Please note that you'll hear several bleeps in this episode in reference to a phrase Doctorow coined to describe tech platform degredation.
Cory Doctorow has spent the past few years chronicling how platforms like Google and Meta have slowly eroded. According to him, the process goes something like this:
First, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die.
Doctorow joins us in a collaborative interview with News Over Noise to discuss how the degradation of tech platforms has affected our ability to find information, engage in deliberative democracy, and more. We also discuss what coalitions are necessary to push back against this landscape, and how science fiction can help us imagine a more democratic world.
Doctorow is a science fiction author, activist and journalist. His books include "The Lost Cause," a science fiction novel of hope amidst the climate emergency, and "The Internet Con: How to Seize the Means of Production."
Episode Transcript
Chris Beem
From the McCourtney Institute for Democracy at Penn State University. I'm Chris Beem.
Cyanne Loyle
I'm Cyanne Loyle.
Jenna Spinelle
I'm Jenna Spinelle, and welcome to Democracy Works. This week, we are talking with Cory Doctorow, who is a blogger and an author, writes and thinks a lot about the role that technology plays in our democracy, and as you'll hear, has a lot to say about that topic. We recorded this interview in collaboration with news over noise, a podcast produced by the News Literacy Initiative at Penn State. And you'll hear me and Matt Jordan, who hosts news over noise, tag teaming this interview, and yeah, lots of lots of good stuff in this one.
Chris Beem
His argument is that that the tech world is undergoing and ensh*ttification, right? That it is becoming progressively worse. And so he, he says, The reason for this is because the tech world, these, you know, these monster Corporation, Amazon, Apple, Google, you know, have taken over all the sources of power, and all the sources of countervailing power, right? And so your your, your left, where, where you have the costs are too high for people to leave. There are there? The the cost of going to somewhere else for a small business is too high not to pay. And when there is a viable alternative that emerges, they just go out and buy them right? And not to mention you have a regulatory environment that is radically sympathetic to their objectives, and which makes it much easier for them to do this. And so you have a place or a world where there's nothing stopping them from pursuing profits, and as a result, sometimes, maybe more often than sometimes, it's in their interest to make their product worse because it improves their profits, and not to mention make society worse, right? But make their own products worse operate less less efficiently, because by doing that, they make more money.
Cyanne Loyle
So I want to just elaborate on on two of those points. So so the idea that we can't leave. I thought was, was a really telling, telling point. So when you talk about things like Facebook or X, I think some of us who were kind of earlier adopters of these platforms may be able to hearken back to a time where it was like, really fun to like, bump into people from high school on these social media platforms. And we could find those people, right? They were easy to find. We could connect. We could do things like that. And I think those things have gotten worse. And I think at least, you know, my social media feeds are more filled with ads. They're more filled with content that I'm less interested in. So I think that's what he means by this kind of ensh*ttification, right? Things Are, are getting worse. But the other point that I that I found a little bit touching was that it's not that we can't leave because we want to support the oligarchs, right, that we're pro Zuckerberg or that we're pro Musk it's that we really still like being able to talk to our friends from high school, right? That we still like those kind of communities and relationships. And the monopolistic aspect of it is that there's no other place to go, right? So you have to stay on those platforms because you can't switch over. So I thought, I thought that point of it was really telling. And this idea of profits, Dr tells a Cory tells a story about kind of, I don't know if it's called allegations, but assumptions that Google is actually intentionally getting worse, because the more times you click and search, the more ads you get to see, right, right? So these are the types of profit maximization things that are really baked into the system. And I learned a lot from this talk, or at least I started thinking about things in really different ways from his presentation.
Chris Beem
Well, and you were mentioning how this is still operative, and with respect to Tesla, right? I mean, people are, you know, people who know this industry are saying that they've never there is no equivalent of this, historically, of this kind of decline of market share. And so it's not that profit is it lets you do anything right. Profit requires that you make profit, and if whatever you're doing causes people to stop using your product or stop buying your product, as long as they have the opportunity to do so they will. And so, you know, you could see in some world where people would say, I really don't like what you're doing. You saw this with respect to Apple and the construction of. Phones that they were using child labor, or, you know, that was the allegation, and and people, you know, use social media to go up against that, but, but if the walls, he talks about, the walls around these corporations, if they're so powerful, so tall, that they're that you can't your opportunity to to choose something else is simply not a genuine choice.
Cyanne Loyle
Which is the definition of a monopoly, right? Right? I mean, that's, that's the idea of antitrust and monopolistic laws, is to prevent corporations from not giving you a choice, and to prevent those corporations from then no longer providing the services that allow you to opt out. I just want to spend a moment to point out, Chris, that you got optimistic. First. Optimistic first in this discussion. So I completely agree that one of the positive takeaways of this conversation is that, you know, Tesla is an example of a massive decline in market share based on people opting out of a service that they no longer believe in. And so I still think there is consumer power in there is consumer power.
Jenna Spinelle
So there are several examples that Cory brings up in the interview about things right here in in the US, ways that people are coming together in their communities to push back against this and ensh*ttification. So we hear more about that in the interview. One final programming note before we go to the interview, we're just going to jump right in. The first thing you'll hear is Matt Jordan from news over noise asking the first question. So let's go now to the interview with Cory Doctorow.
Matt Jordan
Cory, welcome to News over noise. The Internet has become a gateway for information about democracy, and one of the first stops that people take is often Google. How have non competitive policies degraded? This, the information that we find there?
Cory Doctorow
Well, I think a lot of us have an intuitive sense that Google is not serving results of the same quality that we were accustomed to, and certainly there's been some empirical work that suggests that that's the case, but understanding where that came from really only came into focus during the antitrust trial last year, where there were some memos published detailing an extraordinary internal conflict at Google in 2019 when the company became quite alarmed that it had stopped posting the kind of growth that It had historically posted, and there was a good reason for that. Google's got a 90% market share we already search for all the things we're ever going to search for, right? Any full thought that comes into our head, we type it into a search box, and every search box is connected to Google, and so they weren't going to grow by signing up more people, and they weren't going to grow by getting the people who were signed up to do more searching. So what were they going to do to continue to post growth? Please Wall Street maintain their incredible earnings to valuation ratio that's such a huge advantage for them and source of a lot of money and so on. And in the memos that the DOJ published that it acquired through discovery, we see that at that moment, two Google executives came into conflict with one another. One, Prabhakar Raghavan was the head of revenue, and the other one, les Gomes was the head of search. And Prabhakar raghavans idea, broadly speaking, was that if they made search worse, so that the first time you searched, you didn't get your answer and you'd have to refine your query twice, three times, four times that that would be more bytes at the apple, more chance to show you ads. And they could post growth this way, Gomes and pro and ragavan go back and forth pretty ferociously. And in the end, Gomes is sent to the hinterlands. He's running educational technology for Google. Now he's, I guess that makes him like the Chromebook czar or something, and Raghavan becomes a very important person at Google, and Google's quality starts to precipitously decline right about that time.
Jenna Spinelle
So Cory, a lot of what you've been describing the deterioration of search engines and also social media platforms, kind of tech platforms more broadly, seems to line up with the rise of populism around the world. And I wonder to what extent some of that behavior, some of those trends, may actually just be a reaction to what's been happening in our tech environment, the Prager unification of our information environment, and that feeling of being partially lobotomized that you just described earlier.
Cory Doctorow
Well, you know, I think that it's this is where the fact that populism has more than one meaning becomes very useful. You know, populism in its original sense, and I think that the right sense is a kind of leftist, anti authoritarian, anti big business movement. You know what's sometimes called right wing populism, which is a little weird. It's like calling something left wing fascism. It doesn't really make any sense, but, but we know what we mean when we say right wing populism, I think has some of the same vibes as the as as populism, historic and contemporary pop. Ism like the sense that big business is ripping you off and that life isn't as good as it used to be. You can hear that in the Maga, right? And if you close your eyes and you don't listen very carefully, it can sound a little like a Bernie Sanders rally. And, you know, Naomi Klein talks about this in her wonderful book doppelganger. She talks about how often the right has these kind of warped, mirror bizarre world versions of leftist causes. And this, she's not the first person to observe it. As she points out, in the 19th century, they used to call anti semitism the socialism of fools. Right that if you have observed that, like there's a group of rich people who seem to be running the world to their own benefit, to the detriment of everyone else, and you come to the conclusion not that we live under a system that inevitably produces such an elite and that this is a systemic problem, but instead, come to the conclusion that it's because there are Jewish bankers secretly running the world. You've gotten most of the way there and taken a horrible turn off the course. And so I think that, like when you live under conditions of monopoly, as we do. You know, with most of our sectors collapsed into just a handful of firms, a cartel capturing their regulators, being completely unable to be disciplined by their workers, having the whip hand over them, that it's easy and I think correct, to feel like you are living in an environment where you are the food for the machine, and also that you can't trust what anyone tells you right. Like, if you know I'm not in any position to assess most of the truth claims that I need to get right in order to survive the day. I'm not going to, like, audit the software on the anti lock brakes on my car or whatever. And yet, I'm pretty sure that the institutions that we rely on to validate claims about, like, what's safe and what isn't, what's good and what isn't, I'm pretty sure they're not good and like, they weren't good before the, you know, unscheduled, rapid midair disassembly that Elon Musk is doing now. You know, I have chronic pain, and when I lived in the UK, my wife had a job that came with private insurance. I went to see a fancy psychopharmacologist on Harley Street, where all the fancy doctors are, and he said, You know, I've got great news for you, opioids are safe. You can just take opioids every day for the rest of your life, and you won't have any pain. And I did my own research right, and I concluded that the pharma companies were run by evil billionaires who would murder me for a buck, and that the regulators who were supposed to stop them from doing that were in their pocket. And when I heard anti vaxxers talking about why they weren't going to get the COVID vaccine, which is something I believe in. I've had all my jobs, I get perfect 5g reception no matter where I am, a blow in the dark. I've had so many vaccines, when I hear them say, Well, I don't trust the pharma companies, and I don't think the regulators are keeping them honest. I don't think they're wrong. I don't think they're wrong about that. I think that's perfectly rational and and so I think that like regulatory capture and the ability to abuse people with impunity is downstream of monopolization, and tech monopolies are one of the most prominent and harmful monopolies that we come into contact with on a daily basis. And as digital tech finds its way into other industries, some of the tech industry's favorite scams become part of the the other industries. You know, nurses now are booked through gig apps that check their bank balance and if they owe a lot of credit card debt, it offers them a lower wage because they're willing to take a lower wage if they're financially desperate. You know, I think that that does make people ripe for a kind of politics of rage and a politics of weaponized skepticism. You know, media literacy gone wrong, where everything that someone says, You say, Well, you can't trust an expert and just leaves you in, like, this epistemological void, where you're a sucker for any con man who sounds like they know what they're saying.
Matt Jordan
I mean, it's interesting. The early impulse of the internet was this huge democratic spur, right? I mean, I remember as a media studies guy that the early days we would have these, you know, professors come in wearing parachute pants, telling us about how, you know, the Arab Spring and the Jasmine revolution. This was the way of the world that the internet was inevitably democratic. But I think as it's gotten captured, as it's gotten crapified, one of the things that has happened is that impulse toward search, toward finding things out without the gatekeepers, the curators, has been kind of turned on its head in this bizarro world that you're talking.
Cory Doctorow
And, you know, I don't think it's wrong to say that helping people with disfavored views find each other and mobilize is a big change to our democratic system. You know, I am a person who spent his teens and 20s, riding a bicycle around Toronto, wheat pasting up handbills, trying to get people out to street marches, right? I mean, you know, if you don't think that, like, social media is an important change in how we mobilize people in the streets, I got a bucket of wheat paste. You spend a couple of nights out in, you know, Sub Zero weather, and come back and you tell me whether you think social media is an. Important to organizing movements, you know, but I agree that the capture of these platforms, which was only possible because the platforms themselves collapsed into such a small number of speech forums, you know, when there was a lot of different speech forums that that weren't all under one roof, that that, you know, you couldn't just lay hands on it. There was a one throat to choke. It was harder for states to exercise control, just as a logistical matter, right? There might be hundreds of, you know, similarly sized places where people are gathering to talk, but once it's all on Facebook, you just have to suborn Facebook, and once Facebook is a listed Corporation, and Mark Zuckerberg, although he controls the majority of the voting shares, is highly exposed to changes in Facebook share price, more so than any other person in the world, really. Then there's a lot of ways to exercise leverage over those platforms. And of course, you know, the people who run the platforms are themselves billionaires and are class allies to a large extent of the authoritarian project to make being a billionaire stable. Being a billionaire is intrinsically unstable, right? This is Thomas Piketty idea that, you know, if there's enough inequality, eventually you're spending so much money to stop people from building a guillotine on your lawn that you might as well just build some hospitals so they stop trying.
Jenna Spinelle
You know, there are lots of nonprofits and universities and even some companies that are trying to figure out how to bring democratic deliberation online, realizing that a lot of the behaviors that the internet has brought to us, it's that genie is not going back in the bottle. We're not going to go back to our town hall and you know, have have deliberations exclusively in that forum. I guess I wonder if, you see a path forward there, if you think that the internet and democratic deliberation are fundamentally compatible in some way,
Cory Doctorow
I think they absolutely are. And I think the even the internet is currently constituted as fundamentally compatible with democratic deliberation, I spend a lot of time talking to my local political activists and my local representatives, also people around the world who are involved in causes like mine. I'm a member of Yanis Varoufakis DM 25 movement. I think that there's lots of democratic deliberation around and when you look at things like that, Audrey Tong, the CTO of Taiwan, has done with deliberation tools that try to surface areas of consensus rather than areas of difference, and discussion boards and so on. It's been really effective here in the US. One platform I would call your attention to is Vermont's front porch forum. I don't know if you're familiar with this. It's really exciting place where you get to post. I think it's once a day. Each person gets to post once a day, and by default, you only see the post from your immediate neighborhood. And it's really effective at rallying people and addressing local issues. It's very civil people on all sides of the political spectrum participate in it. It's become very central to life in Vermont. So it's clear that, like, the fact that the sunshine can't reach the forest floor is choking out a lot of these things, like front porch forum, but also that where light does penetrate the canopy, you do get all kinds of super interesting things popping up that, you know, they may not be stable in a long term configuration, right? It may be that, like, what works for front porch forum in 2025 will work in a political environment of 2030 or 2050 that's fine, right? We, you know, we don't have to use the same tools over and over again, but one of the things I know from being in political movements all my life is the fact that you did have a community with other people at some point in the past means that in the future, it's easier to return to those people. And actually, you know, far right movements have their own version of this. There's a great scholar called Catherine Ballou, I believe she's at the University of Chicago, who studies far right movements, and one of her areas of research is this group of Neo Nazis who were radicalized in Vietnam, in the in the military, and when they came back, they published zines that they made with nickel photocopiers at grocery stores, but it was very inefficient, and one of them got an apple two plus, and they realized that they could use BBSs to spread the network with other Neo fascist, and they formed an armored car robbery gang, and they robbed armored cars to buy Apple two pluses for every pencil neck Hitler wannabe in the country, and and gave them all computers and modems. And when you look at the contemporary fascist online presence, inevitably the longest tenured members of those forums, who are the ones who are setting the norms and so on. They were all fascist kids on that message board in the 1980s and it's they, they have spread out like like people who saw the Velvet Underground all starting a band, right? Nazis who were on this message board in the 1980s all started some grotesque. Nazi forum, and they're able to work together because they have these personal ties from this moment where they're all in a movement together. It's interesting.
Matt Jordan
I mean, one of the things we associate with democratic deliberation that was the notion of a public right, and one of the things that internet affords are these kind of not exactly public places, right, where people who are like minded can find each other and can say things without having to be accountable as one has to be in public. And that is a that's a feature, I think, that we haven't quite figured out how to manage, right? You can hide behind anonymity. You can amplify your stuff with a trillion bots that would that will act as if they're people, right? That so the idea of having something like you're describing with the with the Vermont platform, right? That's you get one person to do something per day, and it seems like something like that really requires a notion of, kind of authenticating what an authentic user user is like, and showing yourself to be part of a community, and all of those things that we would say are really important. And so the always a question for me in terms of the internet is, how do you scale those things, or is scale really the the enemy?
Cory Doctorow
Do you need to scale those things? I mean, look, anonymity has played a really important role in democratic deliberation as well. I mean, this is the home of the Federalist Papers here in America, right? We there's always been a place for anonymous speech in in this. And anyone who's, you know, read about the red scares and so on, knows that it the the simplistic formulation that if you're not willing to sign your name to your political views, they're not well, they're not firmly held. Really doesn't understand how movements change. And you know, we were talking earlier about Snowden, and after the Snowden leaks came out, you know, I I'm a privacy advocate, and I ended up spending a lot of time talking about what Snowdens leagues meant. And I would tell people that, you know, we live in a world today, although it's changing again, but we live in a world today where things that were illegal in living memory, like so called interracial marriage or consuming cannabis or being gay, that those things are not just legal, but are widely accepted. And we view the fact that it used to be unlawful to be those things or do those things. We view that as like a stain on our national conscience, and unless you think that, like all the social progress we're ever going to make has been made, and there's nothing else to change about our mores, then you should assume that someone in your life, statistically who matters to you and whose happiness, your happiness, can never be complete without theirs, that someone in your life has never told you who they really are and has never opened up to you. And unless there's a space where they can privately deliberate with you, where you and they can have a conversation together, they may never do that, right? They might go to their grave with this, you know, huge sorrow in their hearts, because you never really knew who they were, and they loved you, and you loved them, right? And so that's a that's a really strong case for democracy emerging not just out of public but out of private forums and the solidaristic energy that comes from being in a private space and discussing things. After all, you know, the way that we got homosexuality legalized was not by putting a pink triangle on the sleeve of every person who was gay, right? It was about people who were gay choosing the time and manner in which they came out to other people to recruit them as allies. You know, you tell your dad about it when you're on a fishing trip with them, not when you're at the Christmas table with your racist uncle who's going to freak out. And that is how these big alliances got built, and that's how they changed our world. So, I mean, I would put hiring a million bots to amplify your message in a completely different bucket from having private places or anonymous places. You know, speaking of anonymous, the anonymous movement, which played a really important role in the Arab Spring, and a really important role in revealing the activities of cyber mercenaries who are working for, you know, wealthy, corrupt individuals and authoritarian states and so on. You know, they not only operated anonymously, but they had an extremely democratic form of deliberation. They had no way of compelling one another to act right? The only way that they could act is by convincing each other. It's a bit like if you've read Graeber and Weng rose Dawn of everything, where they talk about the fact that indigenous war chiefs and the forest tribes in the Northeast that they didn't have the power to draft warriors, they had to talk them into going to war. And so the greatest rhetoricians of indigenous societies were these, were these war chiefs. And there were volumes and volumes of debates between these guys and monks, you know, Jesuits, that were best sellers in France, where they just argue circles around them. And it was this that, you know, the the enlightenment. Dollars picked up, and it was this is, you know, the origins of the Enlightenment were these incredible debates, this deliberation between these people. So, like, that's the operate, the modus operandi of anonymous, right? When you don't know who these people are, you don't know how to find them, that you only get to talk to them if they show up to listen, and you all get together and decide, okay, we're gonna hack the Church of Scientology and dump all their documents. Then we're gonna do the same thing at HB Gary. We're gonna, you know, bring down, we're gonna help bring down the Tunisian Government, and go and solidarity to people in the streets. That's all happening through anonymous deliberation, and it was hugely important to movements that were about human rights and democracy.
Jenna Spinelle
Let's talk a little bit more about coalition building. You talked a little bit in your lecture here at Penn State, about some of your work with the Electronic Frontier Foundation and your your work building coalitions there to work on, on various issues. There's a lot of that happening in the democracy world right now, people working on various causes, you know, getting money out of politics, reducing gerrymandering and on and on down the line, trying to figure out, you know, who, who makes sense to be part of this group, who's in, who's out, those kinds of things. And, you know, we might not agree on everything, but can we still have you as part of this movement? So I wonder what, what lessons you might have for people out there, sort of in the trenches of of that work right now?
Cory Doctorow
I mean, it is a really hard call, because often coalitions that are effective. In fact, almost all these coalitions who are effective involve putting together groups of people who disagree about most things, because that's how you you reach the broadest public. That's how you make the most political the most political impact right is not by capturing 100% of progressive legislators, but capturing maybe 50% of progressive legislators and 50% of, you know, conservative legislators, and then all of a sudden you've got an unstoppable movement. And for example, I think the privacy movement has the potential to really do this, that that privacy is so out of date. Here we have an updated American privacy law at the, you know, consumer level, for on the on the federal level, since 1988 when Congress made it illegal to tell uh, newspapers, which VHS cassettes you had if you were a video store clerk. You know, we are, we are really overdue for this stuff. There's a lot of people on the right who don't like the fact that, you know, everyone who was a January 6 rider had their location revealed by Google to the DOJ, because Google spies on your location and gives it to any cop who wants it. There's a lot of people on the left are really angry that that happened to black. Lives Matter demonstrators too. If you can get together and all hold your nose and work together, you might be able to make a change there. And the question is, when your coalition partners have goals that involve something on a continuum with the literal extermination of you and the people that you love, how much can you hold your nose to do it? And in particular, if you're a person who individually, being in company with these people revive some trauma that you've lived through and so on. It can be really, really hard. I'm not going to tell anyone who's experienced traumatic events that I've never experienced that they have a duty to hold their nose right or to suck it up and sit down next to those people, but I will say that if you want to make these changes that will have a big material effect on the rest of your life, and you can muster the fortitude to be in the same room or have your signature at the bottom of the same sheet of paper as people who you make you miserable and afraid all the time and you worry, would like to, you know, literally exterminate you and your friends. If you can find some way to find some part of that coalition and make it some part of your coalition, at least for a little while, to get some instrumental gain that you're hoping to get, you will get a lot done. It's not easy, right? But I think about things like Bernie Sanders going on Joe Rogan, I think that was tactically very sound. I think people who say that he shouldn't have done that really don't want to win, you know, and that's what matters, right? It doesn't matter how you know how pure you are on the way to the collapse of civilization, right? You know, if you remember, after Labor took a pasting in the UK under Keir Starmer, oh no, it was actually under Jeremy Corbyn, when he completely flubbed that general election and he said, Well, I think we won the argument. It's, I don't care if you won the argument, right, because we got, we got Boris Johnson and Liz truss out of that this, go ahead and win the argument. I want to win the fight right? And so winning the argument is not as good as winning the fight.
Jenna Spinelle
So you know, given the conversation we've been having for the last 40 minutes or so, here can be easy to feel down or like things are never going. The chains are never going to get any better. They're going to continue to get worse and worse and worse. And I love your fiction writing in particular. I'm thinking about your book The Lost Cause, which I just finished about a way to imagine a different world science fiction as a way to imagine a different set of circumstances than the ones we currently find ourselves in. I wonder if you could talk a little bit about the Burbank you created in that novel. And maybe, yeah, lessons for how people who are out there fighting for various causes, whether it's democracy or strengthening our media, can think about some of those principles as they're imagining what their work looks like moving forward.
Cory Doctorow
Yeah, yeah. So the Lost Cause is a utopian environmental novel I wrote, and I call it a complicated utopia, because it's not a novel where everything's going well. It's a novel where we're rising to the challenge. I think that's a better utopia. I think imagining nothing will ever break down doesn't make you optimistic. It makes you, you know, a danger to yourself and others, right? That's the decision. That's the attitude that says, Oh, why would we need lifeboats on the Titanic? It's unsinkable, you know? So in that novel in Canada, they have had a political revolution. I'm from Canada, and it happens quite by accident, as often as the case, when, when you see an upheaval in politics, there's a third party in Canada, the perennial third social democratic party called the New Democrats, and they go into an election with a firm belief that there's no way they can win, and so in classic glass ceiling or glass Cliff approach, they let an indigenous woman lead the party into the election, and then the other two parties implode because of their own internal scandals having nothing to do with the NDP, And she becomes prime minister, just as a flood washes Calgary off the map. This happens routinely in Calgary. It's built in a flood plain, just like Houston. And she says, We are not rebuilding Calgary in the flood plain. We are rebuilding Calgary somewhere else, and it breaks a dam, I guess, figuratively, in Canadian political sentiment, where people are like, Oh, wait, we can do stuff. We don't have to just set ourselves up to get kicked in the teeth by climate change every every year, we can do a thing that will change stuff. And this unleashes a network of high speed rail that replaces the main air corridors and housing rebuilding and resilience work, and just all kinds of really big, muscular things that prepare the country for the coming disasters. And this sparks a global movement, and in America, this results in the election and two terms of a president who transforms America as well. And that's where the action opens. It opens in Burbank after this, President has served two terms, her vice president serves a term and is bad at his job, and now a reactionary sort of Reagan or Trump type has taken office, and they're going to dismantle everything. And the people in Burbank, these young people, they semi sarcastically, call themselves the first generation in the century that doesn't fear the future, and all of a sudden that's being taken away from them. And this is a story about what they do in that moment, in a moment where they've done solidaristic work, where it's considered quite normal that you know, what you might do after high school for four years is help relocate all the coastal cities of California, 20 kilometers inland, a project that's going to take two centuries and cost billions of dollars, but which will ultimately save those cities, and even if it means like moving the old missions stone by stone and rebuilding them up the hill and and they have to fight for what they have, and they have to fight against overwhelming odds and overwhelming wealth to recover it. It was a very pleasant world to inhabit while I was writing it, you know, and and many people have written to me and said that they really love it. Bill McKibben called it the first great YIMBY novel, which made me really happy.
Matt Jordan
Yeah, just to maybe a final, final question is along those notes of optimism, you know, there's a lot going on in the world that seems fracturing, right? That it has us worried about the state of things. But you, you've talked about how this also presents a lot of opportunity. So how might some of the things that we're seeing today provide an opening for fixing some of the problems?
Cory Doctorow
Yeah, well, let me tell you about something extremely anti democratic first, that's been going on in plain sight for decades, since the WTO and even before the US Trade Representative, has gone all around the world and insisted that countries that wanted to trade with America would have to adopt laws that were favorable to large American firms, and that this was a precondition for tariff free access to American markets, and in particular, a lot of these laws that were instituted at the behest of the US Trade Representative are IP laws that make it illegal to do things like reverse engineer a printer so it takes third party ink or reverse engineer an iPhone so that you can use a domestic App Store. Apple takes 30 cents out of every app dollar that's spent everywhere in the world. And so that means that if you're like a new. Paper in Canada and your subscribers buy their subscriptions through the App Store. You 30% out of every dollar goes to Apple to process that payment. You know, the normal payment processing rates in North America, which are considered usurious. In the rest of the world, are 3% in Europe, it's like half to 1% and Apple's charging 30% making 10s of billions of dollars off of it. It's against the law to jailbreak a Tesla so that all the subscription features that you have to buy every month and that you don't get to transfer when you transfer the car, so you could just buy them once, and they would be yours, and when you sold the car, your car would be worth more because it had the, you know, autopilot turned on, and all the other features that you have to pay every month for. Well, you know, if Canada, Mexico, Europe, the whole global South, have we all gone on board with these laws that prohibit us from competing head to head with American firms, and not just any American firms, the largest American companies that are single handedly holding up the S p5 100, you need to take them out. And then for a decade, the s&p 500 has been in decline and to compete with them directly in the lines of business that make them the most money, the highest margin, highest dollar lines of business, and to destroy those rackets everywhere in the world all at once, to bring the dollar value of those rackets to zero for these large American firms that are funding the dismantling of America creating software products that give people more control over their own digital lives that will be impossible to prevent leaking over the border into the US, right? I would say Canada doesn't have to stop at exporting reasonable, reasonably priced pharmaceuticals. We can also export the tools of digital freedom to Americans that that this is like a really interesting possibility, and it is a recovery of something important and democratic, which is laws that are set up by people voting for what's best for themselves, and not by deliberation. That is, it takes place behind closed doors in these multilateral and bilateral trade bodies. And you know, it's not just the IP laws, although it's an area that I'm very interested in. You've also got stuff like investor state dispute settlement agreements that come about as a result of these free trade agreements. That's where large companies can sue governments for enacting labor, environmental or safety standards laws, if they erode their profits. You have, you know, tobacco companies suing Australia over plain packaging laws for cigarettes, that sort of thing where, you know, those ISDS agreements, they're also part of these trade packages. So if Trump's gonna, like, unilaterally dismantle the global system of free trade, the global system of free trade, yeah, gets us some things I like, but holy moly, has it been a way to export some of the worst, most anti democratic policies the world has ever seen if we're gonna get rid of it? Well, let's seize the moment.
Matt Jordan
Good place to end. Yeah. Thank you, Cory, thanks so much for joining us.
Cory Doctorow
Oh, it's my pleasure. Thanks for having me on.
Cyanne Loyle
Well, I mean, we had a great conversation over the break as we were, as we were listening to that, and we've been thinking a lot about some of the themes that Cory brings up, in terms of capitalism and Chris, I really appreciated your point that there's been, there really has been a rising tide that has raised many boats, right when it comes to capitalism and the overall improvements of of Social Welfare outcomes globally when it comes to maternal mortality, to literacy, to just access to basic goods and services, has increased globally over the last 100 years. I'm really struck, though, with how in some ways, we've overshot, or kind of missed the sweet spot where capitalism, where economic integration, where globalization, was able to kind of lift up the bottom, because we've now gotten into a system of such gross inequality, where that inequality is both a product of and is sustained by rampant capitalism that was never designed to control itself, you know. And so the weakening and the withdrawal of the state in this system is the part of Cory's talk that really spoke to me most, that capitalism is not doing, you know, Zuckerberg hasn't gotten worse, capitalism isn't doing anything that it wasn't always designed to do, which is maximize profits, right? But instead, in a system where the government, where governments are choosing not to regulate, then you lose the taxation, the social services, the the other parts of the puzzle that are necessary to prevent this gross inequality from really becoming as exaggerated as it's been right?
Chris Beem
And that, of course, raises the question of why that is and when you fail to live up to the distinction between $1 one vote and one person, one vote in your. Or, you know, in your governing structure, then that's what's going to happen when and so, you know, I'm all, I'm just sitting here thinking, well, Citizens United, you know, that made it almost impossible for the body politic to Countervail the power of the government. It is also true that, you know, when these tech industries were developing, you know, as Matt says in the interview, they were looked upon as exciting, pro democracy. You know, you know, I could, oh, my God, this is my guy, my friend from high school. I didn't even know, you know, all that stuff was there.
Cyanne Loyle
And I think you're asking too much of companies or expecting too much of companies to patrol or regulate themselves, right, right? So we've got a couple examples, right? Patagonia, or whatever, that have these kind of social justice missions. But, you know, I'm struck by the example of the algorithms used to divvy up shifts for nursing. Yeah, right. And and one of the things that comes out of that story is the idea that these algorithms pull your credit report feel how, figure out how desperate you are, and then kind of allocate accordingly. But that's just a way to make more money, right, right? These Uber messing around with drivers, it's how they maximize profit, and you don't even need a person behind it. So asking Uber or these wage, these wage apps to develop a conscience is unrealistic.
Chris Beem
I mean, I guess you know it. It would seem to me like, you know, you know. I think many of these people just kind of have to turn off their heart, turn off their moral conscience, because if you know you're harming people, and if you know that really, you're probably harming health care as an industry and as it's given to, you know, people who really need it, who are really sick. I mean, I find it hard to believe that that doesn't like, you know, enter their consciousness, but I think it's also true as you say, that that's they understand that that's not their job, right? And so even if they feel it, they're not going to let it impact their decision, because their job is to make money for themselves and their stockholders.
Cyanne Loyle
You know, my dad always used to say that everybody thinks they're doing the right thing. And so I think that, I think that these folks sleep at night. Yeah, right. I mean, I don't, I don't think that they see the world quite the way you do, right? And so whatever it is that they are telling themselves is what they're is what they're telling themselves. And it could be, you know, the you know, in, you know, impacting shareholder profits and, you know, continuing to offer these services and and so. So, the point that I take away from it is the importance of government regulation, right state regulation. We need institutions that are designed to constrain what could potentially be a democratizing, liberating, you know, kind of good thing, and the idea that with the proper regulation, good things would happen. So one of the things I liked was the discussion of this micro social media platform in Vermont, and that says, you know, this, it's kind of this little thing the state runs it. But I like the idea that if we did regulate Facebook and x and force competition, which is what antitrust laws are designed to do. Then there are actually ideas there, right? There are new platforms that we develop. We would have choice, and we'd be able to kind of select that.
Chris Beem
The tech system, the tech sector, is nothing if not, incredibly creative, right? And so it doesn't surprise me that these kind of initiatives are, you know, coming up. It's just what, again, it's just, what a striking metaphor that he's talking about, the forest canopy of Amazon and Facebook. And so, you know, is there enough sun getting to the bottom, to the forest floor, to make it possible for these things to grow. And, you know, that is an, you know, at minimum, an open question. We just, I mean, it's, it's clear that a lot of, you know, a lot of of these opportunities, a lot of these initiatives died, right? Because they just, they just, they just weren't able to develop to a point where they could sustain themselves.
Cyanne Loyle
Facebook's strategy of, don't compete, consume, right? So it's not even that they're dying. They're being killed, right? Right, being bought off and then not developed, right?
Chris Beem
Right? Yeah, and, and it is a daunting you know, is one of a series of ever more daunting tasks in front of us in terms of preserving and, you know, repairing, I think our democracy.
Cyanne Loyle
My big takeaway, and the thing that's kind of been rolling around in my. Is that my life has gotten shittier right, that that all of these things that capitalism was supposed to bring me isn't necessarily doing that right. And so, like, let's take this as a Jetson moment. Like, let's get in our flying cars. Like, let's make this better. And the way, you know, counterversely or whatever, the way to make this better is to regulate it a little bit more, yeah, and that is something we can totally do, right? This is a deliberative democracy moment. This is a call to talk to our senators moment. I mean, this is an opportunity for us to take up a political call towards thinking about how to structure some of these things.
Chris Beem
And kicking a little sand into the gears of the big guys. Hopefully. Anyway, all right, so thanks to Jenna for the interview for all of us at McCourtney Institute and Moxley works, I'm Chris beam and I'm cyan loyal. Thanks for listening.