Hello, I'm Jesse Hirsch.

Welcome to Metaviews, recorded live in front of an automated audience.

And today we've got a real special show.

Cory Doctorow is helping me ring the alarm because, yes, these are some crazy times.

We're recording this on Sunday night.

I'm gonna release this on Monday morning in advance of Trump's inauguration.

Now, Corey, I have a format for each episode, and I sort of have two segments to start, which are kind of meant to be Icebreakers.

The first is sort of the tradition of all media, which is the news.

And this is partly because Metaviews, we publish a daily newsletter on Substack.

And today, actually, we were talking kind of a Hegelian dialectic of saying that we've entered this weird moment of synthesis where what used to be the thesis the neoliberal global order is kind of now being replaced by a new thesis that we're attentively calling AI Nationalism, but really it's authoritarian nationalism.

And so we're just playing with this dialectic.

But I sort of, again, say it as an icebreaker, because I like to keep our guests on the back of their feet.

So is there any news that you think our audience needs to know?

This could be personal news.

This could be world news, but fundamentally, it's a question of what are you paying attention to?

Corey, given the crazy news cycle we find ourselves in, is there anything you think that's not getting enough attention that you've kind of got an eye on, that you think more people should be paying attention to?

Well, I try not to let things like the inauguration occupy too much mind space.

It's going to happen whether or not I pay attention to it.

There's a bunch of stuff that's going to happen afterwards, some of which has been announced that I think, you know, if I are in Chicago, I'd be organizing about the ice raids that they've announced.

But most of it is just.

We don't know how much of it is posturing and how much of it is real.

And.

And if you recall the last Trump administration, we spent a lot of time worrying about things that he promised to do and didn't do.

And, you know, that is.

It's a very effective tactic, right, to threaten to do something and then make your enemies organize and then just sort of change your mind, and they waste a lot of time.

So I'm trying not to.

Too much energy into it.

Instead, I'm thinking about stuff that's sort of more in my immediate horizon.

I.

I've been very busy because I'VE got a book coming out and I've got another book that's in final edits and I've got a podcast series I'm writing for the national broadcaster in Canada.

So that's what I've really had my head down on.

But things that are not related to those that I paid attention to lately is this growing dispute around Blue sky and Mastodon, and particularly I wrote a.

Wrote a long op ed I'm going to publish tomorrow about how it's a category error to think that the reason that things go wrong is that they are for profit.

Not that there's like a good capitalism and a bad capitalism, but there are lots of different kinds of capitalism.

And, you know, I think it is praxis to pay attention to the different factions who call themselves capitalist and where they diverge from each other.

And a lot of capitalism is zero sum if one kind of cap, you know, if the crony capitalists win, the entrepreneurial capitalists lose, you know, that sort of thing.

Trump's, Trump's brand of capitalism is going to be really bad for a lot of people who call themselves capitalists.

And this shows you where the fracture lines are.

It shows you how to shatter a coalition that has otherwise been very powerful.

And it's got us, you know, running scared a lot of the time.

And I think that when people say, okay, all for profit, social media is bad.

All not for profit, social media is good.

Social media that's born not for profit is good, social media, social media that's born for profit is bad.

They're kind of missing the history of software freedom, which almost entirely related to products that were born proprietary and for profit and that we're liberated by force majeure, by hackers, right?

Like we took SMB, the network protocol for Microsoft, and we cloned it and made Samba, which is now in every device you use.

We took Unix operating system made by A monopolist called AT&T and we cloned it.

Now it's called GNU Linux and it's in every device that you use, right?

We took the Microsoft Office file formats and we standardized them and cloned them.

And now they're in LibreOffice and every other kind of text editor that you use, they're all standardized on this.

And the fact that Blue sky has got 20 million users and there's only one blue sky server.

But the protocol is designed to let there be lots of Blue sky servers which would let people leave.

If the management of Blue sky went wrong, if the fears about how a commercial operator will run.

Blue sky went wrong, militates for, like, creating those other Blue sky servers on the one hand, because it gives people somewhere to go if things go wrong at Blue Sky.

But on the other hand, you know, while venture capital firms like the ones that have backed Blue sky do pursue profit at all costs, they pursue profit at all costs, not unprofitable ventures at all costs.

Yeah.

And if, if, if doing something that is insidificatory and makes the users unhappy and causes them to leave, costs the firm money, the VCs are far less likely to lean on the management to force them to do it.

Right.

And so it creates both a set of incentives that, you know, cut against the impulse to exploit and extract from users, and also gives users a way out.

And I, I realize that the difference between me and some of the people I'm arguing with on Mastodon is while I like Mastodon, I am not a Mastodon partisan.

I am an anti insidification partisan.

Right.

My mission is not the triumph of Mastodon.

It is the end of insidification.

Well, and, and I think the whole point of portability is we don't want there to be one.

We want there to be a diverse ecosystem.

Can you comment briefly on the free Our Feeds initiative?

Well, that's what I'm thinking of.

Yeah.

I put my name on it and a lot of people got angry and they're like, why are you helping these people raise $30 million when we could spend $30 million on the Fediverse?

And I'm like, we should spend $30 million in the Fediverse.

And I don't see how it's mutually exclusive either.

Yeah, I mean, I don't have $30 million and I don't have $60 million.

So this is a largely academic question, as befits my own ability to fund projects.

But there are a bunch of Mastodon features that I think would be better if they were Blue Skies version of them, like composable moderation.

Some of the recommendation stuff is really good.

The way that they handle usernames is really good, where your domain can be your username.

It's really portable and exciting.

But there's one feature Mastodon has that bluesky should have, which is federation, not portability.

You said portability before.

I don't know if you were speaking loosely or not, but portability is, broadly speaking, the ability to move your data from one service to another.

I don't think it matters that much with social media.

There's some people who use social media in a way where the data there really matters to them.

But the thing that keeps people stuck to social media, the reason people don't leave Facebook when Facebook goes bad is not because they care about their old posts.

It's because they care about their friends.

And so that's why federation and interoperability are important, because then you could leave Facebook, you could go to Mastodon and you could continue talking to the people that you left behind on Facebook and yeah, maybe you wouldn't get your old posts.

I, you know, that is not a thing.

Yeah.

Is sticky.

Yeah, it's not sticky.

It's sticky for some things.

It's probably sticky for photographers on Instagram, you know, but, but.

Or photographers on Flickr, for sure.

And if you look in the memos of the lawsuit against Facebook, the government antitrust case against Facebook, there's some internal memos where they were rolling out Facebook photos.

And the program manager in charge of Facebook photos sends Zuck a memo that says, we're going to make this really good because we don't want people to go to Google, which was a concern for them at the time.

If we can convince them to put all their family photos in Facebook photos and then make it so they'll have to lose them if they leave Facebook, then they'll stay on Facebook even if Google is better.

Right.

That's sort of what the substance of the memo is.

And so there are some kinds of data where you want portability, but broadly, the reason people stay on social media, it's not the data, it's the people they love.

Right.

Like, that's the great, you know, crisis of social media is that you are being held hostage by the people you care about.

And it is your care for those people that.

That keeps you from leaving.

And it is their care for you that keeps them from leaving.

And it is exploiting our mutual impulse to care for one another that lets social media bosses, the bosses and the legacy platforms abuse us with impunity because they know we won't leave.

Because we love our friends more than we hate Mark Zuckerberg.

Zuckerberg.

Or Elon Musk.

Although I think that trade off may be reaching a point where that hatred may be so great.

Now I want to hate more.

I'm conscious of our time, so I want to.

Let me say one more thing about this.

Sure.

But let me, let me segment that into our what's the Future Feature, because I think you are talking now about the future, please.

Sure.

So everyone's seen that fantastic documentary Fiddler on the Roof.

And in Fiddler on the roof, you have Jews living in the shtetl, and I think it's Belarus or Ukraine or something, and a tevka.

And every 15 minutes, the czar's Cossacks ride through and kick six kinds of shit out of them.

And in the end, they leave, right?

The Tsar actually kicks all the Jews out of Russia.

And that's the tragedy, right?

They leave the place where they've been beaten up for the last two and a half hours.

And the reason it's a tragedy is they have nothing except each other.

And it's really clear in the last scene that they'll never see each other again, right?

And so the Anatevka problem is the social media problem, right?

Mark Zuckerberg or.

Or Elon Musk can ride through our shtetl every 15 minutes and kick six kinds of out of us.

And we'll stay put because we love each other.

And eventually, maybe you would leave if things got bad enough.

Certainly.

Like, if you look at my family comes from a part of Eastern Europe that was periodically Belarus and periodically Poland.

And, you know, there are people within my family who left before they had to leave, who left before World War II for various reasons, but they were outliers.

And, you know, my grandmother is a Soviet refugee, and she was an outlier, right?

She.

She left Leningrad and never came back after this.

She was a child soldier in the siege.

She was evacuated, and she met my grandfather, and they.

They ran off, but none of her family did.

They all stayed.

And they're all screwed now because, you know, St.

Petersburg's not a good place to be right now.

And, you know, it was because they were holding each other hostage.

My grandmother, you know, between trauma and marriage and becoming a mother at 15, she just broken all of it.

So what's the future?

Well, you know, if you live in Berlin and if you lived in Berlin in 1950 and you wanted to try moving to Paris, if you lived in East Berlin, you would have to risk everything, go over the Wall, never see your family again, and lose every possession you have.

If you live in Berlin now and you want to try living in Paris, you just get on a train and maybe you come back again, right?

And you can make all kinds of choices.

And I think the future is that we make it that easy to leave social media, that we create some mix of mandates.

So the European Union has the Digital Markets act, and we'll see how that's enforced, because they just fired the commissioner who is responsible for it, Vishtagar, and they replaced her With a big tech friendly person that, you know, Nick Clegg's last act was, was getting this person in.

So they are going to mandate certain kinds of interoperability, starting with, with messaging.

So you'll be able to go from like imessage to, well, imessage for some reason is excluded, but you'll go from like WhatsApp to Google messenger as easily as you can switch from T Mobile to, you know, Google Fi or whatever, right?

Where you can just change numbers, no one knows you've changed, they continue to message you at the old place, you reach them and so on.

So that's, that's.

We could bring that to social media with a mandate.

We just have a law.

We could also remove the IP protections that firms use to block people who just do this by force majeure, right.

Who reverse engineer and modify the way these programs work without the cooperation or the consent of the people who made the programs.

And you know, there's a whole suite, it's like a thicket of, of IP laws, anti circumvention, tortious interference, trademark, patent, copyright contract, all this nonsense.

And we could just clear that away.

And when you ask about the future, one thing I'm really interested in, I am a Canadian, we're like serial killers.

We're everywhere we look, just like everyone else.

And Canada has a bunch of these IP laws because it was part of NAFTA and then part of the sequel to nafta, the usmca.

And basically we were promised access to American markets if we would make it a crime to reverse engineer a car so an independent mechanic could fix it, to reverse engineer a printer so that you could put anyone's ink in it, to reverse engineer a social media network so that you could hop from one to the other to reverse engineer a pacemaker so that you could, could add your own security patches if it was not secure and up to date.

Right?

All of these things that we've given up that are a gift to large American firms in exchange for tariff free access to US markets.

Trump has said that he's going to impose a 25 tariff in 48 hours as we speak.

Right?

So if he imposes a 25 tariff on Canadian goods, Canada could retaliate with its own tariffs, which would make everything in Canada more expensive.

That would be very stupid.

Or we could say, actually we're going to have the same engineers who built Research in Motion and sold you the BlackBerry and built Nortel and sold you your switches.

We're going to have that same engineering talent trained in the same institutions start reverse engineering American products and making add ons that anyone in the world can buy.

A Canadian app store for iOS that charges you a 5% commission.

Could we do that?

Could we do that to Chinese tech too?

Yeah, like instead of saying get out Huawei, the opposite, say come on, give us your tech so we can reverse.

Engineer, engineer it and we'll, we'll write alternative firmware for it and so on.

Yeah, absolutely.

I mean and, and honestly, China could do that to the United States.

There's no re.

Like, like the Politburo would benefit significantly from having 10 cent run an app store for iOS.

Right.

It would just give them like lots of, of, you know, levers of control that they currently wish they had where they've met.

I'm curious, have you been following the red note kind of quote unquote protest?

What are your thoughts there both in terms of where we started this with the social relations that keep us bonded under the apps.

Yeah, but, but this very symbolic moment amongst, you know, young Americans who are kind of telling the government to fuck off.

Well, look, anytime young Americans tell the government to fuck off is a good day.

Right.

But you know, there's a lot of protests that's just not very effective.

And I think as a protest method, like it's, it's a spectacle.

It's not much of a spectacle.

Right.

Like as a parent, the fact that my 16 year old is ignoring me with her face in her phone looking at RedNote is completely indistinguishable from my child ignoring me with their face.

So you know, as a spectacle, it's a very subtle one.

Right.

You have to rely on kind of self reported usage.

I've been interested.

You know the thing that I found most interesting are screen grabs of Chinese users reacting to the influx of American kids and talking about the kind of mutual understanding they're seeking, which is very interesting.

I mean international youth movements that are anti authoritarian have done some pretty remarkable things in the past summer.

68 being a good example.

Right.

And you know, Greta Thunberg and the, the sit in strikes.

And honestly, China's got a problem with its young people.

For one thing, it keeps teaching them about Marxism and then they're like, wait a second, we'd like to do some Marxism now.

And the Politburo is like, no, fuck off, you can't support those wildcat strikes.

Right.

Like you are.

Your job is to support communism with Chinese characteristics.

I know we made you read Lenin.

Please stop thinking about what Lenin said.

Well, and this Seems to be the paradox of kind of narrative control in our world.

And I wanted to talk to you about your novel in particular and about kind of your role as a storyteller, because you do seem to be one of the lone kind of radical voices that is part of the creative aspect.

Like there's radical voices in academia, there's radical voices in terms of some of the critics and protests, but there aren't a lot of radical voices who are both in fiction and in the real world, in current affairs.

And I'm kind of.

Right, right.

But I'm curious, especially with this novel, you kind of used history.

You did this at the start of our discussion today when you were talking about the history of hacking.

Right.

And the history of modding and of people making things better.

What is it about this moment that outside of just the way in which you talked about your relationship with your publisher and how this book kind of evolved.

But why do you think the start of the early days of insidification, the early days of the computer revolution, why is that a good time for us to be thinking about the now, Especially given the authoritarianism that's rising?

Well, so I'll hold up the book here and do the promo thing.

Picks and Shovels is a book about Martin Hench.

He's my two fisted crime fighting forensic accountant who is in two other novels, these two here, Red Team Blues and the Bezel that have come out over the last two years.

So I wrote a lot of books during lockdown, wrote nine books during lockdown.

And in the first book we meet him and he's 67 years old and retiring and it's his last job.

And my agent and my editor like this well enough that they, he, he bought two more of them.

And I was like, but he's retired now.

And then I realized I could tell them out of order.

Yeah.

And that like I wasn't foreshadowing anymore.

I was like back shadowing and like the more detail I put in, the easier it got.

And I would look really premeditated even though I was just like winging it.

So it's been like a really effective kind of writing process.

And Picks and Shovels is his first adventure.

It's set in the early 80s during the weird era of the PC.

And he's in San Francisco and he's got his first job and it's working for a company run by a Mormon bishop, a Catholic priest and an orthodox rabbi.

Sounds like the set up for a joke, but the joke is that it's a predatory Ponzi scheme that preys on faith groups and does pyramid selling within face groups of these PCs that are booby trapped so that you have to buy all of your consumables from them.

Like the printer sprockets are a little further apart than a standard printer sprocket so you have to buy paper from them that costs 10x what normal paper costs, right?

Their floppy drives are, are likewise given to, you have to buy their blank floppy dust and so on.

Marty realizes he's working for the bad guys and he goes to work for a rival that he's been hired initially to destroy.

This company started by three young women who used to work for them and who've made it their mission to liberate everyone they helped to entrap.

They're an orthodox woman who's been kicked out of her family because she came out as queer, a Mormon woman who's left the faith because she is upset at the LDS's opposition to the Equal Rights Amendment and a nun who's become a Marxist liberation theologist, you know, working on helping people in the dirty wars in Central America.

And they're all computer virtuosos and they're all disin shittifying right, unfucking these computers that the three wise men that the Reverend Sirs have and sold to their co religionists and Marty helps them.

And you know, the point of this is that there was always an element within computing who saw the opportunity of computers as an opportunity to put people in bondage, to control, spy on people.

If you go back to the 70s, you have Bill Gates and his open letter to computer hobbyists where he says, look, I know the way that we make software is everybody's building their own hardware, everyone is writing code for it, we're all sharing the code and making it better.

It's like a scientific enterprise where you publish your work and then other people peer review it and improve on it and so on.

But I have cloned some software from the Digital Equipment Co Op Cooperate Corporation, right from deck.

I've, I've cloned their basic interpreter and the cloning part was not a ripoff.

But when you copy it, that is, when I do it, it's, it's, it's progress.

When you do it, it's piracy and I insist that no one copy any software ever again without permission, right?

I, I, I stand athwart history shouting stop, right?

I, I'm King Canoodie, right?

Except he succeeded, right?

And he, he set in motion a world where computer users and computer makers were adverse to one another.

And for the next 40 years, we have had an arms race of computer makers trying to figure out how to use computers to disobey the people who own them and do things that are adverse to those people's interests, to hide how they work, and to work against the interests of the people who own them.

So, you know, your.

Your iPhone can run apps that are written by anyone, whether or not they're sold from the App Store.

They just want.

It just won't.

It can.

It won't.

Your printer can use anyone's ink.

It just won't.

And over the years, what.

What started as an arms race that was usually lost by the companies, right?

Because it was a fair fight.

And in a fair fight, even though the companies had more resources, they had a harder position because they were the defenders.

They had to make no mistakes in their copy protection or their ink lockout or whatever.

And then to defeat them, I only had to find one mistake that they'd made.

We call that the attacker's advantage.

And it's considered unbeatable, right?

You never want to be the defender in asymmetric warfare.

You always want to be the attacker.

And so they decided.

They decided since they couldn't win a fair fight, they'd make it unfair.

So by 1998, they gotten this law, the Digital Millennium Copyright act, passed, that just made it a felony to do this.

So instead of making it technically impossible for you to change your computer so it does what it's supposed to do, what you want it to do, they just made it a felony to do it.

And indeed, you know, since then, for the most part, they've made the technology less robust.

Why bother making the technology robust against user modification when you can just put users in jail for modifying it?

And so this is how we end up in a world where our printer ink, right, black water, costs $10,000 a gallon, and you print your shopping lists with a fluid that costs more than the semen of a Kentucky Derby winner.

A great analogy.

Place to have arrived, right?

And so, you know, the.

The point of.

Of going back to the early 80s is to say that this tension existed from the year dot.

There are always people who saw this and said, how can I screw other people?

And there are always people who saw this and said, how can I set people free?

Back to Mastodon and Blue sky, right?

And there were people who wanted to build a demimond on the periphery of homebrew computers and homebrew operating systems and so on that you could use if to both demonstrate and Maintain your ideological purity.

And there were people who wanted to storm the gates and smash them open and set everyone stuck inside free.

Not chide them for being too, you know, soft headed or to lacking the foresight to stay the hell away from anything Mark Zuckerberg or Bill Gates made, but to, like, set them free, even though they made a decision that, you know, you warn them not to make and that you wish they hadn't because you love them more than you hate Bill Gates, too.

Only that means not that you have to stay locked up with them, but that you have to break them out.

Well, and I think that philosophy may be required as we head towards this insidification society, because for me, some of the symbolism, especially of Trump's embrace of crypto, right?

And this meme coin that he sort of launched the day before, it kind of feels like they're taking the culture that you've described that existed within software design, that existed within social media design, and now they're saying, let's apply it to America, let's apply it to, you know, the world in terms of foreign relations.

Yeah.

Do you see that crypto is a very good analogy for Trump ism?

Because the whole point of crypto is caveat emptor, right?

And you remember Trump in the, the Clinton debate, you know, and Clinton accused him of never paying taxes, and he tacitly admitted it.

And he said, that makes me smart, right?

If I can get away with breaking the rules, that makes me smart.

If I can, like, figure out how to misclassify a worker as a contractor, or if I can and deny them benefits, or if I can steal money out of your pay packet in a way that you can't force me to cough up and disgorge, that makes me smart, right?

And crypto is that right?

Whenever someone has their money stolen in crypto, the people who are true believers in crypto will say something like, not your keys, not your wallet, right?

Like you, you made the mistake of keeping your fake money in a web based online service.

We told you not to do it.

Caveat emptor, right?

And caveat empter is like no way to run a society, right?

Because the endpoint of caveat empter is if I can trick you, sucks to be you.

Yeah, right?

If I can, if, if.

And if that maims you, if that ruins you, if you lose everything, sucks to be you.

And that's the Trump Society, right?

Sucks to be you.

Did you vote for me on the promise of me bringing your jobs back?

And then I sent More of your jobs overseas.

Sucks to be you.

Are you the leader of the Teamsters who came and spoke at my conference and then I screwed union workers?

Sucks to be you.

Right?

And you know, that is the.

That is the crypto.

That is Trump.

That is Musk, right?

Did you believe me when I told you there'd be full self driving in 2014 and buy a Tesla in 2015?

Did you believe me when I said it in 2015 and bought one in 2016?

Did you believe it in any of the years since when?

I've announced it as being within 12 months every year since 2014.

Sucks to be you.

No, that's not fraud.

That makes.

That makes me smart.

You said something else that I want to tease out.

Only because it gives us an opportunity to talk about your Kickstarter, which there's this paradox.

On the one hand, these guys are saying freedom of speech, no Internet regulation.

They've gotten the platforms to bend to them in advance of this new regime.

But as you alluded, the ultimate regulation of the Internet is copyright.

Every platform, almost every piece of technology, almost in a very strict, stupid, heavy handed manner.

Copyright, that is the enforcement of private property, tends to be the basis upon which this regulation happens.

And that's why you're using Kickstarter and you're taking a much different approach to market your book.

Explain that, especially the politics of why you're doing that.

So I mentioned the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.

This law passed in 1998 and brought into Canada by Tony Clement and James Moore in 2012, Bill C11.

And under this law, removing a digital lock is illegal, even if you own the thing that's behind the lock.

And what that means, practically speaking, is if you want to sell an audiobook on audible, which controls 90% of the audiobook market, they're a monopolist that was acquired in a predatory, illegal acquisition by Amazon in 2008.

You have to allow them to lock up your book with their digital rights management, their encryption.

And that means that your listeners, your readers, can never take those books out of the Audible app and put them in an app that's not blessed by Audible, which means that you can never leave Audible, because if you leave Audible, your readers have to give up all their books.

And so this has been used to screw readers.

You know, Audible was experimenting last year with ads and audiobooks, and it's been used to screw writers.

So Audible got caught through something called Audible Gate, using an accounting trick to steal $100 million, at least from audiobook creators.

And so you Know both they get you coming and they get you going.

So I don't allow any of this, these digital locks to be used on any of my books.

And as a result none of my audiobooks are carried by Audible.

And so my, my publisher is macmillan.

They're you know, one of the big five publishers and they to their credit really acknowledge that this is a good fight to be fighting.

But they don't want my audio rights if they can't sell the audiobooks on Audible because nobody shops for audiobooks anywhere else.

It's 90% of the market.

So I keep those rights and I, I pay unionized talent, right.

This case will Wheaton SAG AFTRA member to record my audiobooks.

I pay into the SAG AFTRA fund.

I pay professional director and studio and sound engineer and I pay them the going rates.

I don't go on fiverr.

I don't go overseas for cheap labor costs.

A lot of money.

It's kind of a mid five figures expense.

It's very hard to recoup that if you only sell the audiobooks in these stores that are great and I'll name some of them in case you're thinking of getting shot of Audible and finding your way to a more free audiobook world.

Libro fm.

And Libro FM lets you nominate a local bookstore on the grounds that you're probably going in there and browsing the books and then buying the audiobooks at Libro.

And Libro splits the profits with whoever your local bookstore is, which is smart.

Yeah, there's downpour.com but even Google Play is DRM like allows publishers to decide whether they want DRM.

It's not DRM free entirely, but, but you know, they'll let someone sell without DRM like me.

So with no one shopping on those stores, to a first approximation, right.

90% of the market in Audible, I had to do something else.

And so I do these Kickstarters because Kickstarters raise a lot of buzz and they raise a lot of money.

They pre sell a lot of books and, and so I've done seven of them now and they recoup the cost and then some.

And because I also pre sell the hardcover and the paperbacks, the previous two books and the E books and so on.

They also generate a bunch of sales for day one of the book, which is great.

And they give me a way to talk to people who care about my work directly, you know, in a way that gets more reliably delivered than say posting something to a social media account.

And so when I go out on tour.

I'm going to about 12 cities, and starting on February 13th, 14th, I'm going to be in Boston then.

And then I'm going all around the US And Canada.

You know, that, that it gets me, it helps me get people out to the tour events too.

So it's a great way to do things.

It's been very positive.

The audiobooks and ebooks that I sell through the, the Kickstarter, and then I have my own Electronic Store, craphound.com Shop where you can buy my ebooks and audiobooks.

They're not just DRM free.

They also have no license agreement.

So you don't have to click something saying that you won't sell them or loan them or give them away.

You get all the rights that you have under copyright as a user of copyrighted works.

But I wanted to say, you know, apropos, like copyrights, fitness to regulate the Internet.

So first of all, I don't think it's wrong that there is a supply chain regulation for the entertainment industry, right?

As someone in the entertainment industry, I want a regulation for the industry that I'm in.

Copyright's not a very good one.

Maybe it could be, but the one thing that's really important is I don't know why we apply this to people who aren't in our supply chain.

Like the, the test that we use to figure out whether or not you are an entertainment industry supply chain member is whether you're handling or making copies of works.

And so that used to be a pretty good proxy, right?

Like, because it meant you had a printing press or a record factory or a film lab.

Now it just means you have a mouse, right?

And so everyone is suddenly subject to copyright, and it's really not fit for purpose.

No one can figure out what it means.

If we stretch it to cover everything, it ceases to mean anything, you know, and this has been a problem since day one.

Like, I, early on, I was impersonated on a dating site by someone who was luring people out on dates and then not showing up, which was weird.

But I was like, what if this person does show up and kill someone, right?

So I, I actually found the dating site's phone number, because back in those days, if you knew how the Internet worked, you could find phone numbers.

And I called them up and they said, we have no means to report impersonation, but you can report a copyright violation of your photo in the profile and we'll take that down.

And I'm like, this is like uniquely unsuited to it, because first of all, that's a Creative Commons license photo.

It's my author photo.

I don't hold a copyright to it.

But second of all, there are lots of photos of me that I don't hold the copyright to that have nothing to do with Creative Commons.

If they're really determined, I don't hold.

The copyright to it.

So does this mean that you only can shut down impersonation when they use a photo you took and not when a photo.

Not when they use a photo someone else took whom you can't necessarily find?

So it's just not suited for purpose.

It makes for very bad labor regulation, as we're seeing with AI.

So there's a bunch of people who are like, well, we'll use copyright to shut down AI Scraping so that we can prevent wage erosion by AI.

And wage erosion by AI is something we should be worried about, not because AI is good, but because AI Pitchman can convince your boss to fire you and replace you with bad AI.

And, you know, the writer strike showed us how you deal with it.

You just say to your boss, you're not allowed to use AI, or if you do, you can't pay me less or have fewer writers in the writing room, right?

And then your boss is like, well, I guess we're not paying for AI then, right?

Because the only reason we want it is we want to fire you, right?

If we can't fire you, fuck the AI, Right?

Like, we don't.

We don't like it because we think it has good output or because it's fun to play with with.

We like it because we're horny for firing you.

But, you know, if.

If we don't do that, if we just say, okay, well, you have the unambiguous right to decide who can train an AI with your work.

First of all, you just get rid of everything beneficial that people do with scraping and machine learning, right?

So, like, say goodbye to Innocence Project New Orleans that uses LLMs as the top of a pipeline to find the correlates and arrest reports of false arrests and uses those to help get people out of prison.

But, you know, if you're a photographer trying to sell into Getty, which is just about to merge with its largest competitor, you have one company to sell to, and they're just going to say, if you want to sell to Getty, you're going to have to give us your AI training rights.

Getty wants to stop buying things from you and start using an LLM to copy your shit.

Although you're, your point about supply chains comes back to unions, Right.

That those types of supply chains, and especially in the creative industries, they're articulated because of union representation.

Right, sure.

And that's where a lot of this stuff starts to break down.

But unions don't need copyright.

Unions need labor.

Yeah, right.

So like Getty can, can acquire the rights to all of its photographers training, read all of its photographers photos and the right to train on them, then fire all those photographers and use an image generator to replace them.

Right.

That's what Getty wants to do.

Getting the copyright has nothing to do with whether Getty then demands to get the copyright from you.

This is like giving a bullied school kid extra lunch money.

There is not an amount of lunch money that the bullies won't take.

Right.

Like the, you cannot get your kid fed by just handing them more money.

You just give the bullies so much money that they like bribe the principal to look the other way.

What you have to do is structurally change it, which is what labor rights do.

So you have this copyright thing that like on the one hand, you know, we just, we just had the anniversary of poor Aaron Swartz death and he was a hacker who scraped a whole bunch of scientific articles.

No one really knows why but, but.

I'd go further, I'd call him a martyr to, to the corrupt intellectual property regime that you're sort of articulating.

Aaron was very skeptical.

He was a pal of mine and he was very skeptical of, of IP rights and he wanted to, he scraped all these, these files that he was allowed to access.

Like he, he had visiting privileges at MIT and he was allowed to access academic articles from this repository called jstor.

But the terms of service said that you had to access them by hand and not write a program to do it.

And because he wrote a little script that downloaded them, they charged him with 13 felonies.

He was facing 35 years in prison.

They, he had been one of the founders of Reddit and he had made a bunch of money.

They took all of it fight, you know, dragging him through court, dragging the process out.

And once he was broke, he killed himself.

And Aaron was a graduate of Y Combinator in the class of Sam Altman.

And Sam Altman also scraped a bunch of stuff from the Internet in order to get rich.

And Sam Altman gets to write the laws.

Yeah.

And make up his own policies and grift with every hour that God sends.

And they broke poor Aaron on Iraq.

So I, I got a, I just want to finish and say, that's what copyright does.

Right?

Copyright is not a labor right.

Copyright is a system for magnifying power.

And because creative workers don't have power, giving creative workers, copyright does not manufacture the power.

It just transfers the power to industrial entities whom we bargain with and makes it harder for us to bargain against them 100%.

I've always seen copyright as something, quite frankly, we need to abolish that.

The things it serves can be done via other policies, to your point.

But it is fundamentally about empowering the wealthy.

I do.

You know, we're kind of almost out of time.

And I keep.

I put this sound effect in which I'm not sure you could hear that it may not be coming through.

It's tenorsaw ring the alarm because I saw this fantastic tribute you paid to the few Snickens who I also had their album back in the day.

And I'm not sure you're aware of this.

I wanted to bring to your attention.

There's this documentary called Drop the Needle about play to record.

Yes.

Yeah, unfortunately, it's on prime, at least here in Canada, but I'm sure it's on the, you know, interwebs, torrents.

Yes, it is an absolutely dope documentary.

Well, I loved that store.

I mean, I used to, like.

I would get off the young subway probably, I think at like Wellesley, and I'd walk down and there are a few shops I'd stop in, including that one.

And then there was a roti place next door.

I'd get a big roti and then I'd eat that while I listen to my new music on my walk.

And then walk down Queen street to Baka Books and the Silver Snail and get my comics and my science fiction novels for the week.

And that was.

That was a perfect Saturday.

And then I go see Rocky Horror at the Roxy that night.

You know, that was like.

It didn't get any better than that right on there.

In theory.

You heard it that time.

I got it through your channel.

Now, I like to end every episode here of Meta Views with shout outs.

And the point of shout outs is both to again, like the news kind of.

Is there anyone that you're reading, anyone you're thinking about that you kind of want our audience to know?

And I'm gonna give a shout out to two people, Judy Merrill and Emily Paul Weary.

Only because without the two of them, I would never have met you or really had a chance to really understand the nature of the work you do.

So is there anyone you want to shout out or Send in.

I'm looking up the title of this book here in another window.

Bear with me one second.

Second.

Because I'm reading a great book and I'm blanking on the title.

Oh, that's it.

So Pat Murphy, great feminist writer, early cyberpunk.

She has a new book coming out from Tachyon called the Adventures of Mary Darling.

And it is part of a tradition of books that she's done where she's retold classic tales from the perspective of minor, usually female characters who are either missing or get short shrift.

She retold all of the Hobbit, but completely gender swapped because the only women in the hobbit are.

Is this one elf and then the giant flaming vagina that they throw the.

The ring in.

Yeah, right.

And that.

That the total.

Some total representation of femininity and total.

Tolkien and Christopher Tolkien to his absolute discredit forced tour books to withdraw that book from publication on thread of a lawsuit.

Boo.

It's very good.

It's called There and Back Again and I strongly recommend it if you can find it.

I bet the Merrill Collection has it.

But this is a retelling of Peter Pan and it's a feminist retelling of Peter Pan from the perspective.

Do you remember when Wendy Darling and the boys get home from Neverland, there is this coda where you learn that Peter Pan had taken her mother away too and that this is a family tradition.

The mother had also been in Neverland.

This retells it from the perspective of the mother who is horrified that her children have been kidnapped by the monster who took her to Neverland when she was.

And Sherlock Holmes is in it as this like dickhead chauvinist who makes a wonderful foil for Mary Darling.

And Mary Darling is like this.

She's a sword fighting, swashbuckling heroine, you know, because she was on Neverland and then she escaped on a pirate ship and she learned to fight while.

While pretending to be Marty Darling.

And it is very funny.

It's very smart.

It's extremely well plotted.

Like it's really.

It's got a really nice kind of groove.

And then a lot of it takes place on the island in Madagascar where David Graeber did his doctorate.

The island that was made up of anarchist pirates.

Yeah, Lineal women.

That is chronicled in pirate utopia.

The.

His nominally his last book.

I think there will be more books from David.

I'm in touch with his widow and boy did he leave a lot of stuff behind.

So I think there'll be more Graeber books in the years to come.

But.

But his technically, his last book is this Pirate Utopia book.

It's set on this island.

It's set on this pirate utopia island, which is an island where.

Can you repeat the name?

And the author of the book?

Yeah, so it's Pat Murphy.

And the title of the book is the Adventures of Mary Darling.

And it's not out yet.

I'm reading it for a blurb.

It'll be out from Tachyon.

Very cool.

It's a small press.

They're very good.

They did my essay collections.

I.

I'm extremely fond of Tachyon.

So yeah, it's.

It's great.

I mean it really is great.

And this island is amazing.

So like the pirates who lived on this island pretended.

Whenever credulous British merchants would come through, they would pretend to be pirate kings.

And so they would like.

One of them would be nominated the pirate king.

The rest would give him all their loot and he would build like a treasure room and he would sit at the end of it and the rest of the pirates would pretend to be his court.

And all the Malagasy women who were matrilineal and like tough as hell would pretend to be like the harem and they would put on the show for these credulous British merchant sailors who would then go home and say there are these pirate kings in the South Seas.

And Robert Louis Stevenson heard one of these stories and wrote Treasure island because he was taken in by this system systematic decades long hoax by the pirates and their.

Their anarchist, matrilineal, matriarchal female consorts.

And there's like they are distinct ethnic groups still on this island.

The descendants of pirates and matrilineal Malagasy.

And do they still have the matriarchal Malagasy women?

They're a distinct ethnic group.

They have a different dialect and whatever.

That's what David did his doctorate on.

It was an ethnography.

Do they have any of the politics or culture still?

Yeah, yeah, a ton of it.

Yeah, they're like crazy anarchists.

Far out.

Yeah, it's great.

They're still matriarchal and they're still anarchists.

Right on.

Right on.

Well, thank you Corey.

This has been fantastic.

I suspect the Kickstarter is going well.

It is.

I think we're about to.

When I.

When I left it was just about to break 98, 000.

Yeah, it's with $97,990 right now.

Right on.

Which is pretty good.

But a lot of that is things that, you know, things like hardcovers, where I don't get all of the money.

I get a small fraction of the money.

But I am 250 copies away just in audiobook sales from breaking even on this audiobook.

And if I do that, then every dime I make off the audiobook for the rest of time is profit.

Right on.

And for people to find you on Social, I see you're still on X, other Mastodon, other platforms that you are.

Yeah, if you go to pluralistic.net across the top, that's my daily newsletter across the top.

You've got my RSS feed, Mastodon, medium Tumblr and Twitter.

Right.

And then there's a podcast feed as well, so you get all of that stuff.

And I love on X Twitter, your non consensual blue check.

You're like, I ain't paying for this shit.

Yeah, that's right.

That's right.

Yeah.

It's a scam.

You know, he's giving blue checks to people who have a lot of followers to make those followers think that someone they find reputable thinks blue checks are worth paying for.

It's just.

It's just as they would say in Section 5 of the Federal Trade Commission act, it is an unfair and deceptive business practice.

Yeah.

Makes it technically actionable.

Although I don't think the new FTC is going to do anything about it.

Or as you said, the sucks for you society.

Yeah.

Sucks to be you.

Suck to be you.

Although not your case, Corey.

It's pretty cool to be you.

Yes.

Non consensual blue tick.

You too, Jesse.

Cool to be you too.

Thank you very much, Corey, for those listening.

Thanks again for listening.

We've met a views everywhere.

You can find us on Social and we'll be back soon.

All right, take care.