I was recently fortunate enough to spend some quality time with Cory Doctorow, discussing topics related to the plot of Homeland, the thrilling follow up to his contemporary classic novel Little Brother (which serves as a primer on civil rights in the digital age). Our conversation spanned 90 minutes and ran into excess of 17,000 words, so the need for brevity dictated that I had to edit our interview heavily. However, Doctorow has an avid following, and rightly so. Hence I figured those of you that enjoyed the first installment of our interview might appreciate this second bite at the apple.
In the first part, we discussed Burning Man, which is where the action in Homeland kicks off, and the student debt bubble, which serves as a backdrop to the book. In part two, our conversation delves further into the post-Occupy politics of Homeland. In Doctorows book, our hacktivist hero Marcus Yallow, having been forced out of the education system due to financial pressures, gains a position as a tech guru for an independent political candidate. Our discussion therefore naturally turns to the limitations of two party systems, the potential social media has to transform the political landscape, the pros and cons of clicktivism, and the perils of online activism, which is especially poignant given that Aaron Swartz contributed an afterward to the book.
Nicole Powers: It does seem like were living for the first time in recent memory in an era where politically and socially things are regressing rather than progressing.
Cory Doctorow: Regress and progress are not uniformWe have the access to the organizing tools now that we didnt have access to when I was younger. Ive 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. Thats just a giant qualitative change and it does make it possible for us to do things that we werent able to do before
One of the criticisms that Occupy consistently received was that it refused to center in an ideological program. Its very hard to find out what Occupy was for. In general we knew what Occupy was for. I mean Quinn Norton in her eulogy for Occupy said that Occupys manifesto was: Things are fucked up and bullshit. Clearly that was the underlying message of Occupy. But turning that into a program was something that they were very reluctant to do, although elements of it emerged.
I think one of the reasons that political movements have been so concerned with constitutionalizing early on and setting out a program is because group forming is expensive. When it costs a lot of time and energy to get married, you want to make sure that youve got something in common so that you dont end up getting divorced right away. When its cheap to form a group, to all show up, when you get the envelopes and the letters and the stamps for free and the envelope stuffing doesnt take any time, then it makes sense to all go hang out together for a while and see whether you have enough goals in common to go on to march together. Because its not a big deal to have a divorce a little while later, and then reform in some other configuration...
I think that the willingness of Occupy to do what programmers would call late binding of a program was its real strength. It was one of the things that made it possible to go on, because you never had to decide whether or not you were on or off the Occupy program. You never had to check a list of tick boxes to decide whether you were there for the same reason as everyone else. You could all say well you were more or less here for the same reason.
As someone who grew up among Communists whose movements have consistently been ridden by ideological differences that are literally incomprehensible to people who are not in the movement, people who seem to have so much more in common with each other than they have with anyone else in the world, and yet who cant stand to be in the same room with each other, I understand this. I mean, devoting your life to a political ideology thats not mainstream is an enormous expense. Its a huge sacrifice to make. Its something you can only make if youre really sure youre right. If you divert some of your energy to trying to form a group that you know is just going to fall apart, and if that energy is a lot of your energy, a lot of what youve got left over from this big sacrifice that you make when you devote your life to political change, you end up with a net deficit. You end up spending more money or more energy recovering from fissioning, from fracturing, than you get back out of the system in terms of coherent political action.
But if you can make the cost of organizing low enough, you can do lots of things that you couldnt do before, you can all show up and decide later whether youre all there for the same reason. And thats great. It points us to a future where we stop characterizing our politics in terms of left and right, which are a silly way to characterize your politics because left and right dont make any sense. Left and right leaves you with Evangelical Christians and certain feminists on the same side of pornography. They are bedfellows, to use an unfortunate term, on that issue, but theyre not on the same side of a left-right spectrum.
We have other spectrums authoritarian / anti-authoritarian, materialist/spiritualists, centralist/decentralist and if its cheap enough to form a group, we can start to add more nuance to our politics than just left or right, and maybe we can stop having to hold our nose and support politicians and political movements that when we look at them, we go well, Obama, is technically a Democrat and hes not Mitt Romney, but he does believe in extra judicial drone assassination of American citizens far from the field of battle, nevertheless he is the left wing candidate, so I guess Ive got to vote for him. If we can have a more nuanced political discussion than left and right, maybe its the beginning of something much better than what weve got now.
NP: Right. Thats what Im seeing with Occupy. From the outside people arent seeing the numbers on the street anymore so their perception is that its failed. But from the inside what Occupy did was help us all find each other. Now weve all figured out whos into what and who we can work with on particular issues, theres no need to be a homogenized mass.
CD: And it politicized people, it politicized people who hadnt been politicized. There is a lot of cynicism about clicktivism and the idea that if its too easy to be politicized, if all you need to do to take action is click an online petition, then it siphons off energy that could be used to change the world. Its probably true that some people go, Ive done my bit, I clicked that petition. But other people who never would have taken any political action start with that one click.
The height of the barrier to entry has to be correlated with the overall size of the movement. If it takes an enormous affirmative step to start your journey, then a lot of people will never start. If on the other hand its cheap to try, then a lot of people will try. And the more people you have trying, the more people you will have who will find that its what they want to do. Thats the upside of it. This is why Im not cynical about clicktivism. This is why Im glad to have a spectrum of ways that people can engage. The shopkeeper understands that the first requirement for selling things is getting people in the door; a political activist has to understand that the first requirement for building a movement is to have people take some step to want to be involved in a movement. And the smaller that step can be, the easier it is to get them involved.
I think of it like a churchIts a tiny minority of people who join the clergy, but all of the people who join the clergy started by showing up on Sunday. If step one is eschew all material things, take a vow of silence and a vow of chastity and wear a hair shirt for the rest of your life, your clergy will be thinly populated. You need a step one that isnt total engagement for the rest of your life, right?
So one of the things that having cheap group forming does is it makes it possible to have a cheap step one, a cheap entre, a thing that you can do that makes some difference and it does make some difference. A lot of people spreading links about SOPA led to a slightly smaller number of people calling our senators about SOPA, and that made a huge difference. That actually changed the world. But if it wasnt for all the clicks that started it, including the people who just clicked once and never did anything else, that movement wouldnt have gone to the visibility that it had gone to where people started calling senators, and the overall number was the thing that shifted the political debate.
NP: I think too that the sign of success with regards to clicktivism is the amount of resources that the government is putting into social media. One of the things you cover in the book is the use of sock puppets [fake social media accounts that respond to posts from the accounts of legitimate activists with negative comments and misinformation].
CD: When we had the HB Gary leak we saw that the Air Force intelligence arm was tendering bids for software to help them run astroturf campaigns, to allow individuals to run up to 20 sock puppets on the internet and keep their identity separate so that they could poison political discourse. One of the worst things about this, about astroturfing is that, like an agent provocateur, it makes it very, very hard for people within a movement to know whether they can trust each other. It is totally corrosive to dialogue, to discourse itself, because it means that you dont know when youre talking with real people and when youre talking with imaginary people or people who are being paid to espouse a point of view. Ultimately it actually, I think. ends up deprecating dialogue as an alternative to violence or civil unrest, because if you cant talk, youre left with just anger. If you cant actually talk out your differences, all thats left is anger.
I think that a horrible example, were seeing this right now in Pakistan. The CIA used false vaccination campaigns as a way to go door to door to find Osama Bin Laden. Pakistani militants are murdering Red Cross vaccination campaigners now who are actually trying to eradicate polio in Pakistan.
When you take a thing that is itself a net good, which is people talking to each other instead of killing each other, and you poison that, whats left is whatever is left behind. You actually end up voiding it as a legitimate means of advancing an agenda, and then people end up doing whatever else is left behind. Its a very, very short-sided tactic to engage in this
NP: I guess this is one of the reasons why the National Lawyers Guild win recently was so important, that protesters have the right to sue army infiltrators.
CD: Thats one of the things that has made the story about the coppers who infiltrated the environmental movement here so poignant, apart from the fact that they sometimes impregnated activists and had children with them, but that you know on both sides, its so corrosive right? They acted without personal integrity, they destroyed their lives, they destroyed the lives of the people they are charged with surveilling. What they did poisoned our ability to actually have social change groups that work for social good, because you spend all your time trying to figure out whos an agent and who isnt.
I remember my parents were politically involved with someone who it turned out was clinically depressed and committed suicide. His behavior was erratic and some of his political friends thought that he might be in an agent provocateur, and they maybe didnt extend to him the empathy that they could have because they had lived through an agent provocateur within their movement. The Canadian government had used agent provocateurs with left wing groups in Canada, and his erratic behavior, one of the things it gave rise to was that suspicion. What a tragedy, right? What a tragedy to socially isolate people who have problems by poisoning the well. It really is a real evil
NP: In the book you have a character called Joseph Noss, whos a good politician. Do you think theres such a thing as a good politician or is it an oxymoron?
CD: I think there are lots of real good politicians, absolutely. One of the things about politics is that its small-p political, because the only way to attain the level of organization necessary to win a big campaign is to form a party thats in coalition with a bunch of different interests, as you see with the Torys, for example, in this country. Are Torys pro or anti Europe? Are Torys pro or anti gay marriage? Are Lib Dems copyright reformers or are copyright maximalists?
Well, the Business Secretary just announced that the City of London is going to have an independently funded copyright police that will be actual police officers whose job it is to enforce copyright. Although copyright violations are not a crime, theyre a civil matterIts like having contract police who are out there enforcing contracts. Or real estate police who make sure that people arent misreporting the square footage of their house. These are civil matters and yet we suddenly have police. Thats the Liberal Democrat Business Secretary who has imposed it, but the Liberal Democrats are also the party that passed a resolution saying that national censorship regimes should never be an effective remedy for policing copyright. So which one are they? Well, theyre both. They represent a coalition of different kinds of interests.
Just like the Republican Party in the US contains fiscal conservatives and social conservatives. Some of them are both fiscal and social conservatives, but theres a lot of people who are socially liberal and fiscally conservative. And there are a lot of people where social conservative is code for young earth creationist. There are a lot of people on the fiscal conservative side where thats code for investor class, who would be broke if they only bought interests in oil wells that would be where they are if the earth was 5,000 years old. I mean, you cant be a real fiscal conservative and a social conservative. Social conservative means investing in oil wells where they would be if the earth was 5,000 years old and not believing in dinosaurs, right? There are fractions and fractions within these parties. So in order to be a politician you have to be someone whos capable of first being political within your party, which is to say, convincing all the different wings of your party that you can serve their interests equally which is to say that you have to marginally inoffensive. You have to be part of the status quo.
Nowhere is this more visible than places like Singapore. Singapore is a really interesting example of how you can talk to the rhetoric of social equality and use it to maintain social inequality. Singapores origin story is in race riots and racial discrimination between and among Chinese, Malay and Tamil people. Those are still the three major ethnic groups, although the ethnic divisions as always are very, very artificial. In the same way that you were a Tutsi if some distant male ancestor was a Tutsi, even if all your other ancestors were Hutu or even you were a Tutsi if the Belgium authorities had written the wrong thing on your great, great, great, great, great, great grandfathers identity card by the same token, there are people who are technically Chinese, who all of their ancestors are Malay except for some distant Chinese male ancestor.
In Singaporean politics, one of the things that they do, whenever it looks like theres an effective independent political campaign in one of the electoral districts, they will announce that in the interests of ethnic harmony they will convert the single parliamentary seat into a triple parliamentary seat that will have one Tamil representative, one Chinese representative, and one Malay representative, which on its face looks incredibly egalitarian. There have been proposals to require every electoral district in the UK for example to elect one woman and one man in the name of equality. But the thing is that only the state in Singapore has the organizational capacity to field three candidates in any one political district. Whereas the independent parties are necessarily far less organized than the 30 or 50 year incumbents who run for Singapore. So not only do their votes get diluted, they cant put a candidate on the ballot, because while they can get the signatures necessary for one candidate, they cant get them for three.
What this exploits is the fact that organizations used to be expensive and are expensive wherever you dont have the internet because its hard to canvas around to find the right candidates. So the theme of Homeland, in part, is how you can run a political campaign without necessarily having to use a party to back you. Parties are necessary evils, right? Theyre not good unto themselves. Theyre actually the least worst way to organize candidates in all 50 states or in all of the political districts in the UK or whatever. But parties by definition require representatives and representative governments do sometimes vote against the interest of the people that they represent. Thats what a three line whip is. But we tolerate them because how else could you get a voting bloc that would manage to have some coherence in leading the country across all the different areas where we have representatives.
The Lib Dems traded their political future for the next 20 years for a referendum on alternative voting, which they were then betrayed on by the Torys and which we didnt get. As a result, we are going to still have essentially a two party system where most politics is governed by wealthy influence brokers instead of by the representative interest of people. But with the internet, you could imagine it being possible to field candidates in 50 electoral districts, or 100 electoral districts, without having a formal party or having a much more lightly construed party, a party thats just fragmentary relative to the kind of monolithic parties we have now. A party that looked a lot more like a coalition then a party.
NP: In the run up to the election I was thinking about how I would use social media tools to promote a candidate. And, yes, you could run a candidate with almost no money, however, one of the biggest stumbling blocks to that is Facebook, because they are now charging you to connect to your own base.
CD: Absolutely. Facebook is one of those things that succeeds very well and fails very badlyI could tell that their business model was the drug dealer business model; The first taste is free and then after that you pay. Then the more dependent you are on it the higher the cost. That was totally obvious to everyone whos ever seen internet services come and go. I saw that coming a long way off. There are more social media alternatives and we can hope that there will be more still. At least one of the things about Facebook charging is that you know what it costs. But ideally what you do is you reserve that money for something better than paying for stamps and envelopes again, because thats the game changer, not having to pay for stamps and envelopes.
NP: Its particularly obnoxious when it comes to politics because it yet again means that the special interest groups and the traditional parties have the advantage over the independents and the grassroots candidates, and because of the sheer volume of people on Facebook, to some extent its taken away the democratization of the internet.
CD: Yeah, I agree. Theres something interesting that happens with the social networks and their desire to be integrated into government that gives me a little bit of hope. Obama, when he was running in 2008, used YouTube to do these fireside chats. After he took office, he wanted to continue, but the federal government has limits on its ability to collect data on people. They couldnt set a cookie for you when you were looking at Obamas fireside chats once he was in office, once he was president. Also it has to be downloadable and nonproprietary. So YouTube built an entire parallel backend that any video can be accessed through that allows for downloads and doesnt set a cookie. So you can watch any video on YouTube anonymously and download it. Which is pretty cool.
Facebook at one point, the NHS [British National Health Service] put like buttons on all the disease pages on the NHS online portal. Which is a terrible idea because every like button sends a beacon back to Facebook, so they would know if you were looking at chlamydia or cancer or HIV, things that you might not want to have widely known or facts that you might not want to have sold about you. The NHS immediately removed those buttons after going through a palaver. But what if instead the NHS had negotiated that Facebook has to provide two ways of embedding a like button: one is the normal way that gives you a beacon every time you land on a page with a like button, and the other one only gives them a beacon if you click it. So if you wanted to like something about alcoholism so that your family would see it because you were worried about how much they were drinking you could, but merely visiting a page on alcoholism wouldnt send any information to Facebook, well then we might have had a Facebook that was a little more useful to all of us, right? Where all of us who have web pages, where we put Facebook like buttons, wouldve had those web pages not send information to Facebook unless our users chose to send information to Facebook.
And again, I wonder if there isnt some leverage to force them. If for example they want to be used in political referendums or in some other political context, where charging for reach would be inconsistent with being used for some public purpose, if we cant in fact use it as a bit of a stick to beat them and say, all right, we will use you for public purpose but you have to do so in a way that, for example, allows free interchange with Twitter and other social networks, uses some standard defined mechanism for getting information in and out of Facebook, and that allows deterministic reach to everyone whos liked, whos opted into some social group on Facebook. At which point, we might have more broad access to it all around.
NP: I would love to see that and I think that that is possible, especially given whats happened in with Instagram.
CD: Well, Im not a market doctrinaire, but I think that this is where having a market mattersThe reason YouTube created all of this parallel infrastructure to keep Obama there is because of the cache of having Obama there and the cost to them if Obama had decided to do his fireside chats on Vimeo instead. This is how we get this stuff out of them.
To return to regulation, its one of the reasons that copyright wars are so dangerousand other kinds of bad speech wars, libel, pornography, whatever stuff that I dont actually approve of. I dont like people who libel other people. Im not a fan of child pornography. All these things I would prefer to have the world without. But when we make things like Facebook or YouTube or Twitter responsible for them, copyright infringement, whatever, when we make them responsible for it, what we do is we say, okay you giant corporation, you have to divert some of your resources, your prodigious profits to policing users for this and to setting up some kind of response team and takedown whatever. On its face we go, all right, mission accomplished, but what that ends up doing is saying if you want to start a competitor to YouTube, you would also have to have access to those prodigious resources that would allow you to affect those takedowns for libel or for terrorism or for copyright infringement or for pornography or what have you, if you have some extra special burden in the law. What we then end up doing is we end up saying nobody will ever be able to compete with YouTube. Because YouTube couldve never have grown to where it is now, where it can actually afford all the infrastructure, content ID or any of the other things that it does to police the content that it gets, if from the start it had been required to have all of those automated systems. So then you end up with just YouTube.
Again, competition doesnt solve all of our problems. Markets dont solve all of our problems. But if our regulation of Facebooks behavior is not cautious in that it makes it much more expensive to found a Facebook competitor, then we will only ever see Facebook growing and growing. Because the thing that will starve Facebook is competition. The thing that will ultimately cause it to offer better deals to the people who use it is the fear that people who use it will defect to a rival service. Thats always going to be a much more effective curb on its behavior than the fear of a regulator. Weve seen what regulation looks like with big corporations. Again, HSBC, you know? If you launder drug money, you get a slap on the wrist. If Facebook knows that its regulators are its pals, then it will continue to behave badly. If Facebook fears someone who is as big and as awful as it, that has grown just as quickly as it has and is challenging its longevity the same way that it beat the shit out of MySpace, then I think we have a real chance of getting Facebook to behave itself.
NP: But do you see any serious competition coming up?
CD: No, and Im worried about that. I mean, Twitter, obviously, Google + a little. Its funny because Google has historically been willing to eschew profitability in one line of its business to gain profitability in another. They give Android away to keep the mobile market open so that they can sell search ads in the mobile space, which is a huge source of revenue for them. But they really, really seem to want to keep a high CPM in Google +, a high advertising rate, and so they want everyone to use their real name. They want to be as Facebook-like as possible. Obviously real identities give you higher CPM.
NP: I hate this idea of forcing people to use their real identities. Its a basic tenet of internet security that you dont want your real life personal information out there in the universe. Germany has actually just ruled that Facebooks practice of requesting people use their real IDs violates their citizens right to use online services anonymously, and I think thats a step in the right direction. I actually think its irresponsible of a social network to demand that you use your real name.
CD: Especially given how many fuck ups Google has had with Buzz, where theyve inadvertently done things like expose peoples identity to their stalkers. Basically, requiring people to use their real names in services where they often regret their disclosures, its like requiring people to wear flaming trousers around the gunpowder barrels. We know that people make inadvertent, over disclosure with social networks and that they often regret their disclosure after the fact. Forcing them to use their real name increases the likelihood that their over disclosure will have some real world cost.
NP: Ive had to move because of a stalker. Ive had a restraining order too. Demanding that I use a real name online is downright dangerous, and could potentially disenfranchise me from the online world to my detriment.
CD: Google argues that people will be politer if they use their real names, but weve seen so many people who are perfectly capable of being impolite when they use their real names, and weve seen so many people that are capable of being polite. Its clear that real names are not the whole story of politeness. That a lot of it has to do with system design and some of it has to do with scale and some of it has to do with other stuff. Its not merely politeness. Everybody knew Muammar Gaddafis name. It didnt stop him from doing what he did. No one knows the name of the guy who braked and let me cross the road with my daughter this morning, and yet he was very polite. Its not merely a case of the greater internet fuckwad theory. Its not merely the case that anonymity plus the internet equals flaming, equals trolling.
NP: Were all so worried about pedophiles, but then youre demanding that kids use their real names so that the pedophiles can find them.
CD: The answer is that they dont let kids on there. They claim cop-out compliance. In the US 13 year olds really arent supposed to use online services. They have to have official permission from their parents and its a real palaver. Thats why you often have to enter a birth date thats more than 13 years in the past to use a bunch of services. Its for cop-out compliance. Its totally ineffective at keeping kids off social networks. It also means that social networks cant design systems that are safe for kids. Its a complete lose-lose rule.
NP: Finally, the one thing that Id like to talk about which you touched on earlier is the criminalization of copyright.
CD: Yeah, one of the biggest differences between civil and criminal statutes is how easy they are to parse out. The corollary of ignorance of the law is no defense is that the law should be easy to understand. So criminal law tends to be a lot more straightforward to understand than civil law. I mean, if you by accident happen to wander on to a trading floor and inadvertently bought $20M worth of securities, theres a pretty good chance that you violated security law, because it takes a lot to learn how to trade securities legally. You would never accidentally wander onto a security trading floor and accidentally put $20 million worth of orders for exotic derivatives. Whereas, on the other hand, you know in your soul that punching someone in the nose is wrong. Its very hard to accidentally assault someone. Its rare that if you assaulted someone you wouldve done so on the misapprehension that what you were doing was allowed, right?
Copyright is an arcane body of law that most people, including people who work for the entertainment industry, are unfamiliar with, and its very easy to get wrong. To give you an example of how easy it is to get wrong, a Dutch composer who wrote the theme song to the anti-piracy commercials that are put before videos discovered that his composition had been used without correct licensing and had been pirated by the people who make anti-piracy videos. So if the people who make anti-piracy videos sometimes get it wrong, then you and I are going to get it wrong all the time. There is no copyright law that is simple and straightforward enough for a 13 year old girl to get right when she makes her Harry Potter fan site while in her parents basement in Brighton and still complex and nuanced enough that Warner Brothers can use it to successfully license Harry Potter to Universal for a Harry Potter theme park.
What we are creating when we criminalize copyright is were creating a system where all of us will be violating not just civil rules that might cost us a fine if we get it wrong, but criminal rules. We have a system that is as arcane as finance law, but that is expected to be followed by everybody and when you get it wrong, you go to jail. Thats just a fucking disaster. And the reason everybody has to obey it is because unlike finance law, where it only applies to things people in the finance industry do, copyright law, which used to only relate to something the people in the copyright industry and entertainment industry did, which was handling copies of creative works, is now something that we all do a million times a day because the internet only deals in copies. Every time you click the mouse you make copies
Where weve ended up with copyright law is that everybody violates it all the time, and the penalties keep getting more and more harsh because we have hyperinflation in copying. And rather than deciding, well only apply copyright law to people who are in the industry, even though copying takes place inside and outside of the industry now, we said instead, everybody who copies needs to be governed by industry regulation. Im here to tell you, nobody is going to be able to obey industry regulation. Its too complicated for any normal civilian to get right.
NP: I love the story that you had on BoingBoing recently about the 9-year old Finnish girl who had her Winnie the Pooh laptop confiscated by the police.
CD: Yeah. Her laptop was seized because she listened to music the wrong way. The family could show you that she literally did listen to the single the wrong way. Instead of listening to it on the radio, she listened to it on the Pirate Bay. Having listened to it, the family bought the CD, bought two tickets to the concert, bought a t-shirt and so on. And they literally came in and took away her Winnie the Pooh laptop because she listened to the single the wrong way in deciding whether or not to buy the CD.
Before you got here, I just finished a column for The Guardian about this. Its about the fact that piracy numbers go way down when you can buy the works legally. For example, when theres a major release like Wreck-It Ralph, thats a new Disney/Pixar movie that comes out in the US two months before it comes out in the UK, as has just happened, in the UK theres a lot more piracy of that movie because people cant buy tickets to it and yet theyve seen adverts for it, and their friends are talking about it on Facebook and Twitter. All the research shows us that if Wreck-It Ralph were in the cinema at the same time in the US and the UK that piracy on Wreck-It Ralph would go through the floor in the UK. But whenever a study shows this, the industry goes into overdrive to tell you that watching the movie at the wrong time without paying for it is totally wrong and theft. Regardless of whether not piracy numbers go up or down, its theft and its just wrong and you shouldnt be allowed to do it.
And its a bit weird; why would they be defending their right not to sell you a ticket to the movies? The reason for that is that theres two different pipelines for cinematic exhibition. In the US it centers around holidays that are observed in the US, like Thanksgiving when all the blockbuster movies come out. Here its centered around holidays that are not observed in the US but are observed in the UK, like bank holidays and half-terms. They want Wreck-It Ralph to come out at half-term here and they want Wreck-It Ralph to come out at Thanksgiving there. They make more money if Wreck-It Ralph comes out that way.
Now, there are lots of profit maximization strategies that look like this. Cinemas charge more for fizzy drinks then you would pay at a grocery store, but the limit on how much they can charge for fizzy drinks is set by the point at which they start to lose more money from people who sneak the drinks in because the prices are too high than they make when people are willing to pay for more for this. You can see that a cinema could actually reduce the number of people who sneak drinks in by paying for more security, but eventually theyll always hit this limit where the cost of insuring compliance is higher than the profits that theyre making from the profit maximization strategy.
But one way that they can offset that is by convincing us to pay for it. What if instead of the cinemas deciding to hire their own security to stop people from bringing in their own drinks, they instead claim successfully in the halls of power that bringing your own drinks to a movie theater was a form of a theft and that the police should be set outside of the cinemas to stop people from bringing in their own drinks and that the public should pay for huge jail sentences for people who brought in their own drinksIn that case they could actually raise the cost of drinks much higher, right?
Thats essentially what the entertainment has found is that its cheaper to pay lobbyists to wander around Whitehall beating their breasts and crying about piracy then it is to bring movies out on the same day and date all around the world, because they can realize those extra profits from delaying release. So this is what theyve done. They have basically pursued this PR strategy of calling people who would actually buy this if they were willing to sell it to them thieves and then convincing the public to pay for the enforcement
I get that, but we hear a lot of talk about scroungers. We hear a lot of talk about people who enrich themselves at the public expense. Well, copyright comes at the public expense. Enforcement actions, a city police force locking people up, clogging the courts, all of those things represent an enormous public expense, and when theyre not about protecting your property interests but instead maximizing your profits by creating artificial interventions in the market in the form of the willingness to stop people from availing themselves of entertainment products that youre not willing to sell them, well then its up to us to actually say, okay the free ride stops here.
Because they will continue to take the free ride for as long as we offer it. Corporations are externalizing entities. If a corporations duty is to maximize its shareholder revenue, then a corporation that doesnt pay fines for polluting the water system and doesnt have to pay money to purify its waste, it should, in order to maximize its shareholder value, pollute the water supply, because its duty is to not spend one penny more than it has to.
So we need to set up negative incentives. We need to have fines for pollution that are bigger than the cost savings that you get from dumping your waste in the water supply, otherwise these externalizing rational actor corporations will dump their waste in the water supply. Likewise, we need to say to the entertainment industry, our willingness to publicly subsidize your profit maximization strategy goes this far and no further. And I think this far should be not very far, otherwise they will continue to figure out ways to maximize their profits by externalizing their enforcement costs to us.
NP: But what kind of lesson has that taught that 9-year old girl about respect for authority and for respect for the law?
CD: Well, thats true, but remember the entertainment industrys job isnt to maximize worldwide respect for the law, its to maximize their profits. If you have a coercion based business model, you cant individually coerce everyone. You cant put an enforcer in everyones house to stop them from doing it. You have to convince them to police their own actions, and weve known for as long as there have been heads on pikes that one way to convince them to police their own actions, especially when that policing comes at their own expense, when they have to issue doing something that would otherwise make them happy is by terrorizing them.
In North Korea, if you deal in the black market and take food thats above your horrible meager ration you get sent to a prison camp and youre sent to whats called a three generation sentence where you, your children, and their children all have to live in the prison camp. The idea there is that its impractical to police everyones every move. Instead what you do is you terrorize them so that even when theyre starving they dont buy black market food.
The entertainment industrys strategy is you make examples out of people. You make examples out of the people that you catch so the people that you cant catch modify their own behavior because the consequences are so cruel and horrible. Your 9-year old has her Winnie the Pooh laptop taken away. Theyre not interested in instilling respect in that 9-year old for the entertainment industry. I think they quite rightly understand that that 9-year old will hate the entertainment industry forever. What theyre interested in is all the other parents of all the other 9-year olds going, Honey, we need to police everything you do with that laptop because otherwise the entertainment industry is going to beat our door down and is going to have the police come and seize your computer. They dont care that they lost her as a customer. They dont care that she was buying tickets. What they care about is the broader message that they send to everyone else. That is the same message that a head on a pike sends. Its what every bully does to keep their seat of power. They dont terrorize retail, they terrorize wholesale. They make examples.
NP: They terrorize on one end, and on the other theyre enforcing compliance with the new three strikes policy.
CD: Well, thats the same thing right? You dont disconnect everybody from the internet with a three strikes rule. You disconnect a million people from the internet and the other 69 million people go, We better not do it. From the entertainment industrys perspective, taking 1 million people out of the economy, which is what taking them out of the internet does, is a small price to pay because the rest of us pick up the cost of one million people being taken out of the economy, not them.Its worth it to them to take a million people out of the economy if the other 69 million can be terrorized into doing it. The same way that a feudal senior who puts one pheasants head on a pike loses a pheasant working in the field but gets more work out of all of the pheasants who remain.
NP: I can also see, with the ISPs being forced to snoop on us, that theyre going to have algorithms to filter the footprints of copyrighted movies and throttle them, in the same way that YouTube can sniff the footprints of copyrighted music and have a bot automatically take content down.
CD: Well, this is what Japan has proposedBecause now theres criminal penalties on copyright, two years in jail for downloading, 10 years in jail for uploading. The entertainment industry has found some untried and unproven technology thats literally a black box that the ISPs have to install that monitors all traffic and drops any connection that looks like it matches a copyright fingerprint. And again, this is the difference between a system that works well and a system that fails badly. It maybe that content match works really well for figuring out who to give money from ads to, the content ID on YouTube, but it works really badly for randomly disconnecting people who are conducting all of their discourse online. And the most indigent part of this is that the entertainment industry expects ISPs to license this technology from them and pay them an annual licensing fee for having a black box that they operate on their network that disconnects their customers from the internet periodically. But again, this is about externalizing costs, right? Theyre not bearing the costs, the costs are being born externally by third parties, by the ISPs in this case.
NP: Attached to the copyright issue is the attempt to criminalize links, which affects you and I as journalists. Weve seen this with the Richard O'Dwyer case, even though that fell apart, and with the Barrett Brown indictment.
CD: Yeah. The best response I ever saw to that was from a guy here in the UK named Chris Raettig...He maintains a personal website that links to horrible corporate anthems. A lot of corporations have songs that theyve commissioned songwriters to write about them. He linked to the KPMG corporate anthem. Because he humiliated them, KPMG sent him a lawyer letter saying we have a policy on our website that says you are not allowed to link to us without our permission can you show us the letter our lawyer sent you giving permission to link to our website? Instead of answering, he went and stood near the KPMG office which I think is in the Docklands with a sign that said, KPMG this way, and took a picture of himself and said, I didnt need anyones permission to tell people where your offices were, I dont need anyones permission to tell people where your website is. I mean, describing the factual existence of a thing should not be a tort or a crimeAll a link is is a statement about a thing that exists somewhere on the internet. It is not the thing. So regulation of links, mistakes the map for the territory.
NP: And its terrifying.
CD: It really is. I mean, its an enormous curtailment of speech. It really, really is.
Read part one of my interview with Cory Doctorow. Homeland will be available online and in bookstores on February 5, 2013. Catch Cory 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 visit craphound.com/. A free copy of Little Brother can be downloaded under a Creative Commons license here.
In the first part, we discussed Burning Man, which is where the action in Homeland kicks off, and the student debt bubble, which serves as a backdrop to the book. In part two, our conversation delves further into the post-Occupy politics of Homeland. In Doctorows book, our hacktivist hero Marcus Yallow, having been forced out of the education system due to financial pressures, gains a position as a tech guru for an independent political candidate. Our discussion therefore naturally turns to the limitations of two party systems, the potential social media has to transform the political landscape, the pros and cons of clicktivism, and the perils of online activism, which is especially poignant given that Aaron Swartz contributed an afterward to the book.
Nicole Powers: It does seem like were living for the first time in recent memory in an era where politically and socially things are regressing rather than progressing.
Cory Doctorow: Regress and progress are not uniformWe have the access to the organizing tools now that we didnt have access to when I was younger. Ive 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. Thats just a giant qualitative change and it does make it possible for us to do things that we werent able to do before
One of the criticisms that Occupy consistently received was that it refused to center in an ideological program. Its very hard to find out what Occupy was for. In general we knew what Occupy was for. I mean Quinn Norton in her eulogy for Occupy said that Occupys manifesto was: Things are fucked up and bullshit. Clearly that was the underlying message of Occupy. But turning that into a program was something that they were very reluctant to do, although elements of it emerged.
I think one of the reasons that political movements have been so concerned with constitutionalizing early on and setting out a program is because group forming is expensive. When it costs a lot of time and energy to get married, you want to make sure that youve got something in common so that you dont end up getting divorced right away. When its cheap to form a group, to all show up, when you get the envelopes and the letters and the stamps for free and the envelope stuffing doesnt take any time, then it makes sense to all go hang out together for a while and see whether you have enough goals in common to go on to march together. Because its not a big deal to have a divorce a little while later, and then reform in some other configuration...
I think that the willingness of Occupy to do what programmers would call late binding of a program was its real strength. It was one of the things that made it possible to go on, because you never had to decide whether or not you were on or off the Occupy program. You never had to check a list of tick boxes to decide whether you were there for the same reason as everyone else. You could all say well you were more or less here for the same reason.
As someone who grew up among Communists whose movements have consistently been ridden by ideological differences that are literally incomprehensible to people who are not in the movement, people who seem to have so much more in common with each other than they have with anyone else in the world, and yet who cant stand to be in the same room with each other, I understand this. I mean, devoting your life to a political ideology thats not mainstream is an enormous expense. Its a huge sacrifice to make. Its something you can only make if youre really sure youre right. If you divert some of your energy to trying to form a group that you know is just going to fall apart, and if that energy is a lot of your energy, a lot of what youve got left over from this big sacrifice that you make when you devote your life to political change, you end up with a net deficit. You end up spending more money or more energy recovering from fissioning, from fracturing, than you get back out of the system in terms of coherent political action.
But if you can make the cost of organizing low enough, you can do lots of things that you couldnt do before, you can all show up and decide later whether youre all there for the same reason. And thats great. It points us to a future where we stop characterizing our politics in terms of left and right, which are a silly way to characterize your politics because left and right dont make any sense. Left and right leaves you with Evangelical Christians and certain feminists on the same side of pornography. They are bedfellows, to use an unfortunate term, on that issue, but theyre not on the same side of a left-right spectrum.
We have other spectrums authoritarian / anti-authoritarian, materialist/spiritualists, centralist/decentralist and if its cheap enough to form a group, we can start to add more nuance to our politics than just left or right, and maybe we can stop having to hold our nose and support politicians and political movements that when we look at them, we go well, Obama, is technically a Democrat and hes not Mitt Romney, but he does believe in extra judicial drone assassination of American citizens far from the field of battle, nevertheless he is the left wing candidate, so I guess Ive got to vote for him. If we can have a more nuanced political discussion than left and right, maybe its the beginning of something much better than what weve got now.
NP: Right. Thats what Im seeing with Occupy. From the outside people arent seeing the numbers on the street anymore so their perception is that its failed. But from the inside what Occupy did was help us all find each other. Now weve all figured out whos into what and who we can work with on particular issues, theres no need to be a homogenized mass.
CD: And it politicized people, it politicized people who hadnt been politicized. There is a lot of cynicism about clicktivism and the idea that if its too easy to be politicized, if all you need to do to take action is click an online petition, then it siphons off energy that could be used to change the world. Its probably true that some people go, Ive done my bit, I clicked that petition. But other people who never would have taken any political action start with that one click.
The height of the barrier to entry has to be correlated with the overall size of the movement. If it takes an enormous affirmative step to start your journey, then a lot of people will never start. If on the other hand its cheap to try, then a lot of people will try. And the more people you have trying, the more people you will have who will find that its what they want to do. Thats the upside of it. This is why Im not cynical about clicktivism. This is why Im glad to have a spectrum of ways that people can engage. The shopkeeper understands that the first requirement for selling things is getting people in the door; a political activist has to understand that the first requirement for building a movement is to have people take some step to want to be involved in a movement. And the smaller that step can be, the easier it is to get them involved.
I think of it like a churchIts a tiny minority of people who join the clergy, but all of the people who join the clergy started by showing up on Sunday. If step one is eschew all material things, take a vow of silence and a vow of chastity and wear a hair shirt for the rest of your life, your clergy will be thinly populated. You need a step one that isnt total engagement for the rest of your life, right?
So one of the things that having cheap group forming does is it makes it possible to have a cheap step one, a cheap entre, a thing that you can do that makes some difference and it does make some difference. A lot of people spreading links about SOPA led to a slightly smaller number of people calling our senators about SOPA, and that made a huge difference. That actually changed the world. But if it wasnt for all the clicks that started it, including the people who just clicked once and never did anything else, that movement wouldnt have gone to the visibility that it had gone to where people started calling senators, and the overall number was the thing that shifted the political debate.
NP: I think too that the sign of success with regards to clicktivism is the amount of resources that the government is putting into social media. One of the things you cover in the book is the use of sock puppets [fake social media accounts that respond to posts from the accounts of legitimate activists with negative comments and misinformation].
CD: When we had the HB Gary leak we saw that the Air Force intelligence arm was tendering bids for software to help them run astroturf campaigns, to allow individuals to run up to 20 sock puppets on the internet and keep their identity separate so that they could poison political discourse. One of the worst things about this, about astroturfing is that, like an agent provocateur, it makes it very, very hard for people within a movement to know whether they can trust each other. It is totally corrosive to dialogue, to discourse itself, because it means that you dont know when youre talking with real people and when youre talking with imaginary people or people who are being paid to espouse a point of view. Ultimately it actually, I think. ends up deprecating dialogue as an alternative to violence or civil unrest, because if you cant talk, youre left with just anger. If you cant actually talk out your differences, all thats left is anger.
I think that a horrible example, were seeing this right now in Pakistan. The CIA used false vaccination campaigns as a way to go door to door to find Osama Bin Laden. Pakistani militants are murdering Red Cross vaccination campaigners now who are actually trying to eradicate polio in Pakistan.
When you take a thing that is itself a net good, which is people talking to each other instead of killing each other, and you poison that, whats left is whatever is left behind. You actually end up voiding it as a legitimate means of advancing an agenda, and then people end up doing whatever else is left behind. Its a very, very short-sided tactic to engage in this
NP: I guess this is one of the reasons why the National Lawyers Guild win recently was so important, that protesters have the right to sue army infiltrators.
CD: Thats one of the things that has made the story about the coppers who infiltrated the environmental movement here so poignant, apart from the fact that they sometimes impregnated activists and had children with them, but that you know on both sides, its so corrosive right? They acted without personal integrity, they destroyed their lives, they destroyed the lives of the people they are charged with surveilling. What they did poisoned our ability to actually have social change groups that work for social good, because you spend all your time trying to figure out whos an agent and who isnt.
I remember my parents were politically involved with someone who it turned out was clinically depressed and committed suicide. His behavior was erratic and some of his political friends thought that he might be in an agent provocateur, and they maybe didnt extend to him the empathy that they could have because they had lived through an agent provocateur within their movement. The Canadian government had used agent provocateurs with left wing groups in Canada, and his erratic behavior, one of the things it gave rise to was that suspicion. What a tragedy, right? What a tragedy to socially isolate people who have problems by poisoning the well. It really is a real evil
NP: In the book you have a character called Joseph Noss, whos a good politician. Do you think theres such a thing as a good politician or is it an oxymoron?
CD: I think there are lots of real good politicians, absolutely. One of the things about politics is that its small-p political, because the only way to attain the level of organization necessary to win a big campaign is to form a party thats in coalition with a bunch of different interests, as you see with the Torys, for example, in this country. Are Torys pro or anti Europe? Are Torys pro or anti gay marriage? Are Lib Dems copyright reformers or are copyright maximalists?
Well, the Business Secretary just announced that the City of London is going to have an independently funded copyright police that will be actual police officers whose job it is to enforce copyright. Although copyright violations are not a crime, theyre a civil matterIts like having contract police who are out there enforcing contracts. Or real estate police who make sure that people arent misreporting the square footage of their house. These are civil matters and yet we suddenly have police. Thats the Liberal Democrat Business Secretary who has imposed it, but the Liberal Democrats are also the party that passed a resolution saying that national censorship regimes should never be an effective remedy for policing copyright. So which one are they? Well, theyre both. They represent a coalition of different kinds of interests.
Just like the Republican Party in the US contains fiscal conservatives and social conservatives. Some of them are both fiscal and social conservatives, but theres a lot of people who are socially liberal and fiscally conservative. And there are a lot of people where social conservative is code for young earth creationist. There are a lot of people on the fiscal conservative side where thats code for investor class, who would be broke if they only bought interests in oil wells that would be where they are if the earth was 5,000 years old. I mean, you cant be a real fiscal conservative and a social conservative. Social conservative means investing in oil wells where they would be if the earth was 5,000 years old and not believing in dinosaurs, right? There are fractions and fractions within these parties. So in order to be a politician you have to be someone whos capable of first being political within your party, which is to say, convincing all the different wings of your party that you can serve their interests equally which is to say that you have to marginally inoffensive. You have to be part of the status quo.
Nowhere is this more visible than places like Singapore. Singapore is a really interesting example of how you can talk to the rhetoric of social equality and use it to maintain social inequality. Singapores origin story is in race riots and racial discrimination between and among Chinese, Malay and Tamil people. Those are still the three major ethnic groups, although the ethnic divisions as always are very, very artificial. In the same way that you were a Tutsi if some distant male ancestor was a Tutsi, even if all your other ancestors were Hutu or even you were a Tutsi if the Belgium authorities had written the wrong thing on your great, great, great, great, great, great grandfathers identity card by the same token, there are people who are technically Chinese, who all of their ancestors are Malay except for some distant Chinese male ancestor.
In Singaporean politics, one of the things that they do, whenever it looks like theres an effective independent political campaign in one of the electoral districts, they will announce that in the interests of ethnic harmony they will convert the single parliamentary seat into a triple parliamentary seat that will have one Tamil representative, one Chinese representative, and one Malay representative, which on its face looks incredibly egalitarian. There have been proposals to require every electoral district in the UK for example to elect one woman and one man in the name of equality. But the thing is that only the state in Singapore has the organizational capacity to field three candidates in any one political district. Whereas the independent parties are necessarily far less organized than the 30 or 50 year incumbents who run for Singapore. So not only do their votes get diluted, they cant put a candidate on the ballot, because while they can get the signatures necessary for one candidate, they cant get them for three.
What this exploits is the fact that organizations used to be expensive and are expensive wherever you dont have the internet because its hard to canvas around to find the right candidates. So the theme of Homeland, in part, is how you can run a political campaign without necessarily having to use a party to back you. Parties are necessary evils, right? Theyre not good unto themselves. Theyre actually the least worst way to organize candidates in all 50 states or in all of the political districts in the UK or whatever. But parties by definition require representatives and representative governments do sometimes vote against the interest of the people that they represent. Thats what a three line whip is. But we tolerate them because how else could you get a voting bloc that would manage to have some coherence in leading the country across all the different areas where we have representatives.
The Lib Dems traded their political future for the next 20 years for a referendum on alternative voting, which they were then betrayed on by the Torys and which we didnt get. As a result, we are going to still have essentially a two party system where most politics is governed by wealthy influence brokers instead of by the representative interest of people. But with the internet, you could imagine it being possible to field candidates in 50 electoral districts, or 100 electoral districts, without having a formal party or having a much more lightly construed party, a party thats just fragmentary relative to the kind of monolithic parties we have now. A party that looked a lot more like a coalition then a party.
NP: In the run up to the election I was thinking about how I would use social media tools to promote a candidate. And, yes, you could run a candidate with almost no money, however, one of the biggest stumbling blocks to that is Facebook, because they are now charging you to connect to your own base.
CD: Absolutely. Facebook is one of those things that succeeds very well and fails very badlyI could tell that their business model was the drug dealer business model; The first taste is free and then after that you pay. Then the more dependent you are on it the higher the cost. That was totally obvious to everyone whos ever seen internet services come and go. I saw that coming a long way off. There are more social media alternatives and we can hope that there will be more still. At least one of the things about Facebook charging is that you know what it costs. But ideally what you do is you reserve that money for something better than paying for stamps and envelopes again, because thats the game changer, not having to pay for stamps and envelopes.
NP: Its particularly obnoxious when it comes to politics because it yet again means that the special interest groups and the traditional parties have the advantage over the independents and the grassroots candidates, and because of the sheer volume of people on Facebook, to some extent its taken away the democratization of the internet.
CD: Yeah, I agree. Theres something interesting that happens with the social networks and their desire to be integrated into government that gives me a little bit of hope. Obama, when he was running in 2008, used YouTube to do these fireside chats. After he took office, he wanted to continue, but the federal government has limits on its ability to collect data on people. They couldnt set a cookie for you when you were looking at Obamas fireside chats once he was in office, once he was president. Also it has to be downloadable and nonproprietary. So YouTube built an entire parallel backend that any video can be accessed through that allows for downloads and doesnt set a cookie. So you can watch any video on YouTube anonymously and download it. Which is pretty cool.
Facebook at one point, the NHS [British National Health Service] put like buttons on all the disease pages on the NHS online portal. Which is a terrible idea because every like button sends a beacon back to Facebook, so they would know if you were looking at chlamydia or cancer or HIV, things that you might not want to have widely known or facts that you might not want to have sold about you. The NHS immediately removed those buttons after going through a palaver. But what if instead the NHS had negotiated that Facebook has to provide two ways of embedding a like button: one is the normal way that gives you a beacon every time you land on a page with a like button, and the other one only gives them a beacon if you click it. So if you wanted to like something about alcoholism so that your family would see it because you were worried about how much they were drinking you could, but merely visiting a page on alcoholism wouldnt send any information to Facebook, well then we might have had a Facebook that was a little more useful to all of us, right? Where all of us who have web pages, where we put Facebook like buttons, wouldve had those web pages not send information to Facebook unless our users chose to send information to Facebook.
And again, I wonder if there isnt some leverage to force them. If for example they want to be used in political referendums or in some other political context, where charging for reach would be inconsistent with being used for some public purpose, if we cant in fact use it as a bit of a stick to beat them and say, all right, we will use you for public purpose but you have to do so in a way that, for example, allows free interchange with Twitter and other social networks, uses some standard defined mechanism for getting information in and out of Facebook, and that allows deterministic reach to everyone whos liked, whos opted into some social group on Facebook. At which point, we might have more broad access to it all around.
NP: I would love to see that and I think that that is possible, especially given whats happened in with Instagram.
CD: Well, Im not a market doctrinaire, but I think that this is where having a market mattersThe reason YouTube created all of this parallel infrastructure to keep Obama there is because of the cache of having Obama there and the cost to them if Obama had decided to do his fireside chats on Vimeo instead. This is how we get this stuff out of them.
To return to regulation, its one of the reasons that copyright wars are so dangerousand other kinds of bad speech wars, libel, pornography, whatever stuff that I dont actually approve of. I dont like people who libel other people. Im not a fan of child pornography. All these things I would prefer to have the world without. But when we make things like Facebook or YouTube or Twitter responsible for them, copyright infringement, whatever, when we make them responsible for it, what we do is we say, okay you giant corporation, you have to divert some of your resources, your prodigious profits to policing users for this and to setting up some kind of response team and takedown whatever. On its face we go, all right, mission accomplished, but what that ends up doing is saying if you want to start a competitor to YouTube, you would also have to have access to those prodigious resources that would allow you to affect those takedowns for libel or for terrorism or for copyright infringement or for pornography or what have you, if you have some extra special burden in the law. What we then end up doing is we end up saying nobody will ever be able to compete with YouTube. Because YouTube couldve never have grown to where it is now, where it can actually afford all the infrastructure, content ID or any of the other things that it does to police the content that it gets, if from the start it had been required to have all of those automated systems. So then you end up with just YouTube.
Again, competition doesnt solve all of our problems. Markets dont solve all of our problems. But if our regulation of Facebooks behavior is not cautious in that it makes it much more expensive to found a Facebook competitor, then we will only ever see Facebook growing and growing. Because the thing that will starve Facebook is competition. The thing that will ultimately cause it to offer better deals to the people who use it is the fear that people who use it will defect to a rival service. Thats always going to be a much more effective curb on its behavior than the fear of a regulator. Weve seen what regulation looks like with big corporations. Again, HSBC, you know? If you launder drug money, you get a slap on the wrist. If Facebook knows that its regulators are its pals, then it will continue to behave badly. If Facebook fears someone who is as big and as awful as it, that has grown just as quickly as it has and is challenging its longevity the same way that it beat the shit out of MySpace, then I think we have a real chance of getting Facebook to behave itself.
NP: But do you see any serious competition coming up?
CD: No, and Im worried about that. I mean, Twitter, obviously, Google + a little. Its funny because Google has historically been willing to eschew profitability in one line of its business to gain profitability in another. They give Android away to keep the mobile market open so that they can sell search ads in the mobile space, which is a huge source of revenue for them. But they really, really seem to want to keep a high CPM in Google +, a high advertising rate, and so they want everyone to use their real name. They want to be as Facebook-like as possible. Obviously real identities give you higher CPM.
NP: I hate this idea of forcing people to use their real identities. Its a basic tenet of internet security that you dont want your real life personal information out there in the universe. Germany has actually just ruled that Facebooks practice of requesting people use their real IDs violates their citizens right to use online services anonymously, and I think thats a step in the right direction. I actually think its irresponsible of a social network to demand that you use your real name.
CD: Especially given how many fuck ups Google has had with Buzz, where theyve inadvertently done things like expose peoples identity to their stalkers. Basically, requiring people to use their real names in services where they often regret their disclosures, its like requiring people to wear flaming trousers around the gunpowder barrels. We know that people make inadvertent, over disclosure with social networks and that they often regret their disclosure after the fact. Forcing them to use their real name increases the likelihood that their over disclosure will have some real world cost.
NP: Ive had to move because of a stalker. Ive had a restraining order too. Demanding that I use a real name online is downright dangerous, and could potentially disenfranchise me from the online world to my detriment.
CD: Google argues that people will be politer if they use their real names, but weve seen so many people who are perfectly capable of being impolite when they use their real names, and weve seen so many people that are capable of being polite. Its clear that real names are not the whole story of politeness. That a lot of it has to do with system design and some of it has to do with scale and some of it has to do with other stuff. Its not merely politeness. Everybody knew Muammar Gaddafis name. It didnt stop him from doing what he did. No one knows the name of the guy who braked and let me cross the road with my daughter this morning, and yet he was very polite. Its not merely a case of the greater internet fuckwad theory. Its not merely the case that anonymity plus the internet equals flaming, equals trolling.
NP: Were all so worried about pedophiles, but then youre demanding that kids use their real names so that the pedophiles can find them.
CD: The answer is that they dont let kids on there. They claim cop-out compliance. In the US 13 year olds really arent supposed to use online services. They have to have official permission from their parents and its a real palaver. Thats why you often have to enter a birth date thats more than 13 years in the past to use a bunch of services. Its for cop-out compliance. Its totally ineffective at keeping kids off social networks. It also means that social networks cant design systems that are safe for kids. Its a complete lose-lose rule.
NP: Finally, the one thing that Id like to talk about which you touched on earlier is the criminalization of copyright.
CD: Yeah, one of the biggest differences between civil and criminal statutes is how easy they are to parse out. The corollary of ignorance of the law is no defense is that the law should be easy to understand. So criminal law tends to be a lot more straightforward to understand than civil law. I mean, if you by accident happen to wander on to a trading floor and inadvertently bought $20M worth of securities, theres a pretty good chance that you violated security law, because it takes a lot to learn how to trade securities legally. You would never accidentally wander onto a security trading floor and accidentally put $20 million worth of orders for exotic derivatives. Whereas, on the other hand, you know in your soul that punching someone in the nose is wrong. Its very hard to accidentally assault someone. Its rare that if you assaulted someone you wouldve done so on the misapprehension that what you were doing was allowed, right?
Copyright is an arcane body of law that most people, including people who work for the entertainment industry, are unfamiliar with, and its very easy to get wrong. To give you an example of how easy it is to get wrong, a Dutch composer who wrote the theme song to the anti-piracy commercials that are put before videos discovered that his composition had been used without correct licensing and had been pirated by the people who make anti-piracy videos. So if the people who make anti-piracy videos sometimes get it wrong, then you and I are going to get it wrong all the time. There is no copyright law that is simple and straightforward enough for a 13 year old girl to get right when she makes her Harry Potter fan site while in her parents basement in Brighton and still complex and nuanced enough that Warner Brothers can use it to successfully license Harry Potter to Universal for a Harry Potter theme park.
What we are creating when we criminalize copyright is were creating a system where all of us will be violating not just civil rules that might cost us a fine if we get it wrong, but criminal rules. We have a system that is as arcane as finance law, but that is expected to be followed by everybody and when you get it wrong, you go to jail. Thats just a fucking disaster. And the reason everybody has to obey it is because unlike finance law, where it only applies to things people in the finance industry do, copyright law, which used to only relate to something the people in the copyright industry and entertainment industry did, which was handling copies of creative works, is now something that we all do a million times a day because the internet only deals in copies. Every time you click the mouse you make copies
Where weve ended up with copyright law is that everybody violates it all the time, and the penalties keep getting more and more harsh because we have hyperinflation in copying. And rather than deciding, well only apply copyright law to people who are in the industry, even though copying takes place inside and outside of the industry now, we said instead, everybody who copies needs to be governed by industry regulation. Im here to tell you, nobody is going to be able to obey industry regulation. Its too complicated for any normal civilian to get right.
NP: I love the story that you had on BoingBoing recently about the 9-year old Finnish girl who had her Winnie the Pooh laptop confiscated by the police.
CD: Yeah. Her laptop was seized because she listened to music the wrong way. The family could show you that she literally did listen to the single the wrong way. Instead of listening to it on the radio, she listened to it on the Pirate Bay. Having listened to it, the family bought the CD, bought two tickets to the concert, bought a t-shirt and so on. And they literally came in and took away her Winnie the Pooh laptop because she listened to the single the wrong way in deciding whether or not to buy the CD.
Before you got here, I just finished a column for The Guardian about this. Its about the fact that piracy numbers go way down when you can buy the works legally. For example, when theres a major release like Wreck-It Ralph, thats a new Disney/Pixar movie that comes out in the US two months before it comes out in the UK, as has just happened, in the UK theres a lot more piracy of that movie because people cant buy tickets to it and yet theyve seen adverts for it, and their friends are talking about it on Facebook and Twitter. All the research shows us that if Wreck-It Ralph were in the cinema at the same time in the US and the UK that piracy on Wreck-It Ralph would go through the floor in the UK. But whenever a study shows this, the industry goes into overdrive to tell you that watching the movie at the wrong time without paying for it is totally wrong and theft. Regardless of whether not piracy numbers go up or down, its theft and its just wrong and you shouldnt be allowed to do it.
And its a bit weird; why would they be defending their right not to sell you a ticket to the movies? The reason for that is that theres two different pipelines for cinematic exhibition. In the US it centers around holidays that are observed in the US, like Thanksgiving when all the blockbuster movies come out. Here its centered around holidays that are not observed in the US but are observed in the UK, like bank holidays and half-terms. They want Wreck-It Ralph to come out at half-term here and they want Wreck-It Ralph to come out at Thanksgiving there. They make more money if Wreck-It Ralph comes out that way.
Now, there are lots of profit maximization strategies that look like this. Cinemas charge more for fizzy drinks then you would pay at a grocery store, but the limit on how much they can charge for fizzy drinks is set by the point at which they start to lose more money from people who sneak the drinks in because the prices are too high than they make when people are willing to pay for more for this. You can see that a cinema could actually reduce the number of people who sneak drinks in by paying for more security, but eventually theyll always hit this limit where the cost of insuring compliance is higher than the profits that theyre making from the profit maximization strategy.
But one way that they can offset that is by convincing us to pay for it. What if instead of the cinemas deciding to hire their own security to stop people from bringing in their own drinks, they instead claim successfully in the halls of power that bringing your own drinks to a movie theater was a form of a theft and that the police should be set outside of the cinemas to stop people from bringing in their own drinks and that the public should pay for huge jail sentences for people who brought in their own drinksIn that case they could actually raise the cost of drinks much higher, right?
Thats essentially what the entertainment has found is that its cheaper to pay lobbyists to wander around Whitehall beating their breasts and crying about piracy then it is to bring movies out on the same day and date all around the world, because they can realize those extra profits from delaying release. So this is what theyve done. They have basically pursued this PR strategy of calling people who would actually buy this if they were willing to sell it to them thieves and then convincing the public to pay for the enforcement
I get that, but we hear a lot of talk about scroungers. We hear a lot of talk about people who enrich themselves at the public expense. Well, copyright comes at the public expense. Enforcement actions, a city police force locking people up, clogging the courts, all of those things represent an enormous public expense, and when theyre not about protecting your property interests but instead maximizing your profits by creating artificial interventions in the market in the form of the willingness to stop people from availing themselves of entertainment products that youre not willing to sell them, well then its up to us to actually say, okay the free ride stops here.
Because they will continue to take the free ride for as long as we offer it. Corporations are externalizing entities. If a corporations duty is to maximize its shareholder revenue, then a corporation that doesnt pay fines for polluting the water system and doesnt have to pay money to purify its waste, it should, in order to maximize its shareholder value, pollute the water supply, because its duty is to not spend one penny more than it has to.
So we need to set up negative incentives. We need to have fines for pollution that are bigger than the cost savings that you get from dumping your waste in the water supply, otherwise these externalizing rational actor corporations will dump their waste in the water supply. Likewise, we need to say to the entertainment industry, our willingness to publicly subsidize your profit maximization strategy goes this far and no further. And I think this far should be not very far, otherwise they will continue to figure out ways to maximize their profits by externalizing their enforcement costs to us.
NP: But what kind of lesson has that taught that 9-year old girl about respect for authority and for respect for the law?
CD: Well, thats true, but remember the entertainment industrys job isnt to maximize worldwide respect for the law, its to maximize their profits. If you have a coercion based business model, you cant individually coerce everyone. You cant put an enforcer in everyones house to stop them from doing it. You have to convince them to police their own actions, and weve known for as long as there have been heads on pikes that one way to convince them to police their own actions, especially when that policing comes at their own expense, when they have to issue doing something that would otherwise make them happy is by terrorizing them.
In North Korea, if you deal in the black market and take food thats above your horrible meager ration you get sent to a prison camp and youre sent to whats called a three generation sentence where you, your children, and their children all have to live in the prison camp. The idea there is that its impractical to police everyones every move. Instead what you do is you terrorize them so that even when theyre starving they dont buy black market food.
The entertainment industrys strategy is you make examples out of people. You make examples out of the people that you catch so the people that you cant catch modify their own behavior because the consequences are so cruel and horrible. Your 9-year old has her Winnie the Pooh laptop taken away. Theyre not interested in instilling respect in that 9-year old for the entertainment industry. I think they quite rightly understand that that 9-year old will hate the entertainment industry forever. What theyre interested in is all the other parents of all the other 9-year olds going, Honey, we need to police everything you do with that laptop because otherwise the entertainment industry is going to beat our door down and is going to have the police come and seize your computer. They dont care that they lost her as a customer. They dont care that she was buying tickets. What they care about is the broader message that they send to everyone else. That is the same message that a head on a pike sends. Its what every bully does to keep their seat of power. They dont terrorize retail, they terrorize wholesale. They make examples.
NP: They terrorize on one end, and on the other theyre enforcing compliance with the new three strikes policy.
CD: Well, thats the same thing right? You dont disconnect everybody from the internet with a three strikes rule. You disconnect a million people from the internet and the other 69 million people go, We better not do it. From the entertainment industrys perspective, taking 1 million people out of the economy, which is what taking them out of the internet does, is a small price to pay because the rest of us pick up the cost of one million people being taken out of the economy, not them.Its worth it to them to take a million people out of the economy if the other 69 million can be terrorized into doing it. The same way that a feudal senior who puts one pheasants head on a pike loses a pheasant working in the field but gets more work out of all of the pheasants who remain.
NP: I can also see, with the ISPs being forced to snoop on us, that theyre going to have algorithms to filter the footprints of copyrighted movies and throttle them, in the same way that YouTube can sniff the footprints of copyrighted music and have a bot automatically take content down.
CD: Well, this is what Japan has proposedBecause now theres criminal penalties on copyright, two years in jail for downloading, 10 years in jail for uploading. The entertainment industry has found some untried and unproven technology thats literally a black box that the ISPs have to install that monitors all traffic and drops any connection that looks like it matches a copyright fingerprint. And again, this is the difference between a system that works well and a system that fails badly. It maybe that content match works really well for figuring out who to give money from ads to, the content ID on YouTube, but it works really badly for randomly disconnecting people who are conducting all of their discourse online. And the most indigent part of this is that the entertainment industry expects ISPs to license this technology from them and pay them an annual licensing fee for having a black box that they operate on their network that disconnects their customers from the internet periodically. But again, this is about externalizing costs, right? Theyre not bearing the costs, the costs are being born externally by third parties, by the ISPs in this case.
NP: Attached to the copyright issue is the attempt to criminalize links, which affects you and I as journalists. Weve seen this with the Richard O'Dwyer case, even though that fell apart, and with the Barrett Brown indictment.
CD: Yeah. The best response I ever saw to that was from a guy here in the UK named Chris Raettig...He maintains a personal website that links to horrible corporate anthems. A lot of corporations have songs that theyve commissioned songwriters to write about them. He linked to the KPMG corporate anthem. Because he humiliated them, KPMG sent him a lawyer letter saying we have a policy on our website that says you are not allowed to link to us without our permission can you show us the letter our lawyer sent you giving permission to link to our website? Instead of answering, he went and stood near the KPMG office which I think is in the Docklands with a sign that said, KPMG this way, and took a picture of himself and said, I didnt need anyones permission to tell people where your offices were, I dont need anyones permission to tell people where your website is. I mean, describing the factual existence of a thing should not be a tort or a crimeAll a link is is a statement about a thing that exists somewhere on the internet. It is not the thing. So regulation of links, mistakes the map for the territory.
NP: And its terrifying.
CD: It really is. I mean, its an enormous curtailment of speech. It really, really is.
Read part one of my interview with Cory Doctorow. Homeland will be available online and in bookstores on February 5, 2013. Catch Cory 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 visit craphound.com/. A free copy of Little Brother can be downloaded under a Creative Commons license here.