#rC3 - Cory Doctorow – Fireside Chat

rC3 preroll music

Cory Doctorow: Oh, I just got...
Jinxx5: Please, I just wanted to say Hi

Chris...no...Bye Chris and Hi Cory
laughs We just had a little chat before

and, as I know, you will be reading
from your new book in a minute, as I just

stop talking and afterwards, there will be
lots of time for all your questions. And

we're really curious already.
C D: Great, Yeah. And I do have these

questions from the talk earlier and I'm
going to try and get to those too. I'm

going to do a shorter reading, so we can do
more interactive stuff. You can watch

videos of me on YouTube if you want to.
It's more fun to interact. So the passage

I'm going to read comes from Attack
Surface. Attack Surface is a standalone

Little Brother novel. And it's intended
for adults. And it stars Masha who's a

young woman, who is at the beginning and
the end of the other two books working as

a surveillance contractor. And by this
third book, she's like a full-on cyber

mercenary working for a company a lot
like, say, the NSO Group or Hacking Team.

Any other kind of hack for hire
companies helping post-Soviet dictators

crush rebellions. And the way that she
goes to sleep at night and still manages

to, like, square up her conscience is by
helping the people, that she spies on. So

during the day, she installs surveillance
appliances in the national data centers.

And at night, she meets with the
protesters who are being spied on using

this technology and tells them what
countermeasures work for it. And so, this

is very early in the novel. And Masha and
Kriztina - who's one of these local

protesters - are walking through the
square and the fictional, post-Soviet

Republic of Slovstakia during the
beginnings of a protest that is shaping up

to be a very serious one.

starts reading from book
The square buzzed with good energy. There was a line

of grannies who brought out pots and
wooden spoons and were whanging away at

them, chanting something in Boris that
made everyone understand. Kriztina tried

to translate it, but it was all tangled up
with some Baba-Yaga story that every

Slovstakian learned with their mother's
borscht recipes. We stopped at a barrel

fire and distributed the last couple of
kebabs to the people there. A girl

I'd seen around, emerged from the crowd
and stole Kriztina away to hold a muttered

conference that I followed by watching the
body language out of the corner of my eye.

I decided that some of Kriztina's contacts
had someone on the inside of the neo-Nazi

camp. And judging from her reaction, the
news was very bad. What? I asked. She

shook her head. What? 10 p.m., she said,
they charge. Supposedly some of the cops

will go over to their side. There's been
money changing hands. That was one of the

problems with putting your cops on half
pay. Someone might pay the other half. The

Slovstakian police had developed a keen
instinct for staying one jump ahead of

purges and turnovers. The ones that didn't
develop that instinct ended up in their

own cells or dead at their own colleagues'
hands. How many? Borises are world class

shruggers, even adorable Pixie's like
Kriztina. If the English have 200

words for passive aggressive and the Inuit
have 200 words for snow, then

Borises can convey 200 gradations
of emotions with their shoulders. And I

read this one as: Some, enough, too many.
We are fucked. No murders, Kriztina. If

it's that bad we can come back another
night. If it's that bad, there might not

be another night. Oh that fatalism. Fine,
I said, then we do something about it.

Like what? Like you got me a place to sit
and keep everyone else away from me for an

hour. The crash barricades around the
square had been long colonized by tarps

and turned into shelters where protesters
could get away from the lines when they

needed a break. Kriztina returned after a
few minutes to lead me to an empty corner

of the warren. It smelled of B.O. and
cabbage farts, but it was in the lee of

the wind and private enough. Doubling my
long coats tails under my butt for

insulation, I sat down cross-legged and
tethered my laptop. A few minutes later, I

was staring at Commander Litvinchuk's
email spool. I had a remote desktop on his

computer and could have used his own
webmail interface, but it was faster to

just slither into the mail server itself.
Thankfully, one of his first edicts after

taking over the ministry had been to
migrate everyone off Gmail - which was

secured by 24/7 ninja hackers who'd eat me
for breakfast - and on to a hosted mail

server in the same datacenter that I had
spent 16 hours in, which was secured by

wishful thinking, bubble gum, and spit.
That meant that if the US State Department

wanted to pwn the Slovstakian government,
it would have to engage in a trivial hack

against that machine, rather than facing
Google's notoriously vicious lawyers. The

guiding light of Boris politics was: Trust
no one. Which meant, they had to do it all

for themselves. Litvinchuk's cell-site
simulators all fed into a big analytics

system, that maps social graphs and
compiled dossiers. He demanded, that the

chiefs of police and military gather the
identifiers of all their personnels, so they

could be white-listed in the system. It
wouldn't do to have every riot cop placed

under suspicion, because they were present
at every riot. The file was in a saved

email. I tabbed over to a different
interface, tunneled into the Xoth

appliance. It quickly digested the file
and spat out all the SMS messages sent to

or from any cops since I switched it on. I
called Kriztina over. She hunkered down

next to me, passed me a thermos of coffee
she'd acquired somewhere. It was terrible

and it reminded me of Marcus. Marcus and
his precious coffee. He wouldn't last 10

minutes in a real radical uprising,
because he wouldn't be able to find

artisanal coffee roasters in the melee.
Kriztina, help me search these texts for -

... - help me search these for texts about
letting the Nazis get past the lines. She

looked at my screen, the long scrolling
list of texts from cops' phones. What is

that? It's what it looks like. Every
message sent to or from a cop's phone in

the last ten hours or so. I can't read it,
though, which is why I need your help. She

boggled, all cheekbones and tilted eyes
and sensuous lips. Then she started

mousing the scroll up and down to read
through them. Holy shit, she said in

Slovstakian, which was one of the few
phrases I knew. Then, to her credit, she

seemed to get past her surprise and dug
into the messages themselves. How do I

search? Here. I opened the search dialog.
Let me know if you need help with

wildcards. Kriztina wasn't a hacker, but I
taught her a little regular expression-foo,

to help her with an earlier project. Regex
are one of the secret weapons of

hackerdom. Compact search strings that
pass through huge files for incredibly

specific patterns. If you didn't fuck them
up, which most people did. She tried a few

tentative searches. Am I looking for
names, passwords? Something that would

freak out the interior ministry. We're
going to forward a bunch of these. She

stopped and stared at me, all eyelashes.
It's a joke? It won't look like it came

from us. It'll look like it came from a
source inside the ministry. She stared

some more of the hamsters running around
on their wheels, behind her eyes. Masha,

how do you do this? We had a deal. I'd
help you and you wouldn't ask me

questions. I'd struck that deal with her
after our first night on the barricades

together, when I showed her how to flash
her phone with Paranoid Android. And we

watched the stingrays bounce off of it as
she moved around the square. She knew I

did something for an American security
contractor and had googled my connection

with "M1k3y", whom she worshiped
naturally. I'd read the messages she'd

sent to her cell's chat channel sticking
up for me as a trusty sidekick..

trustworthy sidekick to their Americanski-
Hero. A couple of the others had wisely

and almost correctly assumed, that I was a
police informant. It looked like maybe she

was regretting not listening to them. I
waited. Talking first would surrender the

initiative, make me look weak. If we can't
trust you, we're already dead, she said,

finally. That's true. Luckily, you can
trust me. Search. We worked through some

queries together and I showed her how to
use wildcards to expand her searches

without having them spill over the whole
mountain of short messages. It would have

gone faster if I could have read the
Cyrillic characters, but I had to rely on

Kriztina for that. When we had a good
representative sample - a round 100,

enough to be convincing, not so many that
Litvinchuk wouldn't be able to digest them

- I composed an email to him in English.
This wasn't as weird as it might seem. He

had recruited senior staff from all over
Europe and a couple of South African

mercs, and they all use a kind of pidgin
English among themselves with generous

pastings from Google Translate, because
OPSEC, right? Fractured English was a lot

easier to fake than native speech. Even
so, I wasn't going to leave this to

chance. I grabbed a couple 1000 emails
from mid-level bureaucrat I was planning

on impersonating and threw them in a cloud
machine where I kept a fork of Anonymouth,

a plagiarism detector that used stylometry
to profile the grammar, syntax, and

vocabulary from a training set, then
evaluated new text to see if they seemed

by the same author. I trained my
Anonymouth on several thousand individual

profiles from journalists and bloggers to
every one of my bosses, which was

sometimes handy in figuring out when
someone was using a ghostwriter or

delegated to a subordinate. Mainly,
though, I used it for my own

impersonations. I'm sure that other people
have thought about using stylometry to

fine tune impersonations, but no one's
talking about it that I can find. It

didn't take much work for me to tweak
Anonymouth to give me a ranked order list

of suggestions to make my forgery less
detectable to Anonymouth. Shorten this

sentence, find a synonym for that word,
add a couple of commas. After a few passes

through, my forgeries could fool humans
and robots every time. I had a guy in mind

for my whistleblower: one of the South
Africans, Nicholas Van Dijk. I'd seen him

in action in a bunch of flame wars with
his Slovstakian counterparts. Friction

that would make him a believable rat. I
played it up. Giving Nicholas some thinly

veiled grievances about how much dough his
enemies were raking in for their treachery

and fishing for a little finder's fee for
his being such a straight arrow.

Verisimilitude. Litvinchuk would go
predictably apeshit when he learned that

his corps was riddled with traitors. But
even he'd noticed something was off of a

dickhead like Van Dijk, who'd knock out
his teammates without trying to get

something for himself in the deal. A
couple of passes through Anonymouth, and I

had a candidate text along with the URL
for a pastebin that I put the SMSes into.

No one at the Interior Ministry used PGP
for email, because no normal human being

does. And so it was simplicity itself to
manufacture an email and in Litvinchuk's

inbox that was indistinguishable from the
real thing. I even forged the headers for

the same reason that a dollhouse builder
paints tiny titles on the spines of the

books in the living room. Even though no
one will ever see them, there's a

professional pride in getting the details
right. Also, I had a script that did it for me.

stops reading from book
Well, there we go.

J: Woohoo, I think you should...we all
think the big applause right now.

C D: I just realized, that I found out
about Anonymouth at 25C3.

J: Really?
C D: I completely, like when I chose the

reading, I wasn't thinking about that. And
as I was reading, I was like, didn't I

learn about this at a CCC? And I did.
J: And now you're writing about it.

C D: Yeah. Yeah. That's why I write off my
trips to hacker cons.

J: Huh. Do you actually use all those
things for your research?

C D: Uh, many of them. I can't say, that I
use Anonymouth, because I don't have to

forge many things, nor do I have to
puncture forgeries. But I mean, the thing

that immediately struck me during the
Anonymouth presentation was, if you

were like a fanfic writer, who wanted to
find all the ways that your Harry Potter

story was not quite like a J.K. Rowling
Harry Potter story, you could then tweak

your story to Rowling-ify it using
Anonymouth. Right. Using this

plagiarism detectors, that are, you see,
an adversarial stylometry tool. Of course,

today, if you just wanted to make it seem
like J.K. Rowling, you'd throw in some

transphobic stuff. So, that would that
would be the clincher.

J: Probably, yes.
C D: Yeah.

J: But there's a pretty interesting
discussion of that. Because lots of

authors and actually publishers are so
freaking out about text AIs, that can

generate texts, that are pretty good
already. Not like human yet, but pretty

good.
C D: Aha.

J: Umm...
C D:Yeah.

J: I think there's something behind that
already.

C D: I used a GPT3 composition tool, that
some people I know built and played around

with it. And it is really far from doing
the kind of work I do. I don't know. I

won't say that it's really far from
automating some tasks. Obviously it

automates some tasks. But I think, that the
state of GPT3 is such that, if you are

worried about losing your job to GPT3, you
probably have a really boring, terrible

job. Because it's not producing anything
that...I mean, apart from kind of text art.

It's fun text art. I mean, I think maybe
you could, like, replace Internet trolls

with it, you know. Every now and again,
I'll write about, like, you know,

criticism of Modi and these huge,
like, Hindu nationalist troll armies will

come after me and that the messages are so
self similar that they're really easy to

identify and block. You don't even like a
second word. It's just like, you know,

block report and away you go. But, if they
had, like, a good GPT3 package, they could

probably make a whole series of harassing
messages that would be harder to detect.

But again, like, I'm not worried about
those people losing their jobs. I am

worried about, you know, the possibility
of like vast disinformation campaigns, that

are harder to block or detect, but not
about the, you know, technology driven

automation unemployment as a result of all
of the Internet trolls being replaced.

laughs
J: Yeah, I'm totally with you at that

point, because there will always be the
love for human generated text, for the art

of or behind it.
And there are somehow, yeah...

C D: A lot of the most remarkable
GPT3 blocks, that have appeared, right,

where people of like use GPT3 to make
something, turn out to be straight up

copy-pastes of actual texts written by
humans, because GPT3 sometimes will just

regurgitate, like, half paragraphs, whole
paragraphs that are part of its training

data. And so, again, like that is a very
impressive task, right, finding the, like,

the best paragraph from a bunch of pre-
written paragraphs by humans. That is

impressive and it amounts to something,
but it's not the same as composing it.

J: Yeah, that's totally right. And it was
pretty depressing I think, that when we put

some legal texts into a Markov chain
and made a game, ok, which is the real

legal text and which is the Markov chain,
and we made 3 or 4 rounds and

people always failed.
C D: Yeah, I'm not surprised. I mean, it's

an open secret that like it was several
months after Twitter's launch that someone

noticed that Twitter's terms of service
represent repeatedly mentioned Flickr,

because they copied and pasted Flickr's
terms of service to make them Twitter's

terms of service. And, like, no one, not
even Twitter's lawyers had read the terms

of service to notice that, it didn't
mention Twitter. So, you know, I'm not

surprised. Like literally nobody reads
those, right? Those are like self-

reproducing text viruses.
J: Yeah, actually they are. Shall we have

a look into the questions we still have?
C D: Yeah

J: So, we do have 2 parts I think!?
C:D: Right, I only have one of them.

J: I think you have the one from the...
your previous talk.

C D: So, I can... One of my answer, one or two of
these and then you can think about the

rest of these. Right. So. What's the one
that I liked here, oh, was ... We can't

use Antimonopoly. It's not like you can
dissolve Facebook overnight,

realistically, what's the roadmap to a
more sustainable environment? So I think

that misunderstands the benefits of a
protracted antitrust action. That, you

know, if we were to say to Facebook,
all right, we're going to break out

WhatsApp and Insta. Which I think we could
do even without invoking antimonopoly law.

I think you could say that, especially in
the EU, their merger was was contingent on

them not merging the backends of Facebook,
Instagram and WhatsApp. And then they

later merged the backends of Facebook,
Instagram and WhatsApp. And I think if you

are given regulatory forbearance, if
you're given an exemption to a regulation

on promise of certain conduct, then if you
engage in that conduct, then we should

just revoke it. Right? We should just
revoke the forbearance. I

think that's a pretty straightforward
lift. But even if it were to take a long

time, even if we spent a decade trying to
make Google spin out its ad tech stack,

which I think we should do. That 10 years
would really like dramatically alter the

way that investors and corporate
executives thought about anti-competitive

conduct. Right? It would get all
of the the people who are currently, when

they balance out, you know, the upside of
a monopoly and the downside of monopoly,

it would weight the downside much more
heavily. And you would get the kind of

forbearance you got, say from IBM, when
they didn't go after Tom Jennings,

when he was making the Phoenix ROM. And
you would then see things like investment.

So, you know, the thing, that market
believers say about markets is, that they

respond very quickly and regulators
respond slowly. And that's true. The

markets are very quick. You can
see that in the growth of technologies

over the crisis. Right? Like think of how
quickly markets turned Zoom into the thing

that we all use. Right. It was, you know,
if you tried to regulate a video

conferencing system, though, by the time
the consultations were done and so on, it

would have been years later. And markets
are actually pretty good at fighting

monopolies, if they're well regulated.
Right. You know, the reason, that venture

capitalists don't fund Facebook
competitors is not because they, you know,

love Facebook and they wouldn't
want to see Facebook in trouble. It's

because, they think that, if they tried to
fight Facebook, Facebook would destroy

them. And so, if we were to put Facebook on
notice that everything it did from now on

was going to be part of this ongoing
antitrust action, which I think just

happened right just before Christmas with
the new slate of anti-trust suits against

them. Then, if you can make that, if you
can make an investor understand that you

could get capital to start a competitor to
Facebook. Now, in terms of what we can do

that fits between antitrust action and
nothing, what we can do to get like jam

today instead of jam tomorrow, there's two
courses involving interoperability. So one

of them is is already in the Digital
Services Act. It was in the Access Act

that was proposed in the US last year. And
the DSA and the Access Act

both have these mandatory interoperability
components where they say, you know,

Facebook must produce an interface that
third parties can log into. And they have

different ways of trying to make sure that
that third party isn't Cambridge

Analytica. And it's going to be, it's
hard, but it will open some

regulatory space in concert with these
antitrust enforcement actions. But even

more exciting would be an interoperator's
defense, a law or a regulation that said,

if you devise a way to interface a new
product with an existing product for a

legitimate purpose, including increased
consumer freedom, security auditing,

accessibility for people with disabilities
and you know independent repair and so on,

that notwithstanding any law, software
patents, copyrights, terms of service,

trade secrecy, non-compete, you have an
absolute defense. And obviously passing

that law would be really hard, but it
wouldn't have to come legislatively, like

you could imagine bits and pieces of it
emerging. Like maybe we say to Facebook

that the remedy for it's unlawful and
deceptive merger with Instagram and

WhatsApp is that they have to sign a
consent decree saying they won't punish

people who build interoperable services on
this basis. And so they have to act as

though that were the law, even if it
wasn't the law. Or we might see things

like a procurement guideline where you
know we might have educational

authorities who say to Google, yeah, we're
going to buy Google classroom site

licenses for all of our locked down kids,
but as a condition of that, you have to

promise that you will not seek any kind of
vengeance against people who do the

following things. Or we might say to
Apple, as a procurement matter, if we're

going to buy fifty thousand iPads for our
school district, you have to promise not

to sue people who produce side loading
tools, because we have apps that our

district depends on, and we can't, you
know, we can't be dependent on you guys

deciding that you don't want to lock that
app out. And so you get this kind of like

multilayered stack where you have
antitrust enforcement that is like 'pour

encourager les autres'. You know,
sometimes you have to execute an admiral

to encourage the rest of them. And that
just ripples out through the whole sector.

And then you have interoperability
mandates, through regulation that are slow

moving, but not as slow moving as
lawsuits. You have new market

opportunities that are much faster moving
that will depend on both the lawsuits and

the regulation. And then you have
unilateral actions that governments can

take with very little consultation
without having to get things

through parliament where they can just
bind over technology companies to behave

in certain ways so that, you know, they
must do it. Like imagine if the remedy for

Dieselgate was that the German state said
to Volkswagen and other giant German

automakers, you are no longer allowed to
block any independent auditing service,

repair or manufacture of parts for any of
your vehicles. It's a natural remedy,

right? Like it directly addresses the bad
conduct, but it also creates right to

repair, interoperability, independent
security auditing, all of that stuff out

of the gate. And like you could get it
just as part of a consent decree. You

could get it just with the German
regulator talking to the lawyers for Audi

and saying, if you don't want your CEO to
go to jail, you have to sign this paper.

Right? And then then you get actual, like
fast moving action. And so I think it's

that kind of holistic thinking about how
technology, markets, law and norms all

work together that gets us to a solution.
And then as against this backdrop,

remember, that there are people who are
worried about monopolies in beer who are

going to be fighting your corner. And
there's people are going to be upset that

all glasses are made by one company,
Luxottica in Italy, who've raised prices a

thousand percent over the last decade, who
are also going to be fighting your corner

on this. And so, you know, as opposed to
being a war on a thousand fronts, this is

going to be a battle with a thousand
allies. And that's going to make that

antitrust stuff move a lot faster than it
did with Microsoft, because this won't be

just a one off assault on Microsoft, or on
Google, or on Facebook. This is going to be

like a global movement to it to attack
monopolism itself.

J: As I just said, markets, ecosystems.
There was another pretty interesting

question about, by the way,
interoperability and free and open source

ecosystems and things like probably the
fattyverse or so, that just rise and come

up as a yeah as a real alternative to the
solutions we've had over the last 10 or 15

years? What do you see in those?
C D: So I think the thing that's missing,

I mean, I like them. I use them. I have a
Mastodon account. I'm actually trying to

stand up a Mastodon server right now. And
but the problem with Diaspora, Mastodon

and other, like federated answers to
Facebook is not centralization

versus decentralization or features versus
non-features. It's interoperability.

Specifically, it's both the lack of a
standardized interoperable means of

connecting to these services, which, to
its credit, Twitter is actually like

trying to do something about Twitter's
Project Blue Sky. I think they have

like, they've sat down and they've gone
like, well, having absolute control of our

users is worth this much. Not being
responsible for moderating content is

worth this much. The only way we get out
from not moderating content is by not

owning the content, not having the
capacity to moderate the content

and just being like a federator or a
central node and a federator. And so

they're kind of moving towards it. And
they want to provide like a managed

interface. Right. They want to have, like,
you know, a standardized API that everyone

accesses. The problem with those
standardized APIs is that Twitter used to

have them and then they took them away. So
you know the thing that produces an

equilibrium where those standardized APIs
are both good and durable is competitive

compatibility. If you know, that the day
you withdraw the standardized API, hackers

all over the world are going to write bots
that just replace the API with scrapers,

that you're going to have to fight like
this, it's like marching on

Stalingrad, right? Like you're just going
to have, like, this kind of endless

grinding trench warfare with with hackers
who will be legally immunized from your

from any legal tool you have to shut them
down. And all you'll be able to do is just

tweak intrusion detection system rules and
try in a system with hundreds of millions

of users to distinguish users who are just
weird from bots. Right. Because like, when

you have, like think about Facebook, right.
Facebook's got 2.6 billion users

and has 2.6 million, one in a
million use cases or 2.6

thousand one in a million use cases every
single day. Right. So distinguishing the

dolphins from the tuna in your tuna net is
going to be really hard when you're

operating at that scale. And so,
you know, when you're like in the

meeting with the head of, the CTO and the
CSO and the chief marketing officer and

the CFO and the shareholders and
the board, and they're like "We need more

revenue. We're going to shut down the API,
we're going to nerf the API". The

technologists in the room can say this is
what the bill for that is going to look

like and it's going to exceed the excess
capital we get from blocking the API. And

so, you know, this idea that, like, we can
just like all of us, decide that next

Wednesday we're going to shut down our
Twitter accounts and reopen them on

Mastodon. It's crazy. It's not how
technology has ever worked, right? The way

that we got Keynote as like a standard for
a lot of people's PowerPoint presentations

or conference presentations was not by
everyone saying, like: On Thursday, the

21st we stop using PowerPoint, we
start using Keynote. It was by iWorks

Suite being able to read and write
PowerPoint files. And by having this kind

of this, this kind of protracted period
where it was not binary. Right? Like

you can have one foot in one camp, one
foot in the other, you know, I analogize it

sometimes to my family's migration
history, where my grandmother was a Soviet

refugee. She came to Canada and she lost
touch with her family for 15 years. Right?

She couldn't phone them. She couldn't
write to them, like they exchanged

messages. Sometimes if someone got a visa
to go to Leningrad, they she would tell

them what to tell her mother if they could
find her mother. And, you know,

obviously, like leaving the Soviet Union
was really hard for my family. It was a

really hard choice, even though Canada was
a better place to be for them because of

the very high costs that came with it. And
they have family members. I have family

members in St. Petersburg who never came,
because the cost was too high. So five

years ago, I left London and moved to Los
Angeles. And here I am in my office in Los

Angeles. Not only did all of my books come
with me, but let me see if I can get it in

the frame over there is my theremin. OK,
that's the theremin that I bought that

runs on British voltage that has a little
mains adapter. We just got off a zoom call

with my relatives in London and we talk to
my family in Canada every week. So for us,

the switching costs were really low
because if we changed our mind, we could

go back. And in fact, this is the third
time I've moved to Los Angeles so I could

I could try Los Angeles, see how it
worked, go back to London, come back. It

was expensive, right? But it wasn't
leaving the Soviet Union in the forties

expensive. And so, you know, by all means,
build the place that people who want to

escape Mark Zuckerberg's Iron Curtain will
find as a happy home. But give them the

ability to have one foot in one, one foot
in the other. And, you know, the other

piece of this is every time Zuckerberg
says, oh, I'm blocking Interop tools to

keep my users safe. Remember that in the
DDR they said the Berlin Wall isn't to

keep East Germans in, it's to keep West
Germans out of the workers paradise. And

it's the same fucking excuse.
J: It always is. I just got in a message

here and probably an interesting question,
by the way, or actually two, linking

together. Coming back to the monopolies,
you did not say much about Amazon on your

talk before. And we'll have another
question for the fireside chat here with

your book. That the person asked why you
actually went away from publishing under

the CC licenses and went to bigger
publishing houses. Would you like to

explain probably why, also the Amazon part
then...

C D: I didn't work Amazon in just because
of time pressure, but all of this stuff

applies to Amazon. I mean, I think the
most interesting thing about Amazon is in

terms of its worker uprising, where
there's been an explicit, so remember that

all tech companies are split into some of
the highest paid workers on Earth and some

of the lowest paid workers on Earth.
Right. And so in Amazon's case, that's

like the warehouse workers who have some
of the worst working conditions and so on.

And explicitly, the tech worker uprising
in Amazon was in solidarity with the

warehouse workers. And that's really
interesting, right, because it's crossing

these class boundaries and it's crossing
these divisions that the firms themselves

deliberately created to prevent
solidarity. You know, in the same way that

in the early days of the trade union
movement in the US, if the Italian auto

workers were on strike, they'd bring in
German auto workers to break the strike

and they would try to make it about
Germans and Italians, not workers. In the

same way, you have this kind of, you divide
up the workplace into contractors and non-

contractors, green badges and blue badges.
And it it works to drive a fracture line

between different people who actually have
shared interests. In terms of publishing.

Well, it's about monopolies. There's five
publishers left and in fact, there's about

to be four because Bertelsmann is buying
Simon and Schuster, assuming the DOJ lets

them do it, which, you know, this is kind
of like the first litmus test of whether

Biden's DOJ has got like any real serious
commitment to blocking monopolistic

mergers, because the idea that we should
go from five companies to four in

publishing is outrageous. There's just no
reason for it. So the, you know, with five

publishers, there's exactly one that lets
me go DRM free, and that's Tor. And Tor

was also the only one that would let me go
Creative Commons. And they change their

mind. And so the choice was try and self
publish, which frankly, like I've done it,

it's hard work. I would get one tenth as
many books written and I would go to my

deathbed with dozens of unwritten books
but a better Creative Commons track record

or suck it up and I sucked it up. I don't
like it and they know I don't like it. I

like Tor. They're the smallest, most,
they're owned by McMillan, which is owned

by von Holtzbrink and you know they're the
smallest, they're most ethical. They're the

ones that I like the best. But they didn't
like the Creative Commons licenses in the

end. And so that was where I ended up. It
sucks now you know, I can still cc license

the other stuff that I do. And if
anything, I've become more permissive in

that. And I left Boing Boing almost a year
ago, a year minus a week and a half ago.

And when I left, I started this new thing
called Pluralistic. And Boing Boing was

licensed under a very restrictive cc
license. This is cc-by. It's as close as

you get to a public domain without going
cc-zero, it just requires attribution. And

so pluralistic is a pretty significant
piece of writing. I am taking a break from

it this week, but I write three or four
substantial articles every day that are

cc-zero or cc-by and that I think like,
you know, if you're interested in my work,

like there's a lot of it out there under
extremely generous, far more generous than

my novels' cc licenses. I wish I could do
the cc licenses to. I mean, if nothing

else, I mean, this is a little inside
baseball, but given that it's a German

audience and it's relevant to Germany. So
the Germans that I meet who've read Little

Brother and my other books inevitably
found them through Creative Commons

licenses. In part, I think because English
works in Germany are still pretty

expensive relative to the German
translations. And Germans have a high

enough literacy in English that they like
to read original English texts. And so

before there were e-book markets that
served Germany with English language text,

the only way to get an English language
ebook was to pirate it or get a

cc one, and mine was the only cc one. So
what's interesting about that is now,

thanks to Tor books, I'm able to run my
own eBook store if you go to craphound.com

slash shop, I have an eBook store, it's DRM
Free, EULA free books, and the way the

publishing contracts work is my British
publisher has rights in British

territories except Canada, like former
British Empire territories, except

Canada. India, Australia, Canada, New
Zealand, the UK and so on. And my American

publisher has rights in the US and Canada.
And then nobody has the exclusive right to

non English speaking territories, like
Germany. And about 10 to 15 percent of my

ebook sales come from Germany. And I get
all the money from those, right. When I

sell an ebook in the UK, I give 70 percent
of the money to my publisher and then they

give me twenty five percent back as my
royalty. When I sell a book in the US, I

give seventy percent to my US publisher
and they give me back twenty five percent

as my royalty. When I sell a book in
Germany, I keep all of it. I get twice as

much money. And so 10 to 15 percent of my
readership are in Germany and they account

for 30 percent of my gross receipts from
the website. And so that is like super

cool. And you know I understand that my
publisher is not neither here nor there on

that one because they don't get a dime
from it. But for me, my German audience is

super important. My German, English
speaking audience, is super important.

J: And, would have self-publishing ever
be a way for you in the largest scale,

so like Joanna Penn is doing in the UK?
C D: It's just a lot of work. I mean, it

is like like I work at 16 to 18 hour day,
most days. Like I did the - so writing

Pluralistic, doing EFF and working on
novels during the crisis, the first day I

took off between March 19th, after March
19th was December the 17th. So I didn't

have a weekend off, I didn't have a day
off. So and I wrote a book. I wrote a book

during the crisis and I self published an
audio book and I had four books come out.

And - you know, I if - if I were doing
more, if I were doing the stuff that my

publisher does, I wouldn't have written
that book. I would have written maybe half

that book. And so it's just a matter
of how much time I have. And, you know, I

have done an experiment. I did a self
publish short story collection and made a

bunch of money, like relative to how short
story - short story collections

don't make a lot of money usually. So it
made about three times as much, four times

as much. But the amount of the actual
gross dollars that it made was

significantly less than I would get for
going through a publisher. And you know

that the amount of extra work was a
novel's worth of work. And so I just, you

know, back to, like what I want to be
worried about on my deathbed. And I would

much rather have published all of these
books without EULAs, without DRM and, you

know, argued for a more robust set of fair
dealing and fair use rules that would

allow people to use them widely than
having written half as many books, but

gotten them all out under CC to a much
smaller audience.

J: Yeah, it's a [balances with
hands], yeah.

C D: It's not, I mean, I'm not thrilled
about it. It's like and maybe it's the

wrong call - I don't know. But it's like,
you know. It's the call I made for now.

You know, if we see massive de-
monopolization, maybe it'll get easier.

J: Hmm. I see in the chat. We do have a
question. So, do we want to try to have

someone free the microphone and ask the
question here in the room?

Guest-sir#3: I think I'm now unmuted.
J: Yes, you're.

Guest: Hi Cory, just a quick question. So
as the readers, is there anything we can

do about this? It seems like the business
of publishing is pretty in, let's say, a

bit of a difficult situation. Is there
anything we can do?

C D: Yeah, I mean, I think this is the
problem with our consumerism more broadly

is that, you know, consumerism, the value
of consumer rights movements - and there

are some very, you know EFF, have has its
origins in consumer rights, groups like

BEUC and EDRI are fundamentally
consumer rights groups - the value

of them is they work fast, right? Like
consumer power is fast power, but

its limited power and citizen power is
slow. But consumers can't, by definition, can't

shop their way out of a monopoly. Making
better consumer choices, making better

individual choices will not solve
monopolism because the whole point of

monopolism is that the meaningful choices
have been taken off the table. That's

- that's the real problem of monopolism is
the way that it distorts our public

policy. And so for that, you need to be
involved in democracy. And so to be

involved in democracy is to not think of
yourself primarily as an actor whose voice

is felt through purchase decisions, but
rather through someone who's part of a

movement. And, you know, the good news is
that there's a wide political spectrum of

mainstream political movements that are
concerned with monopoly right now. And

it's not the exclusive purview of the
left. I mean, the right for a long time,

we're universally cheerleaders for
monopoly. But increasingly, you

know,they're like: Well, I was fine when
Facebook was de platforming anti-pipeline

activists and trans-rights activists. But
now that Alex Jones is gone, I'm you know,

where will AfD meet if not on Facebook?
And so now suddenly they're all worried

about monopoly. And, you know, the risk is
that they will structure their anti-

monopoly remedies in ways that actually
just make the monopoly stronger. The big

one of those is arguing for more intense,
more fine grained accountability for

moderation decisions. And the thing about
that is, the reason that Facebook makes bad

moderation decisions is not merely because
Mark Zuckerberg is not well suited to

being in charge of the lives of 2.6
billion people. It's because, like no

one on Earth should have that job. And, if
we say, all right, you've got to moderate

all the bad stuff or moderate better or
not have more false positives or

whatever, stop harassment or anything
else, all we do is we create this like

floor underneath which no one can afford
to participate as an alternative to

Facebook. And that just makes Facebook the
endless monopoly. And I fear that both the

right and the left - for their own reasons
- are in their anti-monopoly energy going

down the wrong path here. And so this is
where we need people in movements who are

technologists and understand the
technology and can say - in the same way

that we've said now for decades,
whenever someone says: Oh, we need to get

rid of cryptography and replace it with
cryptography-with-lawful-access-back-doors

and that will only let the good guys in
and won't let the bad guys in - and we say

to them, look, you know, I am here as your
constituent, as a technologist, as someone

who works in the field and I'm going to
explain to you what's at risk and why that

doesn't work. You know, in words that you
can understand. We need to go in and have

those same conversations about moderation
and about this idea that, like, it's not

too late for a dynamic Internet. That we
can we can aspire to something better than

a slightly more responsible Facebook. That
we can aspire to a more self determining

more pluralistic Internet where you don't
have to hope that Facebook cleans up its

act. You can just go somewhere else. Whose
policies you like better and still talk to

your Facebook friends.
J: Hmm. And as you just said activists and

all the bad stuff. We have some more
questions here. You also said

something about that dividing and fracture
line before where workers were divided.

And I have a question: Why do all those,
or most, or many left-wing communities

split up about fundamental discussions
while right wing people just stick

together and, yeah, try to to work
together for benefits?

C D: Well, I think that I mean, it's
multifaceted and that characterization is

not entirely true, right? You know, the
right wing movements do have really

serious fracture lines. In Canada, our
conservative party was like many

conservative parties. One of these
chimeras where you have, you know,

wealthy people and social conservatives
and wealthy people say you vote for our

tax breaks and we'll punish women who have
abortions and they fused this

coalition. And in Canada, after the
Mulroney years - he was our Helmut Kohl

equivalent - the conservatives were in
such bad odour that they pulled less than

12 percent in the election, didn't qualify
for free office space on Parliament Hill.

And the party broke up and became two
parties, the Conservative Party and the

Reform Party. And hilariously, later on,
they reformed and they were at this all

party conference and the naming committee
went into a closed room to figure out what

they were going to call the new party. And
they came up with the Canadian

Conservative Reform Alliance Party - which
is CRAP. And no one noticed until after

the press release. But conservative
parties fracture all the time. They have

really serious, grotesque fracture lines.
The Republican Party is in major

disarray at the moment and will probably
be in worse disarray after the election.

The run off in Georgia in January if they
lose control of the Senate because money

talks and bullshit walks. If you don't
deliver, if your program doesn't deliver

the majority that allows you to enact the
wider program, then you are discredited

and you lose your seat. I mean, the
British Tories have undergone the same

thing. That's what Brexit was. It was a
split in the British Tories. In terms of

the left, there are lots of reasons the
left splinters. Some of it is what Freud

called the narcissism of small
differences. You know, you call it free

software, i call it open source. We can't
be friends anymore. Some of it is

legitimate differences, which, you know,
there are real meaningful differences

between, say, liberals in the left. And
there are lots of places where they agree.

But there are irreconcilable differences.
And when it comes to those breaking

points, you just, the alliance is going to
fall apart, right? It may, it may -

personal friendships may endure, but the
wider questions are going to drive it

apart. And then I just watched a video
with Boots Riley, you know, who is the guy

who made "Sorry to disturb you", he's a
revolutionary rapper. And he talked about

the history of the protest movement in the
US and the trade union movement. And one

thing that is really under reported,
including to my shame by me in the last

nine months, is that the US had more
wildcat strikes than at any time since

the 1940s. Strikes where there wasn't a
union, that it was unsanctioned and they

were in support of the same issues as the
protests that got all the coverage, Black

Lives Matter and so on. But they didn't
draw the coverage. And Riley was on the

show talking about the way that the left -
including the radical left in the US -

moved from strikes to protests. Where the
primary mechanism for enacting a program

of change was protests and not strikes.
And he said that it came from the anti-

communist witch hunts of the 1950s and 60s
and that the trade union movement - to

avoid the penalty of being tarred as
communists by the witch hunters, by the

McCarthy hearings, they backed away from
radical political agendas and they became

effectively part of the establishment. And
that the radical left split off and they

declared that student movements were the
future of political, radical political

change. And student movements, they can
have symbolic strikes, but a student

strike is not a strike in the way that
workers strike is, right? A worker strike

is really fundamental. Like at its core, a
worker strike is the argument that who

gets to decide how things get made and who
gets to own those things should be in a

different set of hands, should be
differently organized. It is a

foundationally different project than a
protest. A protest is about what the

people in charge should do and a strike is
about who should be in charge. And he says

that the legacy of that today is that we
focus our energies on the outcomes of our

political arrangements, which are
structural racism, sexism, inequality and

so on. But we don't talk about the
underlying structure anymore. We don't

address the underlying structure. We may
talk about it in our protest, but we don't

address it with the most tried and true
direct action tool we have for changing

those structural arrangements, which is
striking. And I, you know, I just listened

to that yesterday and I've been thinking
about it ever since. And I think that it

does reveal a really like, non-trivial
distinction between different ways of

looking at theories of change. And it's
not that kind of cartoony, like Marxist

can't care about class and everyone else,
and they're all white dudes. And then

everyone else cares about gender and race.
It's about understanding how anti-

communist witch hunts and how like a
deliberate, like normative and political

project to discredit a certain kind of - a
certain ideology, changed the way that we

talk about what our political aspirations
might be. And it's a really important

distinction. It really matters. I'm still
trying to digest it. But, you know, I'm

thinking about it ever since.
J: Hmm, we have, as we said just before we

went online with the fireside chat here,
by the way. And I'm really happy that

we're exploring this, yeah, for us new
format of a talk/chat. I'm really happy to

have people here in the room with us. So
this will be for all the other fireside

chat, another invitation to pop in and ask
your questions directly and be here with

us in the room. And we have people in the
audience who have a really big question

that probably all of us have. It's 2020
for all of us and 2020 is somewhat

demanding. And how do you manage? To not
get depressive over activism, so how can

you stay positive with all the stuff
happening and all the opponents we face in

activism?
C D: Yeah, you know, I would lie if I said

I hadn't felt a lot of despair this year.
I mean, lucky for me, the way that I cope

with stress is by working. So, you know,
it's not entirely great because when I

work without balance, you know, when when
all you do is stick your face in your

computer and work, then your emotional
health suffers and your physical health. I

have a chronic pain problem. And I hurt
myself so badly a couple of weeks ago that

I was actually walking around on a cane.
Literally just from sitting too much and

neglecting my physical welfare, not doing
the self care that I need to manage my

disability. So, you know, it's
not been great for anyone. I, you know,

I'm working on this utopian novel right
now, "The Lost Cause", which is a novel

set after "Green New Deal" in which people
have oriented themselves to the long

project of dealing with climate change.
And so that includes things like a

300 year project to relocate all the
world's cities 20 kilometers inland and

really big structural changes to cope with
hundreds of millions of refugees that we

know will come and orienting our work
around contingency plans for months at a

time when you can't leave your house
because of wildfires. And it is

indistinguishable from an environmental
dystopian novel, except for the fact that

the people in the book don't feel
helpless. They know what's coming. They

know they can't stop it, but they know
that they can prepare for it. They can do

stuff that will manage it. And so for me,
that's like, you know, back to the theme

of my talk I just gave: Self-
determination, right. The ability to have

like a say in how this stuff works out to
know which parts are parameterized and

which parts are set in stone. That is, I
think, the thing that keeps at least some

people sane and dedicated and acting. And
so this is the upside of activism, right?

Is like doing something to try and make a
difference may feel hopeless and

exhausting, but try doing nothing to make
a difference and to just be like tempest

tossed, smashed around by the breaking
down system, that's for me anyway, much,

much harder and more stressful. And, you
know, ultimately, like my view of the

world is that we cannot operate a theory
of change like a novelist, we have to

operate a theory of change, like a
programmer. So novelists, you know, posit

this like reductionist, simplified way of
getting from A to Z where you have an

ending, you have a beginning, and you work
out the steps to take you up a dramatic

curve and then down and through your
denouement, right? And programers, when

they work with, like, non-trivial data
sets, they know that the terrain is

unknowably complex, that if you try to
enumerate the whole terrain and find an

optimal path through it, the terrain would
have like altered by the time you'd

finished. And also the moment during which
you want to do the job would have passed.

So you can't figure out how to get from A
to Z if you're writing code that you can't

find the optimal way, the one true way,
the best way. Instead, what you have to do

is hill climb, right. You have to like
ascend a gradient towards a better future,

like the victory condition you're looking
for. And you might end up stuck in a local

maximum. You might have to do something
like hill descent in order to do more hill

climbing. But in order to get from from A
to Z in software, you assume that if you

can ascend the gradient to a new area of
the terrain, that from that new area, new

terrain will be revealed that you can't
see from where you are now and that the

best way to map the territory is to
traverse it, and that even if you have

some reversals, even if you have to double
back on yourself to get all the way

through it, you will still have done a
better job than if you had tried to do it

perfectly all at once the way a novelist
does. And so whatever things look shitty

and scary I just say, like, if I can think
of one thing that I can do that improves

my situation, that I will find myself in a
new zone from which I might have new

courses of action that I can't even
imagine now. And that's what keeps me

going. It may not make me happy, but it's
a reason to put one foot in front of the

other.
J: Yeah, I think we all need that. We do

have two more questions in the chat or two
and a half, and we have like three minutes

left. So can I can I get two short ones,
probably? Ian you're first of them.

Ian: Hi - Hi, Cory. Thanks for your work.
Amazing. I love it so much and I read all

of it whenever you post something new. I
want to ask about the book "For the Win".

And I love that much and it showed the
world that games are actually a market, a

big financial market, and the environment,
the setting of the scene feels a bit like

there could be more stuff happening at the
end of the book, so it's a bit open. I

don't want to spoil it to anyone, but it
felt a bit like there could be more. What

would it take for you to write a sequel to
"For the Win"?

C D: Well, you know, I wrote "For the Win"
when I was - as part of my reckoning with

great financial crisis and also as part of
my marriage; because I'm married to a

former professional Quake player. And so I
- she was at GDC when the first gold farmer came

forward. And so gold farming was like a
thing that I was really interested in. I

was really interested in that burgeoning,
you know, games economics world. Yanis

Varoufakis working for that Icelandic game
company and so on. But today, I'm far more

interested in heterodox economics and
particularly in modern monetary theory.

And I think that if I were ever to revisit
this, I don't know that I would. But it

would be - what would be a really
interesting way to revisit this would be

to to do an "MMT lens gold farming" novel.
Ian: Yes, please. Sounds great.

J: OK, so we see a next novel coming up
there. And we have one last question from

Caige please.
Caige: Hi Cory, thank you for the talk,

really great to have you here.
So, given everything that you've

said about monopolies, massive unchecked
corporate power and so forth: What is one

realistic thing that we could all do to
combat this that would actually have a

significant impact and actually have a
second quick follow up on that: What's the

one thing that truly brings you hope in
all of this?

C D: Well, so the one realistic thing is
you can't do anything individually. You

have to do it collectively. Right. So you
have to find a political movement. And

this is this is my point about the right
and the left and different kinds of

parties and so on. You have to find a
political movement that is orienting

itself towards monopoly and towards
dealing with monopoly. You know, our

policymakers are even the ones that
perceive a problem with monopoly, don't

perceive the political will to do anything
about it yet. You know, I debated Vestager

from the audience last year at Reboot and
in or not reboot - at re:publica in

Berlin, and she was like: "Oh, we can't do
breakup's. They take 15 years and cost too

much money". She needs to have political
and social movements who have her back,

who say: 15 years to break up Facebook
sounds good to me! Let's spend the money

right and to get there, it's not an
individual thing. It's a social thing. You

know, it's being involved in a political
party, in a political movement that is

engaged with this. Larry Lessig talks
about the world being regulated by code,

norms, markets and law, right? So, you
know, you can have this normative

discussion with your friends. You can you
can bring them along to the idea that, you

know, all of their problems have a common
origin, that it's monopolies. If you have

a British friend who's local government
collapsed last year because of

"Carillion", you can say, oh, yeah, the
big four accounting firms which were

allowed to buy all of their competitors
and merged with a bunch of consulting

services, they audit the books of all
these companies, including Wirecard. They

forged the books for their customers and
allowed them to steal from us, right? So,

that's not a problem of corruption in the
accounting industry. That's a problem of

monopoly. And then you can get involved
with your party, with your social

movement, if you're involved with, you
know, with "netzpolitik" or if you're

involved with "EFF" or if you're involved
with "Quadrature", you can say, look: This

is my priority too. You know, at EFF we
have an anti-monopoly group now that's

been working for the last year and now
that Anti-monopoly has come to Tech, you

know, EEFs job is gonna be for the next
years to come, it's gonna be making sure

that anti-monopolists understand the
technical dimension, that they don't

inadvertently create more durable
monopolies by fighting it. We need those

technical experts. So, you know, like in
the same way that the one thing that you

can do about climate change is to find a
political party that cares about climate

change and then demand that they take
meaningful action. The one thing you can

do about monopoly is to get involved with
anti-monopoly movements because your

individual action isn't going to do enough
there. It's it's too little. As to what

gives me hope? I mean, the thing that
gives me hope is we have gone from anti-

monopolism being like a fringe thing that
nobody cared about, and that was just

laughable to it being central in like
literally less than a year. Like a year

ago, a year and a half ago, March 2019, I
stood on a stage in Berlin and argued with

Europe's top anti-trust enforcer about
whether we would ever break up Facebook.

And she said we wouldn't. And she's the
most powerful, most active, most take no-

prisoners anti-trust enforcer in the world
today. We're ready to break up Facebook.

It might take a decade, but we went from
this is impossible to let's get doing it

in less than a year or just over a year,
right? That is remarkable progress. It

might seem slow, but like it's a doubling
curve. You know, it's got momentum. Like,

get behind it and push with whatever
group, with whatever organization you're

involved with, push and push and push.
What gives me hope? That's what gives me

hope.
J: And this is a wonderful ending where

unfortunately out of time. People saying
they like this format. And I think we'll

see a bit more of that over the rC3. And
I'm really, really happy, Cory, that you

were the first of our authors doing a
fireside chat and probably we'll have some

progress on turning over publishing
industry at some point.

C D: So, for sure, and I have to say it is
an honor and a privilege, as always, to

speak at CCC. And I'm really indebted
to you volunteers and the people who make

it happen every year. It's a remarkable
event and I'm looking forward to actually

seeing you folks in person again soon. I
hope I can come to Leipzig for an in-

person one next year.
J: Yes, please. That would be really

great. Thank you very much, Cory.

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