Cory Doctorow: Homeland

That’s my cold dripper over there. I run it in the summer.

Yes, it’s very meth lab-ie. Alice gave that me. It’s a Kyoto dripper. Basically it does the same thing as a mason jar and a piece of cheesecloth does except that it’s a lot easier to clean up and looks good.

At Burning Man, I definitely make cold-brew because it’s the best thing. You don’t want hot coffee at Burning Man and it’s just fucking awesome. Especially in an environment where you want a jolt to wake you up at 6:00 PM as opposed to where you want to winding down your day at 6:00 PM. It’s nice to have a big fucking jar of very, very strong coffee in the fridge.

Only recently. When I lived in California I didn’t go. I was always going to the World Science Fiction Convention instead. My wife talked me into it a couple of years ago for our 40th birthday. We went for a joint 40th party. It was more complicated because we had to rent an RV. If I’d have lived in California it would have been a lot simpler. But it was so much fun. We camped with a group of friends, the Liminals who are people I’ve known from The Well, which is an online service in California that I’ve been on since I lived in Toronto in the early ‘90s, so people I’ve known for a really long time. They’re really good and very fun people, and they have a very established camp with big art cars. We’ve got a storage locker in Reno with a smoker in it, and sofas and sunshades. It’s a really good camp to be in. For the last few years we’ve been really lucky, we’ve had very good placement right in the middle.

Yes, absolutely. It’s not ours but we’re lucky that we’re a part of the group that has it. I was totally blown away by how good it was. I thought that it was on the one hand going to be very doctrinarian. I thought it was going to full of people explaining to you that you’re not doing it the Burning Man way, and also that it would be pretty austere…In fact it was just the opposite of that. Even when people were quoting chapter and verse The 10 Principles of Burning Man at you, they were always rolling their eyes while they did it. It was never taken very seriously…They’re not like commandments, they’re more like a social contract. And people just go all out. Stuff that you would just never fucking imagine out there. This year there was someone who was serving white linen fine dining meals to anyone who rocked up for free, with multi-courses and wine…It’s just amazing, it really is.

That might be so. Certainly you don’t meet as many people who go over here as you do there. But people have been telling me that things were better in the old days since I was born. So I’m totally skeptical of anyone who claims that things used to be better in the old days. I mean presumably one of the things that used to be better in the old days, when people tell you this, is that they were younger. It didn’t hurt as much in all the places that you start to hurt as you get older. And that it was novel, and that the novelty has worn off some.

I mentioned The Well before; From the day I got on The Well people were telling me how much better it used to be in the olden days. Every protest movement I’ve been a part of used to be better in the olden days. Everything used to be better in the olden days. And I just think it’s bullshit. I think that things go through cycles…I think people who insist that their personal recollection of things means that it was always better in the old times show a remarkable lack of self-awareness and are just generally giant spoil sports. What a shitty thing to do. Because it’s generally the younger people right? They’re the people who show up later. What a shitty thing to do to younger people to insist that nothing that they do will ever be as good as it was, because it was the old days…

There’s a strain of Orthodox Judaism that says that no Rabbi can ever overturn a Rabbi who came in a generation before, because by definition every generation is further from the Garden and further from God’s perfection than the generation that came before. So every Rabbi knows less than the generation of Rabbis that came before him. It’s such a poisonous idea. It’s literally the opposite of the enlightenment. The idea of the enlightenment is that things get better. That you stand on the shoulders of giants. I think that there is a temptation to believe that things used to be better, because of course in our own experience we can remember that when we were younger, we were more flexible and things didn’t hurt and the colors are more vibrant and the flavors are more flavorsome and the novelties were newer and the people of your preferred gender were more aesthetically pleasing and all the rest of it. But that’s your own relationship with entropy, and not the world’s actual counter entropic trend. We as a species are running counter entropically. Yes, we push a lot of chaos out into the wider universe because entropy can’t be destroyed, but we as a species make this pocket of non-entropy, this counter entropic pocket that builds on itself where each generation has access to more tools, and more procedures for being even better at being counter entropic.

Regress and progress are not uniform. There are areas of social liberalism that are further ahead now than they’ve been in a very long time and things that people say with a straight face now that you never would have heard back then...There are parts of social liberalism that are much more widely accepted now. I mean, if you turn on the radio here you’ll hear pretty straight-laced mainstream commentators talking about the Church of England shooting itself in the foot by insisting that women can’t become bishops or insisting that they need not consecrate gay marriage. Imagine 15 years ago someone on [BBC] Radio 4, the announcer and the guest on a morning radio show commiserating with one another about how ridiculous it is. Neither of them feeling the need to play devil’s advocate and say well of course we know that homosexuality is evil and God hates it. Both of them saying this is just terrible. How could this have happened? How could this have come to pass? That’s pretty amazing.

There are other elements where, of course, it’s gotten much worse. I mean we really do live in an era where individuals who find themselves even tangentially involved with drugs in the United States have their houses taken away. Even if they’ve done nothing willful, they just had stolen property or drugs on their property, they lose their houses, they lose their cars, they lose their jobs, and they lose their liberty. Whereas HSBC can launder billions of dollars in drug money knowingly and merely be fined five weeks income and have their executive suite defer some of their bonuses for a brief period. That is in some ways without precedent. But then, on the other hand, we know about it and we have the access to the organizing tools now that we didn’t have access to when I was younger.

I’ve said this many times, when I was an activist in the 1980s, 98% of my job was stuffing envelopes and 2% was figuring out what to put in the envelopes. Today we get the envelopes for free and the address books for free. That’s just a giant qualitative change and it does make it possible for us to do things that we weren’t able to do before.

That’s very true.

It’s not arguable, it’s true. Apart from a few Ivy League degrees, the rate of return on an investment in tertiary education, in most fields, in most universities in America is lower than the rate of return on gilts. Literally just buy bonds and you’ll get more money out of the system then you would on borrowing to get a university degree over the long run.

Well, they share a certain common heritage. You mentioned for the first time there’s a disincentive to get an education, but what you don’t mention about the UK situation is that for the first time poor people have been given access to tertiary education. It’s not a coincidence that when tertiary education ceased to be the exclusive province of people who had a lot of political influence, that education ceased to be untouchable as an area for defunding by government. In other words, when universities were the exclusive province of rich people who were in close contact with the political classes, nobody took seriously the idea of defunding free education in this country. But when it became more broadly democratized, you could start talking about education as almost like a market proposition.

Well, not just that…One of the reasons to let poor people into university was in the name of social mobility. So when we start talking about universities particularly –– I’m not talking about apprenticeships, I’m not talking about trade schools and I’m not talking about polytechnics –– when we start talking about universities as vocational programs that exist, not primary because of an interest in scholarship but because of a positive return on investment in the employment world, and also because of the perception that the best jobs leave you out if you haven’t gone through university...I’m leaving aside for the moment here a few parts of the university which are the tracks that lead into the professions, medicine, law and a couple of others. When you say the reason to go and get a double first in English and German at UCL is because having a double first degree is itself a ladder into –– not the professions –– but a better job, a white collar job, then it starts to become a market proposition. You are not funding the university because you value scholarship.

Scholarship is inherently not a market activity. You fund scholarships for the same reason you fund basic research. You could call scholarship basic research. It does have a positive return to the economy, but that return isn’t possible to recoup through normal investment. No rational market actor invests in pure research. No one wants to fund a super collider, and yet, super colliders actually do produce more money for the whole economy than they cost because of all the spin offs that come out of it. That’s why we fund scholarship. That’s why we fund basic research. The two of them are very closely related. But once you start funding it because it gets people better jobs, then all of a sudden you can talk about them returning a piece of their better job back to the economy.

When it was just rich people going, it wasn’t about just getting a better job, because you were already rich, you already had the entré into the better job. You could already do unfunded apprenticeships and your parents’ friends were the people offering you the unfunded apprenticeships. You had a good five ways within the system. But now it’s a market transaction, and once it’s a market transaction we start applying cost benefit analysis to it. We start saying, well if the university degree earns you so many pounds, then it makes sense to start talking about you paying so many pounds. And if the objective here is to take people whose lifetime income expectancy was so many pounds, and make it a little bit higher –– which is what we call social mobility –– then why shouldn’t that be a virtuous cycle and they pay back into it. That way the university can expand the number of students they take on and all the rest of it, right?

The problem with that is that it’s become a Ponzi scheme, especially in America. We haven’t quite gotten there here. But in America, you have this crazy thing where it is somewhat true and it’s also universally received as true, that you can’t get a good job without a university degree. It’s also the case that universities, including many state colleges –– that are actually owned by the public –– can act as loan originators, which is to say they lend you the money but where those loans are then backed by the federal government. They can lend you any amount of money because there’s no risk to them because the government will take the loan off their hands. Those loans are then further secured by the federal government when they float them as bonds. So you have this weird perverse incentive where the universities, the more they charge the more they get –– which is a bit weird right? Because in real market economies, the more you charge the more you get up to a point, and then people start going, wait a second, that’s not worth it anymore, and they stop paying in. But if I tell you that you can’t get a job unless you get a degree, and then I tell you that no matter how much the degree costs I can get you a loan for that much, all of a sudden you start getting takers for those crazy propositions and that starts to look like a bubble, like a pyramid scheme.

Then you get the bond traders who actually buy these loans and securitize them and turn them into bonds and float them around. Those people actually have it in their interest to keep tuition high and to keep the economy in such a state that indeed unless you have a degree you can’t get a good job, because that brings more people into the system who take out more loans. Those loans get bigger, that turns into more bonds, those bonds produce more coupons and those coupons continue to fund the private equity funds and whoever else is buying those bonds. And again, the federal government guarantees those bonds, and to the extent that the federal government is there guaranteeing the bonds, there’s a lot of money to be spent on lobbying the federal government to continue guaranteeing those bonds.

Also, the federal government can be successfully lobbied to do what they’ve done now over the last 10 years, which is make student debt the only kind of debt you can’t be relieved from in bankruptcy, and the only kind of debt that can be taken out of social security. This is a perfect storm of awful, where in order to get any kind of a good job you have to take a loan out for a hyper inflated university degree and that loan is then visited upon you forever.

You can’t be relieved of that debt through bankruptcy, even if it turns out you made the wrong decision, and the debt collection practices are set up so there’s almost no limits on them and they can impose arbitrary fees and penalties on you. Whatever your student loan was, you actually can never escape it because if you miss a single payment or even if a payment goes astray, suddenly you have these ballooning charges that could double or triple your student debt and those keep recurring through the life of your student debt, such that it becomes almost a form of indenture.

People also who carry a lot of debt are much more beholden to their employers. Especially a kind of debt where if you miss a payment you have ballooning charges and penalties, because you can’t afford to be made redundant, you can’t afford to be taken off the job, you certainly can’t afford to risk being fired. Those people become a more pliant workforce. So you have, again, this perfect storm of awfulness where all of these awful interests are aligned into making people indebted and unhappy and unable to fulfill their lives, fulfill their potential.

For one thing, people don’t start businesses if they can’t afford to quit their jobs. So all of that economic creativity that America has often benefited from…I mean, for all that America is a nation of military adventurism and conquest, it’s also a nation of entrepreneurship and an enormous amount of its economic mite has been driven not just by resource extraction from foreign economies, but also from the exporting of entrepreneurial ventures. You know, inventing stuff that other people in the world want a buy, that entrepreneurial zeal is increasingly locked up behind people who struggle with debt and can’t afford to quit their jobs to do something cool. This is why you have dot com millionaires who are actually offering cash prizes to people who have good grades not to go to university. They want those people unlocked from debt so they can go off and invent cool things and make jobs and unlock new economic growth for the country.

Yeah, this is a real problem, and so fictionalizing it was very easy. And one of the things about debt is it’s a bubble…When interest rates are lower than inflation, you need to do something with your money otherwise you lose money every day you leave it in the bank. Ordinary people have increasingly found themselves becoming speculators and one of the things they’re speculating on is debt. There has been this bubble of buying and selling debt in a way that has exposed ordinary people to bond markets who have never been exposed before, never would have had that direct experience. You now have this interest in people being indebted, which has been identified as an ill since biblical times. I mean, this is in all of the Abrahamic traditions, warnings about the danger or debt. You probably saw David Graeber’s book, Debt, that came out last year, a magnificent book about debt that also influenced my thinking on this. It was really easy for me to imagine dirty tricks being there to keep the bubble inflated because every bubble has dirty tricks. Bubbles attract dirty tricksters, and it’s often the same people.

There was a good book I read last year, The Monster, about the Lehman Brother’s bankruptcy. One of the things that the author pointed out is the mortgage salesmen who sold the shitty mortgages that Lehman was laundering were literally the same people working out of the same boiler rooms as had been used to pump and duck the S&L crisis. Literally the same fraudsters moved from one fraud to the next fraud to the next. They take the same skill set; It’s highly transferable, from one fraud to the next, and they bring it along with them. So I found it real easy to imagine the same corporate crooks who gave us the subprime crisis, giving us an educational bond crisis in the same way and exercising undue influence in the halls of power in the same way.


Homeland will be available online and in bookstores on February 5, 2013. Catch Cory Doctorow on the Homeland book tour (February 5th thru 26). Visit us.macmillan.com/ for a full list of venues and dates. For more on Cory Doctorow visit craphound.com/. A free copy of Little Brother can be downloaded under a Creative Commons license here.