*rc3 preroll music*
Herald: All right, our next talk is Cory Doctorow, who I think needs very little
introduction in this situation. But for those who don't know him: he's an
activist, he's a science fiction author, and I think he can be
described as the King of Bloggers. I remember him appearing on XKCD
with a cape back in the good old days. So, Cory, please take it away.
Cory Doctorow: I don't know how I feel about being a king, given
given that I'm wearing a guillotine badge.
Perhaps, like, party secretary.
You have my permission to take my picture.
So I'm going to I'm going to talk today about technology and optimism
and where it comes from and where it needs to go.
And I want to start by…
well, I want to start by putting on my slides. So let's do that.
I want to start by busting a myth, the myth of the blind techno optimist.
You've probably encountered the story, the story that, you know, once upon a time,
there were a bunch o' nerds who had discovered the Internet,
and thought that if we just gave everyone the Internet, everything would be fine.
And that the only thing that they needed to work on
was making sure everyone got connected and everything else would
take care of itself. And now those idiots have led us into this crazy, terrible,
dystopian world. And why didn't they foresee all this trouble? And the way that
you know that this blind technological optimism is a myth is that people don't go
out and start organizations like the Electronic Frontier Foundation because
they think that everything is going to be fine in the end. You know, if there's a
motto that characterizes those early technological optimists, it's not that
everything is going to be great. It's that everything will be great if we don't screw
it up. And if we do screw it up, it's going to be really, really terrible. Now,
before computing was the source of regular stock bubbles, it was just a passion. It
was driven not by dreams of riches, but by programmers who are able to make stuff
happen. If you think about what the the journey of a programmer is, it's that
first you figure out how to express your will with sufficient precision that your
computer then enacts your will, and enacts it tirelessly, perfectly…
[stream lost]
…computer is connected to a network, you
can project your will around the world. You can take the thing
that you've built, this self executing recipe, and you can give it to
someone else, and they can execute it as well. It's, and… But it's better than a
recipe, right? You might have a recipe for your grandmother's brownies. And when you
send it to someone else, they still have to follow the recipe. But a program is
like a self executing recipe. It's like a machine that just makes your grandmother's
brownies appear in every household in the world if they just download your code and
run it. And of course, as you get on the network and you find these people to share
your code with, you're finding the people as well. You're finding community…
[stream lost]
*chimes*
Herald 2: But, well…
*chimes*
But not in, yeah, that large scale, to be honest.
Tried around quite a few things, and had a little
little online session for the Towel Day and for all these things. We had the
Easterhegg, the DiVOC, and yeah. We're working on it to get the connection back.
So, yeah.
CD: …giant, fat, phonebook-sized…
H2: OK, I can hear the voice CD: …bill that they would get
every month for all the things that they did, and so they they
they ran this whole system in the shadows. And the last thing they wanted was for
for what they were doing to come to the attention of their bosses.
And so they had a whole bunch of rules about what you could and couldn't create.
They especially didn't want any sex, and they didn't want anyone
explaining how to make bombs on Usenet. And so there would be votes about
what news, new newsgroup could be created.
But every now & again, the backbone cabal, which is what they called themselves…
H2: So we do have a sound of Mr. Doctorow here
So I think it shouldn't, shouldn't be too much of a of time until we get the
stream back. CD: …about cooking should go under the
talk hierarchy, and not under the rec hierarchy.
And John Gilmore and other people who were in his company decided to set up
their own alternative version of Usenet called the alt. hierarchy specifically
to allow for a discussion of cooking wherever the hell they wanted it.
To exercise that little quantum of self-determination. And very quickly,
the alt. hierarchy grew until it was larger than all of Usenet put together.
So the worst nightmares of those early digital activists have come to pass.
We have total penetration of technology.
There is centralization, surveillance, and manipulation of all of our technology,
everywhere. And the question that I think is a valid one to ask is how were we dealt
such a stinging defeat? How did it come to pass that people who foresaw this danger,
and worked to make things great and not screw them up, still arrived at this
moment where the Internet consists of five giant websites filled with screenshots of
text from the other four. That's a phrase from Tom Eastman, a software developer
in in New Zealand. And this is where I get to my thesis about about what's just
happened and what needs to happen next, because there is a story about
technologists that says that the blind spot was dystopia, that technologists just
failed to understand that all of this stuff could go horribly wrong.
And they really understood how –whoops–
They really understood how wrong it could go. The
The thing that technologists failed to understand was the relationship of
monopolism to technology and the economy as it was emerging in the early days of
the technology revolution. So if you think about the early days of the commercial
Internet and commercial technology, personal computing and so on, it was very
dynamic. Companies that were giants one day ended up being acquired by upstarts
the next day. And that dynamism was not driven solely by technology, but also by
US antitrust or anti-monopoly enforcers. So I want you to think about what the
experience of a kid in the United States in the 1980s would have been like if
you were using technology. So you might have gotten your Apple II+ in say, 1980 or
1981. In 1982 the modem that came with it could suddenly dial all kinds of services
all around America at a fraction of the cost that it used to run that because AT&T
had been broken up, and long distance charges fell through the floor. And then
in 1984, you might have replaced that Apple II+ with an IBM PC, but it's more
likely that you might have replaced it with an IBM PC clone. Whichever one you
replaced it with, it was probably running an operating system from this guy, the guy
who wrote this letter. Bill Gates. The guy who started this tiny little company
called Microsoft. And the reason that the IBM PC was running code from this little
startup and not from IBM itself was not because IBM didn't know how to write code.
IBM was really good at writing code. They were arguably too good at writing code.
And for 12 years prior to the creation of the PC, IBM had been in antitrust hell
with the Department of Justice in which they were sued and sued and sued. And
every year of that 12 year lawsuit, IBM spent more on its lawyers than the entire
US Department of Justice spent on all the lawyers pursuing all antitrust action. And
one of the things that the Department of Justice was really adamant about was that
if you made hardware, you shouldn't try to monopolize the software for it. And so
even though eventually IBM prevailed–the case was dropped against it–the last thing
they wanted was to get in trouble with the DOJ again. And so after this 12 year
process, when they made their first PC, they decided not to try and make the
operating system for it. Instead, they tapped Bill Gates to make an operating
system for it. And then Tom Jennings, the guy who created FidoNet, which was the
biggest competitor we had to Usenet. It was a non-Internet-based distributed
message board system. Tom Jennings, who is a virtuoso hardware engineer who lives a
few kilometers from my home here in Los Angeles, he was tapped by a company called
Phoenix that asked him to reverse engineer IBM's ROMs, and he reverse engineered the
PC ROM, produced a specification that was used as the basis for a new clone ROM, and
that clone ROM was sold to PC vendors all over the world. And it's how we got
Gateway, Dell, Compaq and all of the other PC vendors that might have sold you that
IBM PC clone in 1984 running an operating system that IBM hadn't made, on phone
lines that had been broken up from AT&T. And then in 1992, you might have noticed
that that little company, Microsoft, had grown to be a monopolist itself with 95%
of the operating system market. And so in came the Department of Justice, and the
Department of Justice spent the next 7 years dragging Microsoft up and down that
same gravel road that they had dragged IBM up and down for 12 years. And even though
Microsoft got away, the way IBM had, their behavior was tamed, too, because when a
couple of guys in a Stanford lab, Larry and Sergei, named their new search engine
after the largest number they could think of, a one followed by 100 zeros, a google,
Microsoft decided not to do to them what they had done to Netscape because they had
seen what the Department of Justice does to you if you do that to your nascent
competitors. And so it felt in those days like maybe we'd found some kind of perfect
market, a market where you could make your products with low capital, just with the
sweat of your own mind, by writing code. That you could access the global audience
of everyone who might want to run that code over a low cost universal network.
And that that audience could switch to your product at a very low cost, because
you could always write the code that it would take to to port the old data formats
and to connect the old services to your new product. It was a market where the
best ideas would turn into companies that would find customers and change the world.
But what we didn't realize, what we were naive about in those halcyon days of the
early Internet, was that antimonopoly law, the antimonopoly law that had made things
so robust and dynamic that had given everyone who who had access to a computer
a chance to try and make a dent in the universe, that that antitrust law had been
shot in the guts in 1982, and was bleeding out. And it's all thanks to this guy,
Robert Bork. Robert Bork is kind of an obscure figure for for most people these
days. Although I said that on Twitter the other day and a bunch of people in their
50s said, "Oh, I know who Robert Bork is." But I think if you're not an American
in your 50s or a certain kind of weirdo conservative activist, you've probably
never heard of this guy. Robert Bork was Richard Nixon's solicitor general and he
committed crimes for Richard Nixon. And they were so egregious that when Ronald
Reagan tried to appoint him to the US Supreme Court, the Senate decided not to
confirm him because he was too grimy for the US Supreme Court. And so instead, he
became a kind of court sorcerer to Ronald Reagan and he created a new theory about
when monopoly laws should be enforced, a theory he called the consumer harm theory.
The consumer harm theory says that we don't hate monopolies because monopolies
are bad. We only hate monopolies because they sometimes raise prices, and so long
as a company that has a monopoly isn't immediately raising prices after they
acquire that monopoly, it's OK to let the monopoly form and to let the monopoly
fester. And this idea was incredibly popular, and not just with Ronald Reagan.
Every one of the neoliberal leaders of the Reagan era, from Helmut Kohl to Margaret
Thatcher to Brian Mulroney to Augusto Pinochet, took up the ideas of Robert Bork
and said that, from now on, we are not going to get rid of our monopolies. From
now on, we're going to encourage the growth of monopolies on the grounds that
they are efficient and only shut them down if we can prove that they've used their
monopoly to raise prices. Now, this idea is a stupid idea, but it's incredibly
popular for rich people, because rich people like the idea that they could buy
shares in companies that could establish monopolies. And those rich people funded
Robert Bork. They created, among other things, a series of junkets called
The Manne Seminars. M-A-N-N-E
The Manne seminars are continuing educational seminars for US
federal judges in Florida, where you fly to Florida, stay in a luxury hotel, and
get lectured on the brilliance of Robert Bork. 40% of US federal judges have been
through the Manne seminars. Unsurprisingly, those judges are far less
likely to punish monopolistic conduct. The people who like Robert Bork funded law
schools and economics departments and journals. And they they turned the idea of
consumer harm into a kind of global doctrine that has now taken over every
single regulator in the West. China has a slightly different vision of it, as does
Russia. But the European Union, Canada, the US, most of Central and South America
have all adopted these rules. I don't know to what extent these rules have penetrated
the African markets. And so, and and and consumer harm, this idea that monopolies
should only be shut down if you can show that they're using monopolism to raise
prices, is incredibly hard to prove. In fact, you could basically call it
impossible to prove. And as a result, anti-competitive conduct became so
routine, that we no longer think of it as unusual. Until the Bork era, here are some
of the things that were considered violations of antitrust law and that would
have attracted scrutiny from a regulator: merging with a major competitor, acquiring
a small competitor, or creating a vertical monopoly where you own different parts of
the supply chain, like Google buying an ad tech company. Now, the story of how tech
got monopolized leans hard not on Robert Bork, but on all these exotic ideas like
network effects. The idea that if you if you have one fax machine, it's useless and
two are very useful and three are twice as useful and four is twice as useful again,
and that once a tech company starts to become successful, the network effects
snowball and you will never dethrone it. Despite the fact that we no longer have
Friendster or AltaVista or Amigas or any of these other potential purveyors of
network effects. A close look at how tech companies grew does not show that network
effects is what led to that growth. Instead, you see predatory conduct.
Moneyball. Using access to the capital markets to raise gigantic amounts of money
and buy or merge with all of your competitors as the means by which they
grew. And as an example of this, I want you to think about Google for a minute. So
Google is a company that has made exactly one and a half successful in-house
products. They made a really good search engine and a pretty good Hotmail clone.
Everything else that they've made in-house died. This is just a small sample of the
Google product graveyard. And everything that they've done that's
successful–Android, ad tech, YouTube, and so on–all of these are companies that they
acquired from someone else. So this is not a company that has a natural monopoly due
to a network effect. This is a company that has an unnatural monopoly due to
predatory conduct. Now, network effects are indeed real. They are a thing. And you
can see them exemplified pretty well with the Bell System. This was what we called
AT&T in the US before it was broken up in the 1980's. But with with net with tech,
network effects are very different from other kinds of industries. You think of
the railroad industry where once you have rails that run from one place to another,
it doesn't make any sense to to put in a second set of rails. And so the custom
accrues to the rail vendor, which can add more rails to more destinations. And
before long, you have these natural monopolies emerging in rail. But that's
not how it works with technology. And the reason is that technology has
interoperability. So built into our general purpose computers and our general
purpose network is the ability to run any program provided you can express it in
symbolic logic and to interface any new network service with any existing network
service. Now, oftentimes that interoperability is deliberate and
engineered. Someone will go to a standards body like the W3C and decide on what an
HTTP header looks like. But just as often, that interoperability is adversarial. That
interoperability is a form of competitive compatibility, where a new company makes a
product that plugs into an existing product or service without permission,
against the wishes of the people who made the existing product or service. Like Tom
Jennings making his IBM PC ROMs. And what happens then is that the walled garden of
the company that came before becomes a feedlot in which all of the customers have
been handily penned in, so that the new market entrant can go over and choose
whichever ones they want and devour them in a smorgasbord. So to think about how
this worked with the Bell System, the Bell System originally had not just a monopoly
over the wires, but a monopoly over the things that connected to the wires. It was
against the law to connect a phone, or a phone-like device, or even a thing that
clicked on to a phone, to a phone that came from the Bell System or to a jack
that the Bell System had installed. And they argued that because they were a
monopolist, they were part of America's national security and safety apparatus,
and that allowing third parties to connect things to their network would result in
the network being made unreliable and therefore America being made insecure and
unsafe. But they didn't use this power just to keep the network operational. They
used this power to extract monopoly rents, to make money by screwing over their
customers, by preventing new market entrants. So, for example, to see where
how bad this got, you can look at where it broke down. The first time that this
system broke down was when AT&T sued a competitor called Hush-A-Phone.
And Hush-A-Phone was a plastic cup that snapped over the mouthpiece of your Bell
phone so that, when you were speaking, your voice would be muffled, and people
who are in the same room as you would find it hard to listen in on your conversation.
And AT&T argued that the Hush-A-Phone, because it was mechanically coupled to the
Bell System, endangered the integrity of the Bell System. And their regulator told
them to go pound sand. They said, no, this doesn't endanger the system, get used to
it, people can connect things to their phones. And that's when they lost
mechanical coupling prohibitions. And then they went after another company called
Carterfone. And Carterfone made a walkie talkie that plugged into a regular RJ11
jack that you could connect your phone to. And it was for people who worked on
ranches and farms so that they could they could clip a walkie talkie onto their belt
and go out and work in the barn or ride out on the range, and still take their
phone calls. And AT&T argued that by electrically coupling devices to the Bell
System that they were violating AT&T's monopoly and endangering America. And
again, their regulator told them that that was not a valid reason, and they lost the
ability to block electrical electrical coupling. And this is where we see the
growth of everything from modems to answering machines and all of the other
devices that eventually plugged into the Bell System. So interoperability can turn
network effects on their head. And interoperability was really key to the
growth of the tech monopolists today.
So think about the iWork suite and its history
Before the iWork suite came about, Apple was in really serious trouble
in enterprise networks. If you ran a business, chances are most of the
computers in your network were PCs, but maybe the designer or an executive who had
the right to decide what kind of computer they would use was would be running a Mac.
And the way that that Microsoft punished you for running that Macintosh in the
Microsoft environment was by dragging their heels on updating the Microsoft
Office suite for the Mac. And so Macs became this kind of cursed zone, where if
someone were to send a Word file or an Excel file to a Mac, and that file was
then opened and saved again, it would never be openable again on any computer
anywhere in the world. It would be irretrievably corrupted. And Bill Gates
did not fix this because Steve Jobs went to him and asked him pretty please to make
a better Microsoft Office suite for the Mac. Instead, Steve Jobs got a bunch of
engineers to reverse engineer the the file formats. And then they produced iWork,
whose Pages, Numbers and Keynote are used to read and write Office files perfectly.
And very quickly, they were able to colonize the Microsoft Office environment,
running ads like the Switch ads, where they said, well, you may have hesitated to
give up your Windows PC because all of your files are stuck in there.
But what if I told you that you could read and write all the files ever
created with a Windows system, and you could do it from a Mac
by running one piece of competitive compatibility software, of software
that was adversarially interoperable with the Microsoft ecosystem?
And that is what rescued the Mac from the scrap heap of history.
And it wasn't just software, it was also hardware. In the early 1990's
Lexmark was the–or rather the late 1990s–Lexmark was the printer
division of IBM, the not very well reformed monopolist, and Lexmark used
little microchips to stop people from refilling their laser toner cartridges.
And a company called Static Controls, a little Taiwanese company, reverse
engineered that microchip. It only held a 12 byte program, so it wasn't hard.
And they made new chips that would allow you to refill your cartridge. Lexmark lost
their lawsuit against Static Controls. And so now Static Controls had this huge
installed user base of people who are desperate for cheap toner cartridges. And
instead of having a network advantage, Lexmark now had a network disadvantage.
Today, Lexmark is a division of the company that owns Static Controls.
And it's not, of course, hardware also. It's also network services. When Facebook first
got off the ground, Mark Zuckerberg had a really serious problem, which is that
everyone who wanted to use social media already was on the dominant social media
platform, a company called MySpace that was owned by the world's most rapacious,
vicious billionaire, Rupert Murdoch. And again, Zuck did not go to Rupert and say,
please allow your users to talk to my users because people want to use Facebook,
but they don't want to leave their friends behind. Instead, what they did was they
made a bot and you give that bought your login credentials, and it would go to
MySpace and scrape the waiting messages that were there for you and put them in
your Facebook inbox, and you could reply to them, and
it would pilot them back out to MySpace.
Now, all of this led to a very dynamic system that completely changed the
way that we interacted with technology. But all of this has gone the way of the
dodo. And the reason for that is that as these companies acquired new monopolies,
they diverted their monopoly rents to foreclosing on competitive compatibility.
So you may remember the urgent fight over software patents. The growth of software
copyrights. The ongoing problem of anti- circumvention rules that make it illegal
to break DRM, most recently seen in the shutdown of youtube-dl.
Enforceable terms of service.
Facebook has just used its terms of service to try and shut down
Ad Observatory, an academic project that tracks Facebook's compliance with its own
policies on political paid disinformation. And they've said that because this service
violates their terms of service, it's illegal. Never mind that Facebook had to
violate MySpace's terms of service to gain its ascendancy.
And then new rights that are purchased with very expensive lawsuits.
So today we have the Google-Oracle lawsuit
going through the Supreme Court in the United States. That might
create a new copyright over APIs. Now, all of these things–patents, copyrights,
anti-circumvention, terms of service, novel copyrights–they trade under the
name intellectual property. And if you're familiar with the phrase intellectual
property, you'll know that free culture activists hate this term. In fact, when
you ask them what we should call these things…
Sorry, there's my software patents slide, I knew I had one in there somewhere.
When you when you call it…
When you ask them what we should call intellectual property, they say, oh, you
should call it the author's monopoly, because that's what they called it in the
days of the Statute of Anne. That's what they called it in the founding in the
United States, authors' monopolies. And authors get really pissy when you say that
they have a monopoly. And they do for good reason, because although formally the fact
that I wrote this speech and therefore I have the monopoly over reading it to you
on my microphone means that I am a monopolist, I don't have a market power
monopoly. Right? I can't use this monopoly to extract monopoly rents from the
marketplace. Writers who go to the five remaining publishers–soon to be four
if Bertelsmann buys out Simon and Schuster–don't get to use the fact that
they have a monopoly to negotiate crazy supermarket prices that go beyond what
what would happen in a competitive market. Unlike, say, the the monopolists
themselves, the actual monopolists we have who get to charge very high prices for
their services. And so it's it's not a bad point that an author's monopoly is not a
monopoly in the way that we talk about it when we talk about monopolism in the tech
sector. But IP does have a very precise meaning, a meaning that is not…
has nothing to do with intellectualism or property. IP in the sense of software
patents, copyrights, anti-circumvention, terms of service, API copyrights, and so on
it has the precise meaning of any law or rule that lets me decide who can
criticize me, who can compete with me, and who and how my customers must behave
themselves. And when you fuse a market power monopoly with an author's monopoly,
when you have a market power monopoly that has IP behind it, you get something far
more durable than either a regular monopoly or an author's monopoly,
a copyright monopoly. You get a monopoly that the government will defend rather
than dismantling. So, for example, if you have a monopoly that you can defend with a
patent, right, like today, you have HP monopolizing it's ink cartridge market and
they have patents over the security chips and their ink cartridges. The government
will seize compatible ink cartridges at the border on your behalf for because they
violate your patents. And so instead of punishing you for creating a monopoly, the
government will reward you by doing your enforcement work for you. And not only
that, but once you have a monopoly that's backed by some kinds of IP like
anti-circumvention, the government will punish people who report defects in your
products. So if you have a monopoly over printers or if you have a monopoly over
phones, and someone finds a defect that allows third parties to install their own
ink or their own app stores, the circumvention of your DRM becomes a crime
under Article 6 of the European Copyright Directive, and under Section 1201 of the
Digital Millennium Copyright Act, and under similar laws all around the world.
And the government will both fine and potentially imprison the security
researchers who point out that your products have a defect in them.
Now, I started this talk by saying that
early Internet boosters were not blind to the perils of technology.
But some of them them were, a little.
After all, once all that money started sloshing around,
then if you could convince yourself that tech was an unforced
an unchecked force for good, then you could also convince yourself
that getting all of that money that the tech industry was generating
would make you on the side of good.
The myth of two guys in a garage who could top a billion dollar giants
and become billionaires themselves, fired a lot of techies' imaginations
and sidelined a lot of their conscience.
But those days are behind us, thanks to monopolies.
Thanks to monopolies, founders who want to start businesses that compete
with the monopolists, monopolists who have double-digit growth every year, and who
realize tens, if not hundreds of billions of dollars in profit collectively.
Those founders, when they go to a venture capitalist or another funder, are told
that the funders aren't interested in funding these direct competitors.
Funders call the lines of business that big tech is in the kill zone, and they
understand that any attempt to fund a business that operates in the kill zone
will result in your company being crushed
by the monopolistic power of the entrenched company.
And so instead, if you are a technologist headed to Silicon Valley,
you don't dream of changing the world. You dream of like having a mini kitchen with
free kombucha and maybe getting massages on Wednesday on the on behalf of the
company. And liberated from the fear of losing customers to competitors, tech has
pivoted from liberating customers to manipulating, locking in, and abusing
their users. And the code that does that manipulation, that abuse and that lock-in?
It's all written by technologists. Technologists who discovered their passion
for the field when they felt the thrill of self-determination through writing code
and projecting it over networks. And this is a really important fracture line.
I think this is a way to understand things like the Googler Walkout and Tech Won't
Build It. No Tech for ICE. The solidarity movements against facial recognition and
other surveillance technologies. That technologists are no longer able to delude
themselves with the thrill of billions into thinking that it's OK to do what
they've been doing. And one by one and in increasing numbers, they're starting to
wake up to the fact that it's time to do better. It's time to realize the
liberatory power of technology and step back from the power of technology to
control us. That this will all be so great if we don't screw it up and if we do screw
it up, it's going to be really, really terrible. And there are precedents for
this. And unfortunately, the precedents are pretty incomplete. So,
Robert Oppenheimer very famously was one of the few people in the world who is both
brilliant enough at being a manager and brilliant enough at being a nuclear
physicist that he could lead the creation of the first nuclear bomb and the
Manhattan Project in Los Alamos in the United States. And legendarily, as that
first nuclear bomb test went off, he turned away from the mushroom cloud and
said, "I am become death destroyer of worlds," and embarked on a lifelong
project to demilitarize the atom to to put back in the bottle the genie that he had
made. And my hope is that we can arrive at a world in which our Oppenheimers decide
to put down their tools before they make their atom bombs instead of after. That,
that we are at this crossroads now where not only are the harms so visible that
they're undeniable, but also that rewards for building the digital
equivalent of these A-bombs have dwindled from a star in technology's hall of fame
to a really well funded pension plan. And surely that is not enough to sell out for.
So many of you listening today probably read my novel Little Brother and its
sequel Homeland. I know that because I often hear from you, especially at events
like CCC and DEFCON and at SchmooCon and at THOTCON and so on. People come up to me
and they say, you know, I read your book and I, I understood both how powerful
technology could be and how terrifying it would be if that power was not harnessed
for the people and instead was harnessed to oppress people. And it made me embark
on my career as a technologist, as a security researcher, a human rights
activist, a cyber lawyer. And, you know, that's the best thing in my life, really.
I mean, apart from my kid and my family. The fact that there are people out there
who have devoted their lives to doing something better because of something
I wrote, that's that's really important to me. And frankly, you know, if my kid has
got a chance of growing up in a world that doesn't make Orwell look like an optimist,
it's going to be in part because of that stuff.
But I've written a new Little Brother book.
I wrote this book that came out this year called Attack Surface.
And this is genuinely not an ad. You don't have to read it. And in fact, if you're
watching this, you probably don't need to, although you might enjoy it. Because this
is aimed at a different kind of technologist. This is a story about the
kind of technologist who spends their whole life kidding themselves that working
on systems of control and oppression are not that big a deal, because if they
didn't do it, someone else would do it. There's an endless supply of
Oppenheimers, and if I turn my back, someone else will be there to to finish my
work. Who come to a realization, maybe belated, that they've spent their whole
life building a dystopia that they don't want to live in. And who redeem
themselves, who come back from the brink. And the reason I wrote this story now is
because I really wanted to reach the technologists who are waking up every day
and saying I fell in love with this stuff because it liberated me. And I spend my
days figuring out how to take away the future of people who might be liberated by
it themselves. And that's an urgent message, because author's
monopolies–IP–are available to everyone thanks to the Internet of Things,
thanks to our embedded systems.
I'm going to break here and editorialize very briefly.
This is the slide I'm most proud of, not not for any kind of intellectual heft, but
I'm really bad at the GIMP, and I think I did a really good job. So I just want to,
if you're if you're looking away from your screen, if you're like peeling vegetables
or something, spare a glance at this slide. I'm very happy with this slide.
So the IoT means that every device in our world has access to an author's monopoly,
has IP in it. And that governments will enforce the strictures that the designers
and manufacturers of these devices put into them by punishing people who try to
use competitive compatibility to undo those strictures. And not only that, but
IoT devices are not merely smart as a convenience to invoke the law.
They're also smart as a way to enforce the manufacturer's desires, as a way to
control the the actions of users, of competitors, and of critics. That
these devices have a kind of unblinking eye that watches you whenever you use them.
And if it catches you trying to do something
that might displease the manufacturer's shareholders,
it can stop you, and it can rat you out to the authorities.
And so, you know, speaking in my professional capacity
as a dystopian science fiction writer, this scares the shit out of me.
Now, that is all a kind of grim way to end.
And so I'm going to finish this off with a couple of words on what gives me hope. And
this comes from my colleague James Boyle at the Duke Center for the Public Domain.
And Jamie, when he talks about the computer liberation movement,
he compares it to the ecology movement.
And before the term ecology was coined, we didn't have a movement.
We just had a bunch of issues. Some people cared about whales,
some people cared about owls, some people cared about the ozone layer.
And maybe they thought that the people who cared about another issue
were doing important work, but it wasn't their work.
And they weren't really on the same side. They weren't part of the same cause.
But the term ecology changed all of that. The term ecology took a thousand issues
and turned it into one movement; one movement that everyone had
each other's back on. Even if the reason you were in the movement was owls,
you were there to fight the corner of the people who cared about the ozone layer.
And you began to understand that these were all facets of the same problem.
Well, today, monopolies have taken over
and destroyed the lives of people in a million ways.
Right?
Whether you're a professional wrestling fan, a beer drinker, a whiskey drinker,
an eyeglass-wearer, a plane-flyer-in, someone who relies on energy or
financial services or whose money was stolen by a company whose auditors were
one of the big four accounting firms. Whether you are someone who is upset
because there's four movie studios left or three record labels or because there's
only one movie theater left in the United States… one movie theater chain of any
size left in the United States. Or whether you're pissed off that you're not going to
get the vaccine, because in the US there's only one company that makes glass bottles
of any size. All of these people don't know it, but they're in the same side.
They're on the same fight. And that fight is the fight against monopolies.
Now, people talk about big tech as though they're super geniuses.
But when we rip off the mask, we discover that
these are not titans who built monopolies through their special genius.
They're just three sociopaths in a trench coat.
They're just the latest version of the kind of monopolist
that we have been fighting since time immemorial,
since the Rockefellers, since the Mellons,
since every monopolistic family that tried to establish a dynasty
that would allow them to rule as though they were kings
was broken up and relegated to just having their names on a couple of buildings.
We know how to deal with these people, and it's time that we dealt with them
for what they are, which is just plain, old fashioned sociopaths
and not as super geniuses who stand astride the world like colossi.
Thank you.
H: Thank, thank you. I think I'm back now. All right, well, thanks for this talk. We
are basically out of time, so we're moving the Q&A to the fireside chat, which will
happen in, I think, 20 minutes or so. And then all the questions that have already
been asked for this talk will also be answered then.
But Cory, I think we had a short stream outage around minute 5.
CD: OK.
H: So if you know what you said at minute 5 CD: Oh that was the full frontal nudity!
CD: *laughter* H: You can maybe try to,
H: try to recapitulate it. CD: I don't know what I said…
CD: minute 5… H: History of networks apparently.
Unfortunately, it was not visible for us. So I don't know myself, but I think
H: it was the history of networks. CD: Probably it was my story about, it
it might have been my story about the alt. hierarchy. That's probably it.
And and if you if you go to your favorite search engine,
whether it's like, AltaVista or Ask Jeeves or Yahoo,
and type in: alt.interoperability.adversarial
you'll find an article I wrote for the Electronic Frontier Foundation
about the history of the alt. hierarchy.
So I think that's probably what got cut out.
H: OK, wonderful. Thank you.
H: I think people know how to use Google. CD: I think Lycos has also indexed it.
H: Yes. They'll try to they'll try to figure it out.
H: All right. Well, thank you very much. CD: Thank you!
H: Good luck & see you soon CD: I'll see you guys in the fireside chat.
*rc3 postroll music*
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