The man who coined the word “enshitification” graces the podcast to share his views on conspiracy theories, algorithmic management, AI, and reading the saucy passages in Leviticus at barmitzvahs. Cory Doctorow is a philosopher, polemicist, journalist and writer. He also has a long history of working with the Electronic Frontier Foundation and is currently a Professor-at-large at Cornell University.
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https://qaapodcast.com
QAA was known as the QAnon Anonymous podcast.
Welcome to the QAA podcast episode 338 chatting with Corey Doctorow as always we are your hosts Julian Fields Anthony Monsuy and Travis View listeners as you know we are the foremost thinkers of our era globally in the whole world but sometimes we want to hear from other illustrious characters people who also have massive brains and a legacy of public discourse that's why we're finally sitting down with one of the best thinkers of our era Corey Doctorow.
He's a philosopher, polemicist, a journalist, a writer of both nonfiction and science fiction, and sometimes just regular fiction.
He also has a long history of working with the Electronic Frontier Foundation and is currently a professor at large at Cornell University.
And honestly, introducing you, Corey, is difficult because there's too many things.
You are one of the busiest human beings, and your output is terrifying.
I feel like I've done nothing with my life when I read down all the things that you get up to every year.
So I just wanted to say, first of all, welcome to the show.
Oh, well, thank you very much.
You know, my secret is that I have a really shitty coping strategy for stress, which is that I write and try not to think about the things that are making me sad and angry.
And so I end up, like, the worse things get, the more books I write, which is great, except, like, it's also, like, I never process my anxiety and it just sort of builds up and up and up and if I'm not working I'm just like freaking out so you know swings around about that's that sounds fantastic I shut down I shut down and try to avoid all work so it's it's a similar similar approach yeah turning existential dread into productivity I think that's the better method yeah I think so too no I mean I need to change my life profoundly I mean as coping strategies go it's
bad.
It's just not as good as actually coping, right?
It's actually like processing.
But it's, you know, it's fine.
It's good.
Yeah.
I like that you say that.
And then the writing is like so often on topics that I would not say reduce anxiety or stress.
Oh no, I'm giving it to you.
Oh yeah.
The reader.
You see, I'm taking it out of me and giving it to you.
I like that.
Well, we recruited our longtime collaborator and our favorite French journalist, the person that I torture in the field.
You might remember him from the CPAC episodes or or uh you know our two-parter on cambridge analytica it's anthony moncrui anthony how you doing dude salute it's going well thank you very much like half the listeners just quit yeah it's 2 47 a.m here yeah cool yeah well you know anthony's a big doctoral head and he threatened my life i remember him kind of ranting about um you uh in front of the CPAC building.
So we had to have him lead this.
But he did tell me once we went on that since he sounds very French that I should ask most of the questions.
But I don't know.
I don't think his accent is that thick.
I mean, I'm technically Canadian like all the best Americans, which means that I speak French common vache espagnole.
And if you'd like me to grunt ungrammatically in my shitty Anglo-Canadian French, we could try to have a rapport, as they say in French.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Oh.
Insult all the Americans and the Canadians.
Exactly.
One of my favorite characters that I do is Quebecwa Julian.
So we can I can meet you halfway there.
I don't know.
And poor Travis.
Yeah.
Travis doesn't speak any French.
That's why often I will say a few sentences in French and then Jake and Travis will go, well, that didn't sound good.
Yeah.
And we recognized our names in it.
So one of the big concepts, let's jump right in.
One of the big concepts that you are known for recently that has kind of taken off and become a kind of standard talking point, I think, when big tech comes up is insidification.
So like besides the existence of our podcast, what is insidification?
Well, you mentioned I've been working with the Electronic Frontier Foundation for a long time.
I'm actually in my 24th year now, so it's more than halfway through my working life.
So literally for like this entire millennium, I've been running around trying to get people to care about these very abstract technical policy questions that eventually become really concrete, right?
Like, you know, when all your shit is leaked on the internet and then, you know, someone SWATs you or whatever, suddenly it's very important to understand these technical policy questions, but you kind of want people to engage with them before they're concrete, because that's like when everything's on fire.
And for all that time, I've been coming up with colorful metaphors and funny words and all kinds of other stuff.
And one day, I just started swearing.
And it turns out that people really like a minor license to vulgarity.
And so I took this big set of ideas about why platforms are all going bad and I called it in shitification and gave a lot of people an opportunity to swear.
And that made them engage with the criticism in a way that hasn't happened in all my decades doing it.
And partly I think that's because like the internet really is on fire and people are looking for explanations and I think it's a good one.
But also I just I don't want to discount the swearing, not least because there's a whack of people who are like, well, couldn't you have a less swearing word?
One guy I know is like an international security expert was like, I can't say this to NATO generals.
And I'm like, well, I'm pretty sure that by the time you've at achieved the rank of general, you've heard the word shit at least once in your life.
But also, like, think of your own word.
Because, like, I tried for a long time, and it wasn't until I started cussing that, you know, it's now the word of the year in Australia, the US and the UK.
And, you know, the Irish top, Irish tech regulator used it in a formal speech in front of a group of policymakers.
And, you know, just people like to swear.
Anyway, so what isn't shitification?
It is a critic of tech platforms.
Platforms are like the indigenous, uh, form of enterprise on the internet.
Platform is a thing that mediates between two or more groups of people.
You know, dating apps mediate between people looking to find each other, Uber mediates between drivers and riders, Amazon between sellers and buyers, you know, Google between web publishers, advertisers and searchers and so on.
And, you know, there's a good reason we have platforms.
Like, nobody wants to roll their own everything.
You don't want to be like, you know, yes, you want to edit your podcasts, you want to make your podcasts, you don't want to run the hosting infrastructure for your podcasts, you don't want to, you know, create the international directory of podcasts so that people can find it.
You don't want to do your own, I don't know, mid roll ad inserts or whatever.
You kind of, you want intermediaries.
Intermediaries are fine.
They let people do what they're good at.
But the problem is that when intermediaries become powerful, they are in an extraordinarily privileged position because they have lots of insight into what's going on on either side of the market, right, between the buyers and sellers or searchers and publishers.
And they are able to usurp the relationship between those two groups of people and steadily worsen it.
And if they can find ways to lock you in, you will end up staying around on these platforms as they get worse and worse and as you get more and more tormented.
And so long as you love the thing that you get by interacting through the platform, so maybe that's the company of your friends more than you hate the people who run the platform, they can make things worse and worse for you.
And so incitement follows a kind of characteristic three stage process.
Not every platform incitifies this way, but it's the platonic ideal.
In stage one, they're good to their end users and they find a way to lock the end users in.
So I'll use Facebook as an example, right?
Facebook opened up to the general public in 2006.
Before that, you needed a.edu address.
You had to be an American college kid to use it.
And Mark Zuckerberg, he had a pitch, right?
He was like, Hey kids, I know you already have a social media account on MySpace, but has it occurred to you that MySpace is owned by an evil, crapulent, senescent Australian billionaire named Rupert Murdoch, who spies on you with every hour that God sends.
If you come to Facebook, all I ask of you is that you tell me who matters to you in this world and I'll show you the things that they post and nothing else.
And I'll never spy on you, which was the initial Facebook pitch.
I don't know if you remember this.
I do remember this, but can we break away for one second to just get your take on the conspiracy theory that Facebook was, let's say, that Mark was a useful person for the kind of, you know, DOD to launch something like this.
I don't think that's the case.
I mean, Facebook was originally created so Zuck and his pals could non-consensually rate the fuckability of their fellow undergraduates at Harvard, right?
Yeah.
And exactly.
I mean, that is literally the original Facebook.
And I think that what Zuckerberg did was he filled a Facebook shape hole, which is to say, he built a social media network that was not significantly better and not significantly worse.
than, you know, MySpace or Friendster or six degrees or any of the ones that came before.
And the difference was that he figured out how to lock the door behind people because all those other platforms, they were like leaky buckets.
They were Roach Motels or not Roach Motels, rather.
They're the opposite of Roach Motel.
You could check in and you could check out.
Facebook was a Roach Motel.
And so he did a bunch of things.
We're kind of skipping ahead here, but he did a bunch of things like buy competitors.
So at one point, you had Instagram becoming really popular with Facebook users who were finding that the collective action problem of deciding to leave and the switching cost of going away and leaving your friends could be borne because Facebook was so bad and Instagram was so good.
And so he offered a company with twelve employees a billion dollars., which like small potatoes by today's standards.
But back then, it was an unheard of acquisition.
So much so that his CFO sent him an email and said, like, why are you giving these clowns a billion dollars?
And Zuckerberg is very famous for his nocturnal.
If you've read Careless People, the amazing Sarah Wynn Williams book, now, so Sarah Wynn Williams was the first international head of Facebook, the person who did international relations.
She was this very idealistic Kiwi former foreign service person who basically demanded that they give her a job because she believed in the transformative power of Facebook.
And she's actually in Join now from speaking in public about it because she violated her non disclosure and non disparagement agreement.
We're going to be on stage together at the Barbican on the 15th on this tour.
And I'm kind of noodling with the idea that she's going to stand completely stock still with a blank face and I'm going to tell everyone how good her book is and call frequent attention to the fact that she's in no way communicating anything about her book and not violating her court order.
But anyway, in this book, there's this incredible story about the fact that Zuckerberg wouldn't take a meeting before two in the afternoon, I believe.
And so he's been trying to get the president of Colombia to make Facebook basics the kind of national internet.
So you can get Facebook and its approved services for free.
Everything else costs money.
Facebook becomes synonymous.
And this has been like the main priority of Facebook for like two years and Colombia's finally bit and they're willing to do it.
And it's in the middle of the peace settlement with the FARC and the end of a 50-year civil war.
And so they're going to announce it, but they're going to announce it at noon.
And Mark Zuckerberg won't get out of bed for it.
And they're like, but the thing that's happening at two is the signing of the peace agreement with FARC.
And so we can't delay that because it's the end of our civil war for 50 years.
And Zuckerberg showed up at two and was like, all right, we can do it now.
Absolute king, you know?
He's like a reverse Biden.
Yeah.
Exactly.
So Zuckerberg's CFO sends him this email and Zuckerberg sends him.
an email back because, like, this is a guy who just puts every terrible idea he has in writing.
And he sends him an email back at 2:30 a.m.
And it's like, well, Bob, you want to know why we're giving these guys a billion dollars?
People like Instagram more than they like Facebook.
And so if we can reduce the competition by buying them, they won't have anywhere to go.
And, you know, competition law, it's not been very vigorously enforced for like forty years.
Reagan basically killed it.
And then everyone who came after him just put another steak through its heart.
But the, like, the one thing that competition law technically still forbade was deliberately setting out to reduce competition, which, you know, is an unprovable thing because no one would ever put in writing, Oh, no, I did that acquisition to reduce competition.
That would be like saying, Hey Bob, you know that guy we're planning to kill just so you know, it's definitely a murder and I am premeditating it even as I type these words, your pals.
So, you know, Mark Zuckerberg just like he found a way to pull up the ladder, right?
So other platforms had collapsed.
Mark Zuckerberg didn't collapse because he found new forms of lock in.
The most important form of lock in on social media is just, I alluded to this before, collective action problems and switching costs.
Just, you know, you love your friends, but they're a pain in the ass.
And like, you know, God help you for trying to figure out what board game you're going to play on Friday, much less like how two hundred of you are going to leave Facebook and go somewhere else.
And then because you do love your friends, you're like, oh, I guess I will stay, especially since some of those friends on Facebook are the people with the same rare disease as you or the people you left behind when you emigrated or, you know, the parents and your kids' little league team organizing the carpool or they're your customers or they're your audience.
So you're just kind of stuck there.
So that's stage one.
They find a way to lock you in while being good to you, right?
Just showing you what you wanted to see, not spying on you.
And then once you're locked in, they can start eroding the value for you and start handing it over to business customers.
And so in this case, you know, right at the start, it was publishers and advertisers.
So they go to the publishers and they say, hey, do you remember we told these Rubes we were only going to show them the things they asked to see?
We were totally lying, obviously., if you put excerpts of your content, we'll like cram it in their eyes and you'll get a traffic funnel, put a link to your website, you can make money on it.
They go to the advertisers and say, Hey, you know, we told these Rubes we were going to spy on them.
Also lying, clearly spying on them from asshole to appetite.
Give us just tiny dollars and we will target ads with exquisite fidelity to exactly the people you want to see.
And by the way, that whole building over there, that's just like ad fraud engineers.
We just pay those guys to make sure that when you give us a dollar to show someone an ad, it gets shown to that person and it's not just disappearing in a fraud hole.
So publishers and advertisers pile in and they get locked to the platform and they get locked to the platform because of not seller power, right?
When when you have a monopoly that like you have to buy your your stuff from, but because of buyer power, what's called monopsony and buyer power is actually much easier to establish because businesses generally do not have a lot of leeway.
And so if there's a big customer, right?
If there's a customer that's like 20% of your business and they say, oh, as of tomorrow, we're not giving you any money, you're in really serious trouble.
And so that business can really jerk you around.
And so the publishers and the advertisers, they get really locked to Facebook because Facebook is now controlling an audience that they've become dependent on.
And so Facebook then starts to turn the screws on them.
They're making things worse for them.
And this is where like a lot of critiques like Zuboff and surveillance capitalism go wrong because they're like, oh, Facebook made things bad for users to make things good for advertisers because they love advertisers.
And if you're not paying for the product, you're the product.
But actually, Facebook hates the advertisers too and the publishers.
You know, even if you're paying for the product, you're the product.
They're going to screw you if they can screw you, right?
If you can be productized, you're the product.
So advertising fidelity goes way down, advertising prices go way up, advertising fraud goes insane.
So I think it was 2017 Proctor and Gamble zeroed out its programmatic advertising spend, which was what they called surveillance ads.
They were spending 200 million dollars a year on surveillance ads.
They spent 0 dollars a year the next year and they saw a 0% drop in sales because like to a first approximation, like no one saw those ads.
Yeah.
So the accounting is completely fraudulent.
Oh, totally.
And then the publishers, well, they're like, it turns out we have to put longer and longer excerpts on Facebook to even have our subscribers see it, much less to have it recommended.
And eventually it's like, oh no, it has to be fully substituted.
It has to be the whole article.
Oh, and by the way, if you put a link in the article back to your website, we're going to suppress that link because it might be a malicious link.
So you have to now be a commodity back end supplier to Facebook.
And the only way you can monetize your shit is with our advertising market, the one where like 200 million dollars at a time disappears down the fraud hole, right?
So stage two sounds pretty bad.
While stage two is making things better for the advertisers and publishers, stage three is making things worse for them and turning into a pile of shit.
And normally, you know, platforms would then collapse at this point.
But as I said, you know, they don't do that anymore, but they do become in a very brittle equilibrium, right?
Because the goal at this point is to claw back all the surplus value that's available and to allocate it to shareholders and to executive bonuses.
But the difference between I hate this platform so much, but I can't seem to stop visiting it.
And I hate this platform so much, and I'm never going to visit it again.
It just takes like a live stream mass shooting, a Cambridge Analytica, a whistleblower, you know, and people bully for the exits.
And because these platforms are so sensitive to investor sentiment because, you know, they're growth platforms until they stop growing and then they're a mature company and their value drops by like, whatever, seventy percent because growth stocks are valued at like, ten X of what mature stocks are.
Then they get really worried when they see slowdowns.
You know, in 2022, Zuckerberg, uh, his first quarter, uh, results were slightly less growth in the US than projected.
And there was a 24 hour quarter trillion dollar sell off of Facebook stock.
Uh, before the Nvidia crash, it was the biggest crash of any stock in the history of the human race.
You know, you love to see it.
So, yeah.
When that starts, sorry, go ahead.
Oh, no.
I was just going to say, I do love to see it.
Yeah.
And also speculation is wild.
I hope it's not the core of our economy.
Well, thankfully, everything's pivoted to cryptocurrency, which is all about the fundamentals.
So, yeah, absolutely.
So, you know, when there are these exits of users, business customers, or both platforms, they panic.
And being tech bros, they have a technical term for panicking.
They call it pivoting.
And so one morning, Mark Zuckerberg, you know, arose from his sarcophagus and he said, comrades, I've had a vision.
I know I told you that your future consisted of arguing with your racist uncle using the primitive text interface I created in my dorm room.
But actually, the future is that I'm going to turn you and everyone you love into a legless, sexless, low polygon, heavily surveilled cartoon character and imprison you in a virtual world that I stole from a 25-year-old satirical cyberpunk novel called the metaverse.
And like, that's the, you know, kind of the gambit.
And we've seen pivots like that since with AI, super intelligence, blah, blah, blah, blah, but that's the cycle.
So, you know, that's incitification.
We can, I could talk about this all day about why it's happening now and what we should do about it.
But that's the pattern that once you explain it, people are like, oh, yeah, I see that happening everywhere.
Of course.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Absolutely.
I mean, even with stuff like Netflix, I mean, this, this kind of like accumulation of debt while you, you know, get your market share above everybody else's.
And then suddenly it's time to pay the bills.
And that's when they, you know, the screws, the screws get turned.
But yeah, no, I mean, you have, like, if people want to hear a lot, a lot more about this, you have a Kickstarter related to it, right?
Yes.
So as I said earlier, I write books.
It's a filthy habit.
And I ended up writing a book called Inshidification, Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It, which my publisher in the US, Macmillan picked up through their For Arceus and Giroux imprint.
And then in the UK, Verso picked it up.
And there's about a dozen foreign editions in the pipeline.
There's a graphic novel coming from another Macmillan imprint next year.
There's a documentary crew that's going to follow me on the bo book tour and so on.
But what there isn't is an audiobook.
And the reason there isn't an audiobook is because of incitement.
So, uh, audio is controlled by one company, uh, Audible.
It's a division of Amazon.
They have a 90% market share.
Amazon did not found Audible.
Like most tech companies, Amazon is not an inventing things company.
It's a buying things company.
And, uh, these predatory acquisitions allow it to sow up markets and to create switching costs and so on.
Amazon has a, uh, an ironclad policy for Audible, the 90% market share audiobook market that if you sell on Audible, you have to agree to lock up your audiobooks with something called digital rights management, which, you know, the gamers and the audience will know about and anyone who is into tech will know about, but it's it's a kind of encryption that locks the media to the platform.
So you can't take your audiobooks with you somewhere else.
And, you know, that wouldn't be a normal, a big problem under normal circumstances because, like, technology is really flexible.
You know, someone builds a ten foot pile of shit, someone else makes an eleven foot ladder, you just convert those files and run them somewhere else, except that in 1998 Bill Clinton signed a law called the Digital Millennium Copyright Act and section twelve oh one of the DMCA establishes a new felony punishable with a five year prison sentence and a five hundred thousand dollar fine for breaking digital rights management, which means that if I let Amazon sell you an audiobook of mine.
And then later, Amazon starts mistreating me and I want to go somewhere else and I want you to follow me.
So I give you a tool so you can convert the library of books that you bought of mine and follow me to a rival platform.
I commit a felony and can go to prison for five years.
Have you considered for your book tour getting like a piece of duct tape and putting it over your mouth and calling it like the censored tour?
They're not letting him speak.
I like that.
I like that.
Too dangerous for Jeff Bezos.
Half the people he hates, he makes piss in bottles.
The other half, he refuses to sell their audiobooks.
That's, yeah, both exactly the same level of pain in the individual.
So it turns out publishers don't want the rights to audiobooks that they can't sell on Audible because that's ninety percent of the market.
And like ninety percent of what's left is Apple, which also does mandatory DRM.
Ninety percent of what's left after that is audiobooks dot com, which also has mandatory DRM.
And so I just retain those rights.
And so I go into a studio and I record the books.
Uh, sometimes I get other people to record them.
Will Wheaton's recorded a ton of my fiction.
He's a really good audiobook narrator and a neighbor of mine here in LA.
But for this one, I definitely was going to record it on my own.
So I went into the studio with my director, Gabrielle DeQuer.
I recorded it.
My editor edited it.
And I will sell it in all the places you can buy audioboooks that are on Apple, Audible and audiobooks.com, basically everything that starts with a B or another letter further down from there all the way to Z, but not A. And the problem is that no one is going to buy them there because they are a fraction of a fraction of a percent of the market all put together.
And so these Kickstarters that I do to pre sell the audiobook are how I make the whole thing viable.
It's not cheap to pay people union scale and what they're worth to do this work and to rent studios and so on.
And so that Kickstarter is running right now.
You can preorder the ebook and the audiobook.
They're delivered without DRM, but also uniquely without license agreements.
They're not license deals, they're sales.
You own the e-book and the audiobook the way you own the print book, but you can also buy on the Kickstarter.
And I have fulfillment partners in the UK and Europe and Canada and the US.
So they'll ship them all over the world.
But the e-book and the audiobook, you can give them away, you can lend them, you can sell them.
If you and your partner get divorced, you can divide them up in your divorce estate, you can leave them to your kids.
They're yours, like your books.
And that is unique among digital publishing, as far as I know, to own something.
Is there a high divorce rate among your readers?
Well, statistically, I think it's a little over fifty percent, right?
I mean, if they're North Americans.
I mean, we're going to put the link definitely to this Kickstarter, yeah, in the description.
I have an alias for it.
It's disenshittification.org.
We'll direct you to it with two Ts.
Beautiful.
Okay.
Well, yeah.
I mean, obviously, you know, the listener should go check that out.
You do not own this podcast listener, by the way.
You are borrowing it from us.
Right.
It's licensed.
I also don't know how any of this works.
And I have a feeling it's like when you're talking about this stuff, I feel like the guy who's not wearing the They Live glasses.
Like you see the whole system.
I don't understand.
I'm just kind of wandering like it's fine.
But we're surrounded by ghouls at this point.
I mean, it seems really grim.
Well, yeah.
I mean, here's the the thing this is like uh the climate emergency right 25 years ago very few of us understood greenhouse gases and their relationship to you know ecosystem level issues.
And now I think most of us have a pretty good lay understanding.
I think, you know, 25 years ago, if I was talking about CO2 or methane or whatever, you know, or ocean heating or any of those things, you would have been like, you've, you've got the, they live glasses.
You can see all the science stuff that's happening.
And like eventually everybody understands that stuff.
They understand it when it's kind of too late because it, it's, it's there.
These tech policy issues, it's one of the things that makes them so deadly is that they are kind of boring until they're not.
And the thing that makes them not boring is that they're terrifying.
And so the only way to actually deal with them is to deal with them when they're boring.
Otherwise, you end up fighting this rearguard action.
Like, you know, one of our best tools for organizing against incidification is the internet.
The internet is also very incidified, which makes it hard to use the internet to fight against incidification.
15 years ago, it would have been a lot easier.
Yeah.
Well, I want to jump right in because you also write a lot about conspiracy.
I do.
And conspiracy theories and conspiracy theory culture.
And so Antony's question here is about you writing a column about the links between rejecting systemic explanations and conspiracy culture.
So there's this quote by you, Conspiratorialism is a cognitive failure that occurs when you blame systemic problems on individuals.
Could you elaborate on that?
Yeah.
So I know you folks are fans of Nomi Klein's Doppelganger.
I love that book.
And there's a bit in that book where she revives a 19th century saying that anti-Semitism is the socialism of fools.
And, you know, I think this is a very profound observation because if you observe that the finance sector has a parasitic relationship with the productive economy and that because it is able to kind of leverage what should be a fairly kind of utilitarian role of allocating capital into a kind of market structuring role of controlling and structuring the economy, it gains political power that it can use to enhance its financescial power and then its political power and so on.
You observe all of this and you say the problem is that the bankers are Jewish, then you have ascribed individual moral failings to what is a systemic problem, right?
You asked me before about Mark Zuckerberg and whether he was an op.
I don't think Mark Zuckerberg was an op.
I think there was a Mark Zuckerberg shaped hole in the economy because we were allowing monopolization.
And in the same way, I don't think that who the bankers are matters.
I think that it is the structure of the economy that makes bankers so powerful that matters.
And so I spoiled the rest of this interview because I looked ahead in your document.
I know we're going to talk about libs in a bit.
But there's a little saying about libs that I like, which is that libs observe a world in which 150 straight white men are running everything and say, that's not fair.
Half of them should be women, people of color, and queers.
And I think that if you are unable to understand that systemic problems arise out of systemic conditions, and you think instead that extraordinary individual villainy is what causes bad things to happen, then you're asking the wrong question.
I'm a novelist.
I write about villains, right?
But the thing that makes villains important is not just their bad ideas, it's their power., right?
If Elon Musk didn't have the ability to exploit a bunch of financial loopholes, he'd just be another asshole with bad ideas.
You know, it's the it's the half a trillion dollars that makes him an important person.
And, you know, there are lots of people with bad ideas out there.
If the only way we can make the world better is by making sure that people stop having bad ideas, we're really hosed.
But if we can just make sure no one's got half a trillion dollars, which I think is a much smaller lift, then the bad ideas just don't matter in the same way.
Yeah, it's interesting.
I've been kind of toying with this idea about the actual living entity is capitalism and we're just cells in it.
As in those cells could be easily replaced or shed.
Yeah.
And so Zuckerberg or Musk, if it wasn't them, it'd be someone else because, like you said, of the kind of systemic existence of power and like the essentially there's a demand for people like that, right?
If we live in an economy where the rich are going to get richer and can leverage their increasing monopolies, then rich people will take those roles.
They will sit at that seat that's available for them.
My friend Charlie Strauss, he calls AI slow, or he calls corporations slow AI.
And I sometimes say that the limited liability company is like an immortal colony organism that uses humans as gut flora.
So I think that this is a productive analogy.
Yes, especially now that we know that the gut has like neurons and stuff.
Which is one of my favorite little things that's happened recently is that essentially hundreds of years ago, before we had like proper scientific method and shit, everybody was like, well, your digestion and your stomach is obviously related to your humor and like how you feel.
And then we're like, no, that's not true.
And then much later we go, wait, it actually is true.
And so we're returning, I think we should return to like biliousness.
Your black bile is too hot.
Yeah.
We need the four elements.
Right.
Sleepy, dopey, dock, sneezy.
Yeah.
You know, we tried bloodletting for 2,000 years, but maybe we didn'll maybe we'll find out that the leeches were doing something that we didn't understand and that when we stopped using the leeches, I mean, I think that maybe that's too far, but I would like to promote leeches to our listeners.
You should use leeches on yourself.
That's medical advice.
This is getting a little off the field, but I think about this business of where people have put the seed of consciousness all the time, because the Egyptians, if I'm right, thought the seed of consciousness was in the chest and that the brain was an organ for cooling blood and not related to thought, which I just find like I find it literally unimaginable that you wouldn't intuit that the seed of your consciousness was behind your eyes.
Yeah.
And yet the lived experience of someone who believes that their seat of consciousness is in their chest must be so different.
Yeah, I do think that there's something to that, though.
I mean, that there would at least, it would be interesting to look at a kind of dual vision of that.
But again, science fails us at this point, right?
Like we intuitively know that there's something there, but we can't quite put it in terms that the scientific method is able to process.
And so that's why science is wrong.
and we need to return to religion.
Well, and to roll this back to conspiratorialism, I do think that, you know, the failure of institutions is the convincer that con men need to make new conspiratorialists.
That, you know, if you if you are an anti-vax grifter who wants to sell your horse pills, you point to the fact that the Sacklers got away with ten billion dollars and you say, really, you think that that regulator has your best interests at heart.
You think that the pharma industry wants to make you better.
You think that the system works, why would you trust these motherfuckers, you know, and that's the convincer.
And so I think that, you know, going back to libs and, you know, defend our institutions, you cannot defend the institutions unless you improve them.
RFK junior wouldn't be able to do what he was doing now if the manifest problems of the institutions hadn'' failures are often rooted in monopoly because it's very hard to regulate a cartel because they're more powerful than the referee.
Yeah.
How do we explain the individualization, the individualization of the whole process?
Is that, because that's like the reason why it happens that I think the systemic deficiencies, which can lead to any explanation being peddled, but why the individualization in your opinion?
So tell me what you mean by individualization.
To blame the systemic deficiencies that materialists can analyze on individuals.
And why does that work better than systemic explanations?
So I think that, you know, the neoliberal.
revolution was all about moving away from societal explanations to individual ones.
And I think that there's like an instrumental reason that that was valuable to people who wanted to get rich at everyone else's expense, which is that if you say you are only an individual and there's no room for systemic action or collective action, then you make weak people stay weak because the only way weak people can defeat strong people is by working together in institutions.
And so when Margaret Thatcher stands up and says there is no such thing as society, right?
What she's saying is the only way that you can get a better wage is to individually go into your boss' doesn't give you a raise at the end of that, you don't deserve the raise.
And that the thing you absolutely can't do is have you and all of your colleagues walk off the job and stop anyone from going into the factory until your boss gives you all a raise, because if that were the case, then there would be such a thing as society.
But I also think that the ideological work, so that's like the material work it does, and I'm a materialist.
I think that like things that produce material benefits for a certain segment of society get spread by that segment of society.
But I also think it does ideological work.
It's very hard, I think, if you're rich to feel good about yourself unless you think that there's no such thing as luck.
Because if you think there's such a thing as luck, then like you have to contend with the fact fact that you just stepped over someone who is dying in a gutter on your way to, you know, warm yourself in a bonfire made of $50 bills.
And the only way that that could possibly be okay is if the economy is a computer, the computer processes information, that information that is processed in the name of discovering people who are efficient capital allocators, it allocates capital to those people.
The invisible hand elevates the good, it punishes the weak.
It's, you know, Providence for, you know, the Adam Smith set.
And if you believe that, then you can form a moral justification for it.
And if you're on the other side of it, if you're in the gutter, it forms a moral justificationation for the guy who's stepping over you because you deserve it because you didn't.
That's every rise and grind asshole on Instagram and TikTok trying to, you know, pedal their MLM, you know, products and then blaming themselves.
There's an anthropologist, a legal scholar named Vina Dubo, is also an anthropologist.
She coined this term algorithmic wage discrimination.
She did this ethnography of Uber drivers.
So Uber does this thing where they I call it twiddling where they adjust the business logic on a per user, per interaction basis.
So every price you're quoted, every wage that's quoted to a driver is customized for the situation based on surveillance data and the expectation of what you're willing to.
So you have to have an expectation of what you're willing to pay and what they're willing to take.
And the rough heuristic for drivers is that picky drivers get paid more.
If you turn down rides, they raise the wage until you start taking the rides.
But then when you start taking the rides, they start to tighter the wage down using small random intervals, small random increments.
Very hard for the human sensory apparatus to notice this downward trend.
And the idea is to trap you in a lower wage where you're jettisoning your other side hustles at the point where the wage is higher and you get stuck in Uber and you get stuck in a lower wage equilibrium.
And when Dubble interviewed drivers about this, because they don't really know about this, most of them, they bucket themselves into two groups.
There's drivers who call themselves ants who take every ride, and there's drivers who call themselves pickers who are picky.
And the ants would watch the pickers on social media on, on Reddit forums and whatever saying like, I just made 300 bucks in one day and they're looking at the 40 bucks that they've made in that day and they're like, I am so bad at Uber.
I am so bad at Uber.
Why am I bad at Uber?
That guy's so good at Uber.
Did he say something to the passengers that made them give him five stars so that then he got a raise from the algorithm?
Like, what?
Why am I bad at Uber?
Right.
The only way to find out what's going on literally is for these drivers to get together and pool information.
Right.
If they, if they like, all show what their wage offers are and there's, there's a guy called the rideshare guy who took two brothers who drive Uber, one of whom is more occasional, one who is does it as a daily hustle.
And they sat next to each other with their phones and they watched the same job come into their phones.
And you could see that the job was being bid out at half the wage for one of these drivers, the less picky driver.
The only way to find that out is to be collective.
And so atomization, individualization does this incredible material work, but it also does this ideological work, this psychological work.
That's amazing and extremely depressing.
So yeah, guys, we need algorithms, but for labor.
Yeah.
We need to develop labor algorithms and they will fight the capitalist algorithms.
Wait till I tell you about the nurses.
Because, oh no, unions, you know, hospitals don't like union nurses, so they understaff and then they hire contract nurses.
And they've been doing that for a long time, but they used to hire them from local labor agencies, right?
Local staffing agencies.
Those have all been replaced by three giant apps, each of which calls itself Uber for nurses.
And their algorithmic wage discrimination is that because we live in a country that hasn't had a new consumer privacy law since 1988, when we banned video store clerks from telling newspapers about your VHS cassettes, there's almost no limits on what data brokers will sell you.
And so the apps can in real time buy the recent credit history of nurses who are looking for a shift and offer them a lower lower wage if they're carrying more credit card debt on the grounds that they're more economically desperate?
I don't like the feeling of hearing about hearing about anything of this.
Doesn't it make you conspiratorial?
Right?
Like, don't you hear this stuff and you think, yeah.
Fuck that, like there's a villain somewhere.
There's a bat.
I need to go into the basement of the pizza parlor and shoot someone so this stops happening.
I was definitely thinking exactly that.
There's no basement in the pizza parlor.
Altuni, do you want to step in a little bit and talk about this question that you have about a mirror world?
Yeah, yeah, because you often mention Naomi Klan in your in your columns and the idea of a mirror world.
I can't pronounce it.
Mirror world.
It's like getting a German to say squirrel.
The world in the mirror.
But it kind of implies that there's two sides, you know, like you're one or the other.
And you mentioned liberals earlier, which would put them like in perhaps the good side, the right side of the mirror.
And we know that when it comes to probably Palestine or the economy, they probably are not.
So like this idea of the mirror world where like you have definitely the conspiracy theories to the listeners, the idea is that they see the same kind of reality, but they twist it and interpret it in a completely different way.
But there is no like what's on the other side.
of the liberals?
Yeah.
Well, so I think Mirror World as Klein uses it, and I think she's really right, she uses it in two different ways.
She uses it in a very poetic way.
Sometimes, you know, this is the interesting and curious and somewhat surreal fact that there's like a Naomi Klein and a Naomi Wolf and they get mixed up with each other and they have some superficial similarities, but these really important divergences.
And that's a kind of poetic description.
I think it's quite compelling to hear that.
But she also uses it in this ideological way, right?
And I think the way Klein uses it, she says she really wants to say that on one side of the mirror are the people who develop systemic critics.
And on the other side of the mirror are people who develop individualistic ones, and they fight the same broadly the same issues, but because their diagnosis is so wrong, they've observed the same pathology, but their diagnosis is so wrong that they fall, you know, into traps.
So I wrote a column about this called The Swivel Eyed Loons Have a Point after the fifteen minute city demonstration in Oxford, right?
Which like Oxford is like a what, two thousand year old or one thousand year old university city, right?
Like it is a fifteen minute city.
You can't bring your Land Rover around Oxford because the streets are like wide enough for a donkey cart, right?
Like, and you have all these nut jobs out there saying, you know, like, don't put out the license plate cameras to spy on us, to stop us from driving out of our neighborhood.
Don't force us to use central bank digital currencies so you can interdict our payments and control our political actions by shutting down our financial activity.
Don't, you know, like they have all these demands, right?
And I'm looking at these demands and I'm like, they're actually pretty reasonable demands, right?
Like the actual reality of automatic license plate recognition cameras is that they are used as a system of unaccountable off the books mass surveillance, right?
And they are used in ways as a system of political control.
And, you know, I happen to think a central bank digital currency is okay, but only because all of the merits of central bank digital currencies are already there with Visa, which will just hand all your transaction data to the government if they ask for it.
And the only difference between central bank digital currency and Visa is that we would just eliminate this company that has a three percent tax on the entire consumer economy, which, you know, good riddance and don't let the door hitch in the ass on the way out.
But they're right about the dangers of central bank digital currencies.
Right?
So they're they're right about so much.
And yet their overall worldview is so wrong.
Right?
It's like, it's like there's a I'm trying to remember how the joke goes, but there's a joke about.
someone who wants to be safe while they're like riding their bicycle.
So they put a condom on because they've heard that, you know, wearing a condom is the key to being safe.
And it's like, it is the key to being safe, not while riding a bicycle, right?
And like they're right about this stuff, but they're wrong about it.
And on a good day, I'm like, maybe this is our common ground, right?
Maybe if we sit down with these people and say, yeah, you know, who's been tormented with CCTVs and automatic license plate cameras and mass surveillance and phone tracking?
Marginalized people who tried to protest for better conditions.
Like not you, not you know, you folks downwardly mobile middle class people from the leafy suburbs and London exurbs.
Those problems will eventually reach you.
You're right to be worried about it.
We have this, you know, shitty technology adoption curve where every bad technology is first, you know, used on like prisoners and refugees and then like people of color and blue color workers and school children and then like high school kids and whatever.
And then like eventually like you go from, oh, CCTVs watch you eat dinner if you're in a Supermax prison to CCTVs watch you eat dinner if you were like dumb enough to buy an Apple home camera system.
Oh, God.
And, you know, it's it's like you do you should worry, right?
You should actually absolutely be worried.
I don't buy this argument like, oh, you've got privilege.
You don't have to worry about being spied on by a camera.
Sure, you don't today, but you know, like you will tomorrow.
Yeah, that's that's what you talked about the the common go ground is something you can see on the field when you work as a journalist there is like many many of the conspiracy theorists don't want to speak to journalists and when they're not like in the fascist end of the of this conspiracy spectrum the only way to get them to really talk to you is actually to acknowledge that there are problems in society and the thing is journalists like don't don't see them don't report on them which is actually we know not true but yeah the common ground is like yeah yeah this is bad this is not good and
uh and there's a way to talk about this that probably doesn't like demonize billgates for the wrong reasons yeah you know there's this idea comes from uh well it comes from sociology but i encountered it in David Graeber and David Wengrow's book Dawn of Everything, which is schismogenesis, which is that people establish identities by saying we're the people who believe the opposite of what those people believe.
And it can be very weird to watch this happen in real time.
Like my mom was really important to the struggle for the rights of women to get abortions in Canada.
And so I grew up at abortion protests and doing clinic defense and so on.
And I just about remember, because I was born in 71, I just about remember when it was only Catholics and evangelicals and Protestants thought that caring about abortion was ideologically suspect and made you like a crypto papist, right?
And there are people today, you know, white evangelicals who will, you know, vote for Donald Trump, right?
Vote for like a rapist who's probably paid for innumerable women's abortions because he will make abortion illegal because it is literally the only thing they care about who in their own living memory were like, you care about abortion?
What's wrong with you, right?
Like that is weird.
And I see it today now with people going, oh, you think voting machines aren't trustworthy?
What are you some kind of conspiratorialist, right?
Like I don't have to believe that voting machines are being used to hack whole elections to understand that like voting machine companies have a long track record of making sub-par products that don't survive independent audit and that, you know, like the voter village at vote hacking village at DEFCON every year takes a bunch of voting machines they bought off eBay and shows just how wildly insecure they are.
How, like, there was one where like the only thing you needed to do to access it and like stick a USB key into it and flash its firmware was open its high security lock, which was a hotel mini bar lock that you can buy for five dollars on eBay.
And like, oh good.
Yeah.
So like, I don't think Dominion was like a chavismo op from Venezuela or whatever.
I also don't think Dominion is good and that we should be buying its products.
Like there, there, there is room to not have your mind so open that your brains leak out of your ears, you know?
Yeah.
I remember a few years ago in france during the the yellow vest protests in france you had like many liberal pundits and even some of um emmanuel macron's deputies the the congress people in france they pedaled the narrative that it came from russia and even in some cases uh like actual like elected people said that it came from steve bannon because they saw that the yellow vest.com the giletsjaune.com website was registered in america just on that basis and if we think about that but also some parts of russia gate blue and on and
even uh yeah sure the cambridge analytica story we've uh we've covered on this podcast would you say there's such a thing as liberal conspiracy theories and in your mind how do they differ from the fascist ones?
Well, start with the thing that's the same as the fascist ones, which is that they're locating the source of systemic phenomena in individuals.
So, I mean, do I think Steve Bannon likes the Gilets Jaunes?
Yes, I'm sure I don't listen to his podcast.
I'm not Naomi Klein.
I'm not like a masochist, but I'm sure on his podcast he spoke about the Gilets Jaunes in glowing terms.
I'm sure that he's networked with some of the people who are key to the movement because those people all know each other and they gather and whatever.
You don't think so?
They don't know either he doesn't know any of them.
No, no, no.
Okay.
Well, I wouldn't be surprised in any event, but if it turned out that he did know these people, so what, right?
What were the material conditions that caused people to listen to someone as obviously stupid as Steve Bannon, right?
And like, I don't know a ton about French politics, but like, my impression is that the best point that you can say that the Gilets jaunes made was they say that there's a climate emergency and they say that the way we're going to deal with the climate emergency is for everyday working people to pay more for petrol and not for, you know, bougies to pay more for their private jets.
And they got a point, right?
Like, I also would like to have fewer individual vehicles and also fewer internal combustion vehicles on the road.
And I suspect that there are people in the movement who have an aesthetic attachment to the idea of driving your own car and having an internal combustion engine, but like that's not what drove them out into the streets because they had those feelings before they were in the streets in their yellow vests.
You know, the thing that precipitated people in the streets in their yellow vests was this like extremely materially unfair form of upward redistribution of their wealth.
And so, you know, even if you think that Steve Bannon is a Svangali who hypnotizes people, it doesn't have much explanatory power because it doesn't explain why he wasn't able to hypnotize them last year and what is it about what's going on this year that let him hypnotize them, right?
What drove people to do stuff?
The yellow vest movement is really interesting because it has this diagonal as a diagonal.ist politics that is not left and it's not right.
And there are elements of both in the movement.
And, you know, it reminds me when I was a kid, we used to go to anti-nuclear proliferation marches and we would be carrying giant banners that said Solidarnosc because we believed in the Polish trade union movement.
And the guys protesting opposite us were carrying giant banners that said Solidarnosc because they believed in Lech Walesa's war against Soviet domination of Poland.
And like, you know, there's like a universe in which we were all like probably like giving money and aid and support to the Polish trade union, the Polish independent trade unions.
And we were on the same side in some way.
And I think that the idea that Putin or the guy who runs the Internet Research Agency or the Cambridge Analytica people or whatever that they have a mind control ray must be very comforting if you're someone who lives in a world of material unfairness but that you are on the positive side of that unfair arrangement.
Because it says that the reason that the people who have historically accepted that unfair arrangement are up in arms about it is that they have been tricked by a huckster and not that they have a legitimate beef with you.
And I understand why that would be a very comforting thing, especially if you're just like a if you're just a spearar carrier in the, you know, professional managerial class, right?
If you're just someone who, like, you know, middle class parents went to college at a time when it didn't bankrupt you, got an okay job, got promoted, have a union, you know, or or and like a decent retirement fund, maybe defined benefits, pension, bought a house when they were cheap, you know, live in a school district where the parents all give each one 100 bucks extra a year to the local school.
And so it's got all kinds of facilities and whatever.
And as far as you're concerned, like, all you've done is live a normal life.
You're, you don't feel like you're exploitative, but you're definitely like getting the better of the system that is failing a lot of people.
It must be very nice to say, oh, the problem with the system.
isn't that I have gotten more than my share.
The problem with the system is that those people have been fooled.
Yeah.
I mean, one last little related thing is how do you apply Mirror World to the difference in treatment of the Ukraine invasion by Russia as a kind of moral evil and the very delayed, very, I'm just going to say it, pathetic reaction to Gaza.
Yeah.
I don't know if I have a coherent way to explain it.
I mean, some of it is schismogenic, right?
I think that the right likes Putin and so progressives don't like Putin.
And don't get me wrong, Putin's not a good leader.
My father and grandmother were Soviet refugees.
My family's all in St. Petersburg.
It is not a good place to live and Putin's not a good leader.
But I think that Putin's aggression is categorically bad for a certain kind of person who doesn't like Putin because Putin has become a symbol for a certain kind of Christian nationalist, you know, Chud.
And, you know, I also think that in addition to that, the Ukrainians are on the right side of history and Putin's on the wrong side of history.
And so it's easy to feel sympathy for Ukrainians because it is terrible that they've been invaded.
And whatever we say about NATO provocations and whether there's an Azov battalion with Nazis in it or whatever, or whether we should be risking World War III, it is one hundred percent true that Putin is waging a war of aggression on people who were no threat to him, and he puts civilians in the crosshairs.
And so, you know, it's an easy side to take, which explains why lots of progressives liked Ukraine and why people on the right didn't, you know, and why they were siding with Putin on a kind of aesthetic basis.
It doesn't explain what happened in Israel and in Gaza.
And I think some of this just has to be decades of dehumanization and fatigue.
Yeah, I mean, it probably helps that the Ukrainians are essentially white people that we can relate to in that way.
And that the war on terror, the body count has been almost exclusively brown Muslim people.
I'm sure there's some truth to that.
But again, like as a general theory, it doesn't explain why no one was upset about Ceausescu, who also was oppressing a bunch of white people, right?
Right.
You know, and, you know, it also highlights the incredibly contingent nature of whiteness because, of course, one of the reasons that Russia has historically oppressed Ukraine is because they weren't white.
They weren't fully human.
They were Slavs, you know.
So like, maybe I think, you know, there are lots of tactics that have been used and they've differed at different times by.
by advocates for Israeli apartheid and ultimately genocide to neutralize their opponents.
And, you know, the obvious one that we all know is anti-Semitism.
And, you know, I am Jewish.
I have been called an anti-Semite.
I have been called an anti-Semite by Germans who have Vaughn in their name.
Talk about mirror world.
That is some pretty mirror world shit right there.
And, you know, when I was in Berlin a couple of years ago to give a speech at the Canadian embassy, that was the Marshall McLuhan lecture.
And before I went out, like my German hosts, because it was a German conference that has this lecture at the embassy, my German host came out and said, now you mustn't mention Gaza.
And I'm like, I just don't think that Germans get to tell Jews what they can say about Israel.
Yeah.
Yeah, I think that's I think that's fair.
I think that's very fair.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So, you know, there's that.
But I also think that like if you are progressive and you've been skeptical of Zionism or opposed to Zionist expansion over the years, you've encountered a completely different form of neutralization, which is a kind of technicalism that I associate with cryptocurrency grifters who are like, oh, you just don't understand and you won't understand until you've read these seven books.
And also you need to know the history of every square inch of the Golan Heights.
You need to know like that.
one time when Moshe and Ahmed had a fist fight outside the temple, Ahmed sucker punched him in 1949, and that is why Ahmed's house in the Golan Heights technically belongs to Moshe and his descendants.
And like if you can't understand that, you're not entitled, you know, if you don't know what kind of fuel every tank that went into Lebanon used, if you don't know the names of the six RAF pilots who were the start of the Israeli Air Force, one of whom was Pee Wee Herman's father, true story, then you're not entitled to talk about Israel.
And like, if you remember the days when cryptocurrency people were pretending that it was anything but a speculative bubble and when they were like trying to convince people, you know, they were treating like criticism of cryptocurrency as like racism.
And whenever you talked about it, they were like, well, you're talking through your, you know, your, your fiat currency privilege.
You need to really like, uh, sit with that for a minute and, and, and, and, and, and, like, do the work to understand cryptocurrency.
And, you know, like, that is the, that is a thing that I've encountered from my Jewish family and people in my, my, my circle who were apologists for Israel during the decades that led up to October 7.
And I think that it's just left a lot of people feeling like this is a geopolitical issue.
This is a geopolitical situation that is too complicated for me to have an opinion about.
And I'm just going to sit this one out.
Yeah.
Which, you know, there's a lot of bad shit that's happened in the world that we've all sat out.
I confess to not knowing nearly enough about Yemen, you know, and many of us have sat out a lot of conflicts over the years.
So I, you know, I think a lot of people are like, well, maybe I'll just sit this one out.
Like maybe just, maybe this one's just one of those.
Maybe I don't need to have an opinion about this one.
Could I not have an opinion about this?
You know?
Yeah.
It's, uh, and then two years later, you kind of realize, oh, that made me look not so great to not have any opinion as things slid into essentially like a new Holocaust.
And, you know, I've always felt felt, felt that as a Jew and as the Ch child of Jewish refugees, that I had an obligation to have an opinion about this and talk about my opinion about this because it was done in my name.
I understand, like I don't forgive or apologize for, but I understand how people who sat out understanding what was going on in Syria or Sudan or Yemen or lots of other places felt like, oh, maybe, maybe this is just one of those things that it's far from me and I don't have to have an opinion about it.
And, you know, I guess one of the differences if you're not a, if you're not Jewish, one of the differences if you're American, especially is the relationship of Israel as a client state of the United States and the extent to which public money from the United States has been critical to the culture of impunity that Israeli hardliners have been able to cultivate where they can commit war atrocities and face no repercussions either domestically or internationally.
Yeah.
Well, that's that's a that was a fun, fun little segment.
I think we can move on.
Are you sure like we could we could enumerate the dead for a while.
Like that's that's always a I mean, talk about our own individual culpability.
Yeah.
Tell us a bit more about disaster fantasies, this concept that you've written about the apocalyptic mentality of far right movements.
You know, what are they?
Like what purpose do they serve for the capos of these movements and what needs do they fulfill for the base?
So right around the time I started listening to QAA, my path into it was that I went to high school with a guy named Matthew Remsky.
And Matthew started a podcast called Conspirituality.
Of course, yeah, Friends of the Pod.
And I think that I heard him, like I was during the lockdown, and I was like, I wonder what Matthew's doing.
And I was like, Oh, he's got this great podcast.
And then that led me to you guys.
And neither you nor Matthew were the ones who helped me understand this.
It was Brooke Gladstone on the media who at the peak of 2020 QAnon weirdness and interviewed an anthropologist who had spoken to a bunch of End of the World people and doomsday preppers.
And this anthropologist had concluded that the thing that powered the fantasies of preppers was a fantasy about a world in which they were very important, right?
In which their skills, right?
Everything collapses and their skills are the only thing that stands between their community and disaster.
My favorite example from this anthropologist's work was there was a water chemist who had been stockpiling all kinds of materials.
I think he lived in rural Washington or something, stockpiling all kinds of materials in case Al-Qaeda poisoned the water supply in town.
And, you know, this anthropologist really pushed him on like, well, why would they do that, right?
Like, what is it about your water supply that would attract Al Qaeda?
And eventually they got him to admit that it would just be really fucking cool if Al Qaeda poisoned the water supply and this guy, the water chemist, saved everyone's life, right?
Like, what a awesome thing that would be.
And so you get a lot of preppers who are like, I'm good at shooting, so the apocalypse is going to be that there's going to be a lot of people I need to shoot, right?
That's like a very common one, right?
But the really interesting one is billionaires, because what the fuck do we need, you know, financial engineers for after the world collapses, right?
What is there like, what is there like, what fallen civilization?
Come on, Corey, we need someone to put up against the wall.
Right, well, exactly.
Exactly, like isn't there someone around here who really understands that tax code, right?
Like, you know, I I've got, I think I've got dysentery.
Can we go ask that guy who was really good at arbitrage what I should do about my dysentery?
I need to get a quant to figure out my diarrhea.
Bring me a quant stat.
And so, you know, you joke, but that is what they fantasize about.
And so when you look at the disaster fantasy of the billionaire prepper, right?
The luxury bunker in New Zealand, it is that the lesser people, us, will do some of the work of rebuilding civilization, right?
We'll get some of the factories going and whatever.
But we are like, we're destined to be ruled over, right?
We're like in a in Platon's Republic, we're like the brown people, right?
Uh, we're not the gold people.
We need philosopher kings.
And so their job is to restart civilization by hunkering down while we get like the basic stuff started.
But once we've got like the substrate necessary to support the philosopher kings, they can emerge from the bunker.
They'll have the AR fifteen s, they'll have the armed guards with the bomb collars, they'll have like thumb drives full of Bitcoin, they'll have Bullion, and they'll like assemble like a harem and build a fortress, and they'll tell us what to do, because that's what we'll be missing after the apocalypse is we won't have anyone smart to tell us what to do.
And so they need to preserve their special wisdom.
It's amazing to consume the literature and also consume the text, right?
Like the way these people talk to themselves about themselves, because you really do hear that that's what they think that we will lack for, come the, come the, uh, the collapse and renaissance.
Yeah.
Whereas podcasters are going to be very useful.
Yeah.
Well, you say that, but like actually like telling other people what's going on in the world and helping them understand and organizing it is an important thing.
I think so, but we need to switch to song.
I think we should become a kind of group of bards that travel the land.
Well, so yes, the podcasting won't be useful, but the skills of communicatingation and synthesis as well.
There's a reason that the first thing Trotsky seized was the Post and Telegraph office, right?
Like that you're not going to build a new society unless you've got communications, infra, and people who know how to, how to use it well.
So moving on a little bit, I did want to talk a little bit about AI, even though it is something that we've discussed a lot recently, but your perspective is very valuable on this.
So, you know, you've written a little bit about algorithmic management.
You talked a little bit earlier about that in relation to like Uber and all of these, uh, mediators.
But you also, you know, there's this great concern right now about, you know, false content with AI and how it feeds conspiracy culture.
I mean, what are your, what are your kind of concerns?
and insights around this?
Well, first I have to point out that, you know, because you were the first person to raise AI in this conversation, you owe everyone listening a drink.
That is the rule.
I don't make the rule.
Sounds good.
So I literally today finished the manuscript for a short book I wrote over the summer about AI for McMillan for Forrestros and Giroux called The Reverse Centaur's Guide to AI.
And it's a book about being a good AI critic.
Because I don't think AI is great.
I think there are some really cool things you can do with some AI tools.
I was writing an essay a couple of weeks ago and I had heard something on a podcast and I couldn't remember which one.
And so I downloaded Whisper, which is an open source model from OpenAI that transcribes audio.
And I just threw thirty hours of the last podcast I'd listened to at it.
And my laptop worked for about an hour.
The fan didn't even spit up.
It was like, no, it didn't break a sweat.
And then I had like full text searchability for all the audio I'd heard in the past two weeks.
And I found the exact thing I was looking for.
That's super cool.
But I think that like the thing that AI is, first and foremost, is a bubble.
And if you want to understand the harms of bubbles, you have to understand the reason that they exist.
Because they don't exist because of mania, right?
The reason bubbles exist is because they materially benefit the people who start them, the people who are selling the thing that you are buying in the bubble.
And for a bubble to inflate, investors need to be able to be convinced that there is some kind of upside that warrants the investment.
And that can be a lie, but it has to be a good enough story that sucks in enough institutional and large scale investors that normies start putting their own money in it.
Because frankly, I don't care if billionaires lose their money, but I do think that bubbles are very bad because of what they do to the finances of everyday savers who just like trying not, you know, starve to death in their old age.
And I think the lie that AI tells, the story that it spins that has attracted all the capital is that AI can do your job.
And I think that your boss is insatiably horny for firing you and replacing you with a chatbot that doesn't mouth off.
You know, when I I live in Burbank and I was out on the picket line with the writers during the writers' strike, I'm not a guild member, but I'm a member of the animation guild's writers' unit.
And so we did we did sympathy striking with them.
And one of the writers on the line said to me, you know, the way you prompt an LLM is the way that you get notes from a studio exec in a writer's room, right?
Like, I got an idea.
Why don't you make this ET, but it's about a dog and give it a love interest and put a car chase in the second act, right?
Now you'd say that to like a writer'ss room.
They're like, first of all, that's just Air Bud.
And second of all, You know, we all have to stop because like that guy rolled his eyes so hard that they're now rolling around on the floor and we all have to crawl around and find them.
You're an idiot, right?
You say it to an LLM, the LLM barfs it up.
Now, it's not good, but they don't make you feel bad for having stupid ideas.
Oh, excellent.
Yeah, we need self care.
We need, we need safe space for people who give notes and don't understand the art.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So I think that like that's the promise of it, right?
The promise is that it can reduce your wage bill.
And the reason investors are investing in it is because they imagine, sort of, roughly speaking, that if for every worker that is fired, half of the salary will be r obtained by the company that fired the worker and the other half of the salary will be paid to the AI company that replaced them.
That's the change the distribution as you feel, but that's the foundational business proposition here.
And so if you want to stop the bubble, the first thing you have to do is pay really close attention to the degree to which that's not true.
And so one of the things about some of the most harmful uses of AI and also some of the most grotesque and banal uses of AI is that they have no impact on the investor return on AI.
So there is no giant market for, say, election disinformation, right?
There isn't a company that is currently paying 7,000 people to write election disinformation that is like, I'm going going to fire seven thousand people and replace them with AI and I will save their wages, right?
There are little election disinfo outfits here and there and there's troll factories, but it's not like you add up the salary of every professional troll and it doesn't pay for like the electricity bill for the guard house at Open AI.
So it's just not like no investor is like, okay, well, this is definitely going to replace a lot of trolls and that's going to produce the return on my capital that's going to make that, you know, ten X or hundred X that I'm looking for out of this money I gave to Sam Altman, right?
And so as bad as it may be, and we could argue all day about whether it's bad or good, it's not important to the future of the bubble.
If we banned all AI election disinformation tomorrow, it would change the investment picture for AI by nothing, right?
Same is approximately true for AI illustration.
And it's really funny because AI illustration is on the one hand quite banal.
If you think about illustration as being like a communicative act, right?
Like art is communication, it is a way for someone to take something big and numinous in their imagination and put it into your head by first infusing it into some intermediate medium like a book or a song or a painting or whatever, and hoping that you materialize some facsimile of the emotion that caused them to make that in your own head when you experience it, all that an AI can do is communicate what's in the prompt.
So if you write a three sentence prompt, the entire communicative freight of the work is whatever you put into those three sentences, which for most sentences is not enough to matter, right?
Sometimes it matters, right?
There's haiku that are very good.
But mostly what you've got is a tiny amount of communicative intent diluted across a million pixels to the extent that like the amount of communication in any part of that image is like homeopathically undetectable.
And so it just makes for shitty art.
But even if it were good art, if you add up the salary of every commercial illustrator in the world, you do not get the kombucha budget for the training run on one version of midjourney, right?
They are like hoping to bankrupt these workers by using the product of their labor, which is especially gross, you know, to go back to Judaism here, there's a reason Leviticus bans cooking animals in their mother's milk, right?
It's very mean to drink milk, to have milk and meat because you are cooking an animal in its mother's milk.
It is very mean to bankrupt an illustrator with their own work.
It's just gross and cruel and shitty.
And they do the whole thing just to have a convincer to being like, oh, why should you give me your life savings for AI?
Because we're going to put a lot of workers out of work.
Look what we did to those assholes, right?
And, you know, they're the most precarious, creative, hard done by people in the arts already, and they're just being sacrificed for like a grift.
And so again, like on the one hand, we should acknowledge that it's a grift.
We should talk about the quality of the art.
We should also understand that if you banned AI illustration, it would not impact the investment picture for AI.
We should also understand that right now, it's probably the case that copyright allows you to train AI with this stuff.
There's a lot of reactionaries who are like, no, no, no, copyright definitely bans this because it's stealing.
And when you break it down into the composite parts, it's all stuff that we do all the time and that is actually good, like making transient copyies of works to analyze them is how we get search engines.
It's just, and you don't need anyone's permission to do it.
And it's just like a normal thing that has existed for literally as long as the internet has existed.
You wouldn't have the Wayback machine if it were, if that were, you know, a thing you needed permission for, you know, that guy in Austria who figured out that his like grocery store was like price gouging and coordinating with the other grocery stores by scraping all their prices every time they updated them.
That guy wouldn't be able to do it.
You just lose a lot of stuff.
You wouldn't have like anyone scraping all the people who had taken down all their like DEI stuff after Trump became president, like preserved it.
Like just all that stuff would just be gone.
So like we don't, first of all, that's not a copyright infringement.
And second of all, it shouldn't be.
And then like actually doing the analysis again.
Again, you're not going to tell me that counting the number of words or their position is a thing you need permission from the author for.
That's bullshit.
And it doesn't even matter if the thing is stolen.
Like if you go to the flea market and buy a bootleg CD and then take the CD home and count all the adverbs in the lyrics, like sure, like the bootleg of the CD is illegal, the count that you made is not.
The count that you made is just a bunch of facts, and they're not copyrightable and the fact that they're derived from a copyrighted work has no bearing on whether they should be or are copyrightable.
And then finally, there's publishing your findings, which is all a model is.
A model is just a publication in software form of a bunch of statistical insights gleaned from counting relationships between aspects of creative and factual works.
And again, I don't think we want to say publishing findings of correlations between aspects of works should be illegal.
But even if you think I'm an idiot for saying all of that, and you're like, no, no, no, we should give creators a copyright because that's how we'll save their income, you're wrong.
Because like Getty Images hates paying photographers.
They are not suing mid-journey because they want to pay photographers.
Getty Images doesn't want mid-journey to stop making models that can replace photographers.
Getty Images wants to be paid for the training data to make that model.
And then they want guardrails on the model so that no one can make competing images that compete with Getty images, uh, images that they're going to make with all of the works.
And if we created this new copyright and we said every creative worker has the right to enjoy people from training works with their model, Getty images and the five publishers that control all of publishing and the four studios that control all of films and the three labels that control all of music will amend their standard contracts to say to do a deal with us, you have to hand over your training rights.
And then they will charge some model company to make a model of it.
And then they will try to fire your ass.
So I think there is a way for creative workers to protect their jobs.
It doesn't have to do with more copyright.
It's actually less.
less copyright.
Because the US Copyright Office, an organization I've been fighting with since the 90s, keeps getting out there and saying the smartest thing anyone's ever said about AI, which is that algorithms don't get copyrights.
Copyright, to use some UN jargon here, copyright inheres at the moment of fixation of a work of human creativity.
If a human doesn't make the work, there is no copyright in it.
That's why monkey selfies aren't copyrightable.
Which means that Getty has to endure the only thing they hate more than paying photographers, which is people taking their photos and not paying them.
Their AI generated images can't be copyrighted.
Anyone can take them, anyone can sell them, anyone can give them away, anyone can reproduce them.
And if that's the case, Getty will pay photographers all day long.
And that is the only thing we need to safeguard, the most important thing we need to safeguard the rights of artists in an AI world.
Now, I have lots of other thoughts about AI, and I've literally just finished a 45,000 word book about it.
But that's the idea here is to be a good, smart critic that takes aim at the material basis for the AI bubble so that we can pop the bubble and, you know, condemn these assholes to the scrap heap of history and then get on with using a few cool toys that are left over from the bubble, like, you know, really good transcription.
Yeah, you know, like when I think about AI, I think about a lot about there's a big gap between the promise of the internet and how it was seized by these like these massive companies who like owned all these platforms and resulted in insidification i mean i feel the same way about ai because it is neat and it can do neat things but i'm very worried about the people who have control over these neat things i'm thinking specifically about the big let down that occurred when gpt5 was released with open ai because they were hyping this up as
like a massive leap forward they're posting these cryptic uh you know death stars and stuff uh phd in your pocket yes pc in your pocket and they released it and uh it was it was not up to expectations it was not It wasn't the quantum leap that people were hoping for.
And I feel like maybe we're entering a phase where they're diminishing returns of what's possible with these models or they're finding ways to deliver the service that they do in cheaper ways leading to, you know, incientification.
Well, you know, my concern is that we're going to like replace a lot of people who do important work with AI that can't replace them.
So like it's not that an AI can do your job, but it is that an AI salesman can convince your boss to fire you and replace you with an AI that can't do your job.
And then that's going to be bad, right?
Because we're going to be in like the world we're in now, but times a million where like you can't get customer service.
You can only get a fucking hallucinating chatbot.
But then the foundation models will no longer be economically viable because there's not going to be investors investors willing to lose $10 billion a year on them.
And then they'll shut down too, right?
So the only thing worse than dealing with the AI chatbot is like not having any customer service at all when your plane is canceled and you need to rebook it.
And then there's just nothing, right?
I think that this stuff is like asbestos in the walls, right?
Like we are filling the walls of our technological society with AI asbestos and it's going to be there for a million years and it's going to be doing all kinds of bad shit and we're going to be trying to figure out how to excavate it forever.
So, you know, before we let you go, this has been such an interesting conversation, but I wanted to touch a little bit on the EFF, which just turned 35 and you know kind of give us an idea of uh the evolution of ef and then scare us a little bit what's going to happen next current tech hellscape is there something coming that we don't know EFF is an amazing organization for those for people who don't know EFF.org we're a 35 year old digital rights group.
We're pretty much the grandparents of this stuff.
Maybe the free software foundation is a little older than us, but our remit is to try and take the human rights that are important to us in the physical world and make sure that they follow us to the digital world.
And then these days, it's to watch as all of those rights are being eroded in the physical and digital world.
can be used to reclaim them in the physical world as well.
I have been with EFF since we were six people and we're now over a hundred.
And we work on so many issues that I actually will read releases from EFF about issues we're working on and be surprised because I don't, I didn't know we were on those issues.
But the thing that I think has us all very worried now, no matter where we sit in the org, whether we work on privacy or speech or other forms of human rights, is the age verification stuff that is sweeping the world because it is setting the stage for everything that we worry about getting much, much worse.
On the one hand, we are creating the conditions for for mass scale surveillance of people's online habits in a way that makes even today's surveillance dystopia seem like weak tea by comparison.
And on the other hand, we are setting up the conditions for punishing people for what they see and for censorship.
And then we are also creating circumstances where the compliance costs of hosting speech will be so high and the compliance risks of hosting speech will be so high that only the very largest firms that are on the one hand going to be able to structure markets for all kinds of other things because they will be in control of our speech and in control of our connections to one another.
So they'll be able to decide who hears which podcast and they'll be able to decide, you know, think about it.
If, if there were only like two companies that could be CDNs for podcasts because they could do the work to ensure that they were either age verifying everyone who heard a podcast or that there was nothing in a podcast that required age verification.
Well, there's two CDNs and neither of them will do business with you.
You don't exist anymore, right?
Your podcast just goes away and that becomes a single throat to choke for regimes that want to exert control.
But also, you know, as we saw with Twitter, as wealth gets concentrated into fewer and fewer hands, it is entirely possible for structurally important services to fall into the hands of individuals who want to use them for ideological purposes.
And so we are about to create a lot more structurally important services that will then be within reach of anyone who can acquire them or or can suborn them who could then use them for purposes that are unrelated to all of the things that are bad about age verification because age verification is itself very bad, right?
Like telling kids that they're not allowed to see hardcore pornography fine, right?
But I'm a parent of a teenager and the last thing I would have wanted is for that kid to have no access to material about sexuality and about, you know, the world as it really is that would help her understand who she really was as she was growing up.
And I think the kids who really need it are the kids whose parents really do want to keep them away from that stuff.
Those are the kids that we really do want to be able to reach with material that will help them understand who they genuinely are as a whole person because their parents want to deny it.
And so that's the issue that has got us all very head up.
And we are a very international organization now.
We have people in Europe and Latin America.
And we are fighting this on many fronts, but we're also seeing it pop up on many fronts.
This is a very bad idea that's propagating very quickly.
And it is using all the stuff you guys worry about, the culture war stuff, the conspiratorial stuff to fuel it.
And ironically, you know, Rebecca Watson had a great little rant about this in her vlog today.
Ironically, a lot of the, you know, right-wing assholes who are organized around things like gamer culture are going to be like the first up against the wall in the night of the long knives here because the thing that all these guys are going for now is games and age-gated games.
And you know, you're going to see that games are no longer economically viable because they're all age-gated unless they are all PG 13.
And that is going to be really bad for the these guys who are, you know, have organized their lives around an ethnic identity as a gamer.
Wow.
Fascinating stuff.
They're trying to take away, as far as I can tell, they're trying to take away my games and my jacking off.
And I will not stand for have you thought about Bible study?
Bible study I hear is very fascinating.
There's some really dirty parts in Leviticus.
I have sat through a lot of bar mitzvahs just reading the dirty parts in Leviticus.
Now that is old fashioned.
Forget like the Victoria's Secret Cat.
That's right.
If you're reading Leviticus to jack off, then you have truly defeated the tech hell system.
I don't jack off in bar mitzvahs.
That's not cool.
I'm not saying you.
That was like a general that was general.
I was not accusing you of doing anything in any bar mitzvah, but maybe I was.
Is there anything you'd like to plug, Corey?
I know you have so much stuff going on, but yeah, feel free to to plug whatever you like.
And obviously we will be linking to the incitement, you know, crowdfunding.
So I published this newsletter called Pluralistic.
It's at pluralistic dot net.
It's kind of the name's kind of a joke because for twenty years I was co owner and the, I think, the most prolific writer on a group blog called Boing Boing.
And then I left Boing Boing and started a solo project, but I called it Pluralistic, which is kind of funny.
And Pluralistic is open access.
So it's Creative Commons license.
It's CC attribution only.
So you can commercially reproduce it.
So that's been really great.
If there's stuff you want to, you see stuff there, you can sell it, you can give it away.
It's fine with me.
Conde Nast has pulled long features out of it and just published them.
I'm really glad to see it.
It's an influence op.
I want those ideas to spread.
And I mirror pluralistic as a newsletter that is sent out with no tracking, no ads, no anything.
I don't get read receipts.
The blog itself has no tracking and no ads.
And then you can also get it as a feed on various social media platforms.
And again, it's all freely shareable.
It is really one of my major outlets for developing all of these ideas.
That's where incitification came from.
And then I'll say I'm going to be out on tour starting in September.
I'm going to be in 24 cities and four countries.
And so if I'm in your city, please come and see me.
I hope I won't repeat myself too much from the things I said tonight.
And it's always great to see people.
And the people who show up at my events are really cool.
They're much cooler than me.
So you might make a friend.
Well, that sounds very good.
As you can hear, listener, the Corey Doctoro project is currently in stage one of incitement.
So get in whenever you can.
That's right.
He hasn't closed the doors behind you and tightened the screws.
So that's very positive.
And we trust him, folks.
We trust him.
And we also just want to thank you for coming on the podcast.
It's been really fascinating.
Oh, thank you for having me.
No, it's definitely an honor.
Oh, the honor is all mine.
I really do enjoy your guys' stuff.
I think Liv's brilliant.
That's right.
She's the best one.
But also, what's her Annie?
Is it Annie, the British one?
She's amazing.
That's right.
Yeah.
Oh, yeah.
No, the women of our podcast are by far the best.
Yeah.
And what about Jake?
Do you like Jake?
I like Jake.
Yeah.
But I love that Annie did that.
Actually, it was Annie's coverage of the 15-minute city merch in Oxford that inspired me to write that essay.
So I really have gotten a lot from you guys.
That's wonderful.
Well, she's next up for her miniseries.
So that should be really, really fun.
I can't wait to see what Annie's cooking up for that.
Thank you so much, listener, for tuning into another episode of the QA podcast.
Obviously, we've got a Patreon, patreon.com slash QAA.
You can sub for $5 a month.
You know the deal.
You get a second episode for every normal free one, which has no ads, by the way.
So far, so far, so good.
And for everything else, we've got a website, QAApodcast.com.
Please do also check out cursedmedia.net, which is the recently founded miniseries network that we are going to be working on pretty intensely for the next two years and really allowing our contributors and sometimes outside contributors to follow their curiosity and give them the resources they need to put out a very high quality and well researched podcast miniseries.
So go check that out, cursedmedia.net.
You can support us.
It's a yearly fee and it just allows us to launch this thing very well and to raise funds so that we can continue to pay people fairly.
Corey, could you please read the line?
Oh gosh.
It's may the deep dish bless you and keep you whole.
Is that right?
No, there's no hole, but that's it's Keep your hole.
May the deep dish keep your whole.
hole be deep and dishy.
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