I read some of your other writings about ah well, what people have talked about cyberpunk or dystopian fiction, and some people have called a couple of your books hope punk, I think, or solar punk. Yeah, walk away is like that.
01:01:25
Speaker
Yeah, there's this idealism that doesn't feel it doesn't feel out to lunch, it feels real. And so the question that might be a little unfair, but I'm asking you today, and I promise I didn't bring you on this show just to make me feel better about the future.
01:01:40
Speaker
ah The question is, what keeps giving you hope? What keeps making you try and coming to this work again and again and again and keep pushing for more change?
01:01:53
Speaker
So that the the key word here is hope as opposed to optimism. um So I'm not a big fan of optimism or pessimism because I think they're both quite fatalistic.
01:02:05
Speaker
right that if you If optimism is the idea that things are gonna get better no matter what we do and pessimism is the idea that things are gonna get worse no matter what we do, that the key phrase in both of those is no matter what we do.
01:02:16
Speaker
right Both of them are a denial of the role of human agency in shaping history. And let me see how much time do we have? My friend Ada Palmer, is a great science fiction writer, but she's a tenured historian of Renaissance history at the University of Chicago.
01:02:33
Speaker
And she's famous because every year she has her students reenact the election of the Medici's Pope in a four week long live action role playing game where everyone is given the identity of a real Cardinal or other important historic personage. And they spend four weeks wheeling and dealing, trading, betraying.
01:02:50
Speaker
And then they there's this fake Gothic cathedral on campus and they go in there and they ah deliberate and then a white puff of smoke comes out and there's a new pope. And every year, two of the of the final four are always the same because they come from the most powerful families in Florence.
01:03:08
Speaker
And two of them have never been the same. And the way that Ada teaches this, the thing that she's trying to impart to her students is that history is contingent, that what we do matters.
01:03:19
Speaker
But yeah, the great forces of history are bearing down on that moment to make sure that these two rich, powerful failed sons are going to have a crack at being the Pope. right But what people do in that moment completely alters the outcome.
01:03:33
Speaker
We are never prisoners of history. History is a steering wheel. It's not on rails. right So hope, for me, is the idea that although you can't see your way across this unknowably complex and adversarial terrain, that we have to traverse to get to kind of higher point of human thriving and safety and a habitable planet and so on.
01:03:58
Speaker
That if you ascend the gradient, even just one step towards that future you want to live in, that you will have revealed to you terrain that was occluded given your previous vantage point.
01:04:14
Speaker
And you will see new paths up the hill, up that gradient. And that no one except a novelist knows how to get from A to Z. Right?
01:04:27
Speaker
Real people in the real world take a couple of steps up, take a step down, three steps sideways, another step up. No, that's a dead end. They go back down again. The only way you get a smooth wriing rising curve of tension and accomplishment and a nice hero's journey is if you've got a writer writing the scene.
01:04:45
Speaker
If you're a person in the world, all you can do is have the discipline of hope That is to say that at all times, you are surveying your terrain to find the steepest gradient up towards the world that you want to live in, even if it's a half step.
01:05:01
Speaker
And you are taking that step and then ah resurveying the terrain, taking stock again to see if there's a ah new step you can take that will take you further up the hill. And that's all hope ever is I love that explanation. i think that's a great place to end our conversation today. Corey, it's been so wonderful talking to you.
01:05:22
Speaker
I encourage everybody to look up Corey's bibliography and see what they would like to try reading. I really enjoyed The Lost Cause. I enjoyed Eastern Standard Tribe. but We'll put a book list out with this podcast.
01:05:36
Speaker
I'm going to stop the recording now, Corey. Thank you again for your talk. Thank you very much.
Conclusion and Call to Action
01:05:43
Speaker
Thank you for listening to The Voice of Canadian Humanism. We would like to especially thank our members and donors who make our work possible. If you feel that this is the type of programming that belongs in the public conversation, please visit us at humanistcanada.ca and become a member and or donate.
01:06:03
Speaker
You can also like and subscribe to us on social media at Humanist Canada. We'll see you next time.