The folks on the other side are getting the chuckle out of that.
It's like, Ooh, wow.
What a nice introduction there, Reggie, or something like that.
I don't know.
But anyway, I try to keep it light folks.
I don't want to go into the whole diatribe again and mentioned
about the phone number yet again.
But you know, I'm going to do it anyway.
2 1 2 2 0 9 2 9 5 0, or go to gift to WBAI.org online.
But at the very least, I'm trying to keep it light and positive.
You know, I could go back into playing that to bet music that it did last
summer that people apparently got a chuckle out of when I was doing that.
But okay.
Maybe I'm calling myself out a little ahead of time.
So anyway, stay tuned for off the hook coming up at 7 PM.
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And a very good evening to everybody.
The program is off the hook.
Emmanuel Goldstein here with you on this Wednesday evening, joined tonight by Kyle.
Yes.
And out in Skype land, we have Alex.
Good evening.
And we're honored to have our good friend, Corey Doctorow with us as well.
Hello, welcome Corey.
For those who don't know, Corey is a prolific author, hacker, digital freedom
fighter, overall troublemaker, and guess what?
He's got another book coming out.
He had another book.
It's, it's, it's really amazing.
It's it's called red team blues.
But the story is even bigger than just the book.
We'll get, we'll get to the book.
We'll talk about the book in detail.
Um, but this has to do with, uh, bullies and with monopolies and with
individuals fighting back against the system, you know, the things that we
talk about week after week here.
Um, in this particular case, uh, what Corey has been trying to do is have
his book published in audio format.
You'd think that would be simple.
You think that would be easy.
You think that would be encouraged, but no, um, there's this entity called
audible, which is a part of Amazon.
Uh, and, um, audible apparently owns 90% as a 90% dominance in the field.
And they insist, they insist on having, um, something called digital rights
management, which basically means, uh, you're not free to do what you wish
with the technology that you purchase.
Uh, so if you were to buy something using, um, audible on Amazon, um, you
would have to agree to their terms.
You would have to have something that is crippled that you cannot copy that
you cannot use on other devices.
And if you ever disconnect from Amazon, you lose it entirely.
And, um, what Corey has done is taken them on, uh, not for the first time
either, um, because basically, uh, you put out a, um, a blog post saying,
uh, red team blues is another audio book that Amazon won't sell.
And so you started a kick, uh, a Kickstarter, um, with the humble goal
of $15,000 and you are currently at 108,957.
Congratulations on that.
Um, Corey, tell us how did you, how did you first become aware of this?
Um, um, this injustice that basically every author I think has
to, has to face at some point.
Well, look, you know, I, uh, was, um, bought a callow youth when an
organization called the electronic frontier foundation decided to represent
a little magazine called 2600 after it published, uh, um, Jan Johansson's
code for decrypting DVDs, uh, the digital millennium copyright act had
been passed in 1998 and section 1201 of the DMCA provided for a $500,000
fine and a five-year prison sentence for, uh, um, removing a copyright
restriction and that, uh, rule did not have any exemption, uh, for
fair use or for authorized use.
So it meant that, uh, even though you could use DCSS, this program that
2600 published to, uh, decrypt a DVD so that you could, um, save it to
your hard drive or down res it so that you could run it on a little primitive
computer of those days, uh, you know, the, the kind that you pop the lid
open and there was like a bird in there that went, ah, it's a living.
Uh, and, uh, uh, all of those things were just out of scope.
The, the court said that publishing this code was itself unlawful.
And that was kind of the, the starter pistol for, um, a kind of DRM land
grab that has been going on ever since.
You see the, the law, the DMCA so broadly written that I, as the
copyright proprietor, the person who wrote the book, Red Team Blues, the
person who paid Will Wheaton to narrate the book, uh, and, uh, Gabrielle
Dequere to, to, um, uh, to direct it and paid for mastering and so on.
I cannot give you a tool to unlock it from Amazon and take it to a non
Amazon platform or a non Amazon app.
Only Amazon can do that.
And Amazon, when it has its suppliers over a barrel, does what you would
expect any self-respecting monopolist to do it, it, it squeezes them.
Um, in the case of Audible, the authors who work on ACX, which is Audible's,
uh, self-serve platform for independent authors discovered last year or rather
in 2020, that they were the subject of a $100 million wage theft where Amazon
was just lying about the royalty rate they were paying them, and this was
only possible because Amazon was relatively certain that those authors
weren't going to go anywhere because if they did, they would have to bet
that their audience was willing to just get rid of all their audio books and
pay for them again on a new platform because they couldn't authorize them
to unlock the books that Amazon had sold.
And Amazon mandatorily requires DRM.
You, you can't choose not to sell with DRM.
And from the very beginning, after Amazon bought Audible in an
anti-competitive acquisition, I knew that this would eventually be bad
for authors that if Amazon was putting DRM on this book in order to protect
us, then surely it would give us the right to decide whether we wanted that
protection.
I actually coined a thing I called Dr.
O's law, which is anytime someone puts a lock on something that belongs to
you, I won't give you the key.
That lock is not to benefit you.
And so I knew that over time they would, they would come to squeeze
us and here we are, and they're squeezing us.
So for more than a decade now, I've paid, um, readers like Neil
Gaiman and Amanda, um, uh, Amanda Palmer and, um, and, and so on to, to
read my work, um, Amber Benson from, uh, from Buffy and Will Wheaton.
Uh, and I've released these audio books.
The thing is that releasing them on the platforms that aren't
Amazon doesn't get you very far.
There are some really good audio book stores like libro.fm out there,
but no one uses them.
And for one re for one thing, they're very clunky to use because
of the app store attacks.
Uh, if you, if you sell an audio book through an app, you've got to pay
either Apple or Google 30% and the margin on an audio book is 20%.
So you would lose money on each of those.
Um, so the only way to get an audio book on those platforms, uh, is
you go to the libro.fm website, you pay for the book there, then you
switch back to the libro.fm app and download it and people just don't want
to do it and, you know, most people just haven't heard of anything except
Um, you know, on, on Apple people buy with Apple books, but Apple books
is just a front end for audible.
It's audibles retail agent on the Apple platform and it doesn't
pay the app store tax.
So after a decade of doing this as kind of a symbolic gesture where I lost
money on each of these books, but at least I had the audio books out there.
I finally decided I was going to do something about it.
So I kickstarted, uh, uh, attack surface, the third little brother book.
And you were kind enough to have me on when that was going on that
raised almost $270,000.
And at that point I realized that if I could demonstrate to other
moderately well-known, moderately skilled, moderately internet savvy
authors, that you could treat Amazon as damage and route around it, that
we could build towards a critical mass of creators who would boycott audible.
Uh, even if it was just for the first 90 days and get people habituated
to buying their books elsewhere, especially with big front list titles.
If we could do that with just say a hundred top selling authors
for a couple of months, I think we could bring Amazon to heal.
And so while these, these audio book kickstarters are very important
to, you know, feeding my family, I'm a working author and while my
publisher Macmillan pays me well for those print rights, you know, these
days, audio book is about half of your sales, so it's very important
to, you know, bringing home the bacon.
I also think that it's an important way of, of steering us towards a
more pluralistic future where a format as important as audio books isn't
controlled by one company whose primary goal is to make sure that its founder
never wants for a penis shaped rocket.
Yeah.
Well said.
Um, and this is something that seems to hold true with
Amazon on a variety of fronts.
We're, we're, we're also going through something similar.
I'm not sure you heard about this, but basically Amazon decided, uh, to
cut off, uh, uh, magazine subscriptions, uh, on their, on their platform.
Um, and, uh, what this has done to small publishers has been, has been horrific.
Uh, they have simply decided that no, we're not going to do this anymore.
After many of these publishers, um, basically, uh, put a lot into Kindle
versions of their publications, 2600 included, uh, so to be met with this,
um, where either you're completely cut off or you're the amount that you do
make is, is cut substantially, uh, is, um, it's, it's, it's traumatic and
it seems to be something that's a theme, uh, what you're going through right now,
what every author is going through.
Um, as, as, as far as audible though, um, what would happen if Amazon said,
you know what, we're not going to have DRM anymore.
Do you really think they would lose that much business?
I think that Amazon understands that if people, um, under, uh, if people
are able to move around that the abuses they can inflict on those people would
be limited by the threshold at which they go somewhere else.
So if you think about it, if you, if you, if you're in a situation
where you can't afford to leave, the person who's got you in that situation
can abuse you right up to the point where all the value you're getting out
of that situation is outweighed by the abuse.
And so for Amazon, lock-in is an asset that it can book.
It can actually treat the fact that it knows that its audience is, is stuck
where they are as, as something it can factor into its business plans.
So, you know, they just announced that they're going to
start putting ads in audio books.
Oh my God.
Well, you know, if it were easy to, to leave, you could just take your audio
books and, and, and, you know, hive off to another platform, then, then
that would be a non-starter, right?
Someone in the boardroom would say, let's put ads in audio books.
And someone else would say, are you crazy?
People will start buying their books somewhere else.
And once they start, they won't necessarily stop.
I mean, one of the things that, um, about this AudibleGate scandal where
they were stealing a hundred million dollars from independent authors,
that the way that they did that was they took people who
are subscribing to Audible.
So who pre-committed every month to buying an audio book, which is a way
of ensuring that they never take their business elsewhere, because most
people don't listen to more than one book a month, and if you've already
paid to listen to a book that month, you're going to, you're going to get
the book from the place where you paid for it, um, what they did was they
said to those people, Hey, you know, we're such good natured slobs.
If, if for any reason, after you get this book for a whole year, no
matter how many times you've listened to it, even if you've written
in a positive review, you can return it.
We won't ask you any questions about why you're dissatisfied with it.
And we'll give you a credit to download another book, right?
With this is an incredibly generous policy.
And it raises the question, how can Amazon afford that generous policy?
And the answer was it took it out of the authors.
Every time you returned a book, they charged it back to the author.
In fact, not just once, if you were the kind of author whose books got
returned, they would say, Oh, well, look, you might get returns in the future.
We're going to take away one royalty for you for the book that was returned.
And we're going to take away another one as a reserve against a return
that might come in the future, lest you empty out your royalty account.
We have no way to, to, to gouge you for this.
Um, this was, uh, an act of extraordinary generosity that was
born by the, by the authors that they had.
They didn't tell the authors about this.
They hid it from them.
The only way that it became apparent is that they had an accounting glitch and
they, they did three weeks worth of returns on one royalty statement.
So instead of seeing that your, your sales were just declining and declining,
you know, you used to be sold 50 copies a week.
Now it's 20, you know, it's 10.
Oh, what, um, they saw one day was they had just, it was that every
audible author, every ASAX author had just sold a negative number of copies.
And they all said, well, I don't understand how can I sell
minus five copies on your platform?
And that was when people started to figure it out.
One of the ACX authors is actually a forensic accountant who became a
finance thriller writer named Colleen cross.
And she's the one who did all the shoe leather work on this.
She figured out that everything about how they described their royalty schedule
was a lie and that they were stealing from authors in this systematic way.
And the reason they knew they could do that is they understood that if you
went somewhere else, if you were disgusted by this a hundred million dollar
wage theft and you went somewhere else, that your audience wouldn't be able to
follow you.
And that meant that you would have to start over and they were just making a
bet that if that, um, if they had you locked in enough, they could, they could
do this terrible thing to you.
It's, it's not dissimilar.
You remember when frontier, which was like probably the second worst ISP in
America after a century length, you remember when they went bankrupt during
the pandemic and, um, and, and we got to see their books, right?
We got to see like their, their finances.
And what we discovered is that if you lived in a territory where there was no
competition, no cable modem, nothing else that frontier booked you as an asset
because they understood that they could pay for less maintenance, do less
infrastructure investment and charge more.
And you would still buy their service, right?
If, if you don't, if you can't go anywhere else, that's an asset.
And that is the thing that Amazon is very keenly attuned to is the, the
long-term commercial value of depriving people of choice.
Amazing.
And this seems to be a theme I've noticed over the years that, uh, writers,
authors, um, they tend to always be on the short end of the stick, whether
it's through distributors, whether it's through bookstores, whether it's
through, uh, companies like Amazon.
Why do you think the author is always the victim?
I mean, they're the source.
Well, they're, they're the, on the one hand, they're the easiest ones to abuse.
And on the other hand, you know, we've been told as authors, you know, when,
when I was a baby writer, I heard this all the time that the best tool that we
have to defend our interests is copyright, which is foundationally, it's
an individual bargaining, right?
Right.
It's the right for you, you know, a plucky LLC to go up to one of these big
multinational companies and say, all right, guys, you're a business, I'm a
business, let's do business here.
Um, and we see how that works out over and over again, as an individual, you
have very little negotiating leverage.
You know, I, I wrote a book with, uh, my colleague, Rebecca Giblin, who's an
Australian copyright scholar called choke point capitalism that came out last, uh,
autumn, and it investigates the question.
How is it that for 40 years, we've made copyright last longer.
We've made a cover more kinds of works.
We created higher statutory penalties.
We made it easier to secure those penalties in the case of an infringement.
We've made the entertainment industry itself larger and more
profitable than it's ever been.
And the share of income going to the creative workers has declined both
in real terms and proportionally.
And the answer is that when there's five publishers, four studios, three
record labels, two giant ad tech companies, and two app companies, one
of those is the same company and one company that controls all the audio
books and eBooks that giving a creator more copyright, it's like giving
your bully kid extra lunch money.
There isn't an amount of lunch money.
You can give your kid that will get them lunch.
You're just giving money to the bullies.
And eventually they might even use some of that money to run an
international campaign saying, think of America's hungry school
children, give them more lunch money.
Still not going to get those kids fed.
And so what you need are structural interventions.
So in this case, you know, we need things like fair contracting terms
and the European union and the digital single markets directive in 2019,
they passed a transparency rule that would require Amazon to disclose to
every creative worker who they owed a royalty to exactly how they
calculated that royalty, right?
Well, it, you know, one of the reasons they got away with this is because
they, you know, the people didn't know why their sales were going down.
Um, we could, uh, modify or repeal the digital millennium copyright act so
that, uh, uh, bypassing DRM for a lawful purpose or with the author of
the rights holder whose work has been locked up with DRM is, is presumptively
lawful so that you couldn't, you know, this is the crazy thing, right?
If you pirate my audio book, you face a $150,000 fine.
If I give you a tool to take the audio book that I hold the copyright to and
take you and take it off of Amazon, Amazon can put me in prison for five years.
Right.
So we could just modify the law.
So that actual copyright infringement was the thing that copyright defended
us against not felony contempt of business model, where your only crime
is doing something that makes Amazon shareholders sad.
Do you think that is a realistic possibility that Amazon would go after
you if you told someone how the pirate your own book is that if I gave them a
tool, yeah, if I started a business that said, look, here's your, here's your
tool to, to, you know, one click and you're not an Amazon customer anymore.
I, I would be very certain they would.
And what I'm very, very certain of is that there isn't a venture
capitalist or bank manager.
Give me a loan or, or, or some startup capital to start that business.
That is a hell of a business risk.
Uh, and there's, there's just no way that I'm going to, that, that, you
know, anyone's going to fund that business or start that business.
You know, it's, um, Larry Lessig who, you know, helped start creative
commons and is quite a leading light in, in tech policy circles.
He says the world is regulated by code and markets and norms and laws that
it's this mix of like, what's legal, what's possible, what's profitable
and what's socially acceptable.
And, you know, something's illegal.
It's very rarely profitable unless you're willing to
become a career criminal.
Right?
Like that, that is.
And so the unlawfulness of this makes it unprofitable as well, which
means that we don't see what, you know, a good capitalist would want to
see, which is a competitor coming in and offering authors a better shake.
You know, when I started as a baby writer, there were 30
publishers in New York today.
There's five, right.
And, and, you know, the fact that writers get, uh, lower advances on
average and, and, and do worse on average is, is strongly related to that.
You know, when, when Penguin Random House tried to buy Simon and Schuster,
uh, Stephen King, uh, gave testimony and he's, and, and he said, Penguin
Random House, Simon and Schuster say that they'll still bid against each
other for my books when I, when I write a new book, he said, you gotta have
your head examined if you think that's true, that's like saying my wife and
I are going to bid against each other on the house we both plan on living in.
There's no way that's true.
It insults our intelligence to say that it's true.
Any auction that has fewer bidders has a lower closing price.
Anyone's ever bought anything on eBay knows that in their bones.
And so, you know, this is, this is just another expression of what
happens when you stop enforcing antitrust law as we did 40 years ago.
And as we stopped doing two years ago, when Joe Biden appointed, uh, Lena
Kahn, who's amazing and Jonathan Cantor to respectively run the FTC and the
department of justice, uh, antitrust division, when you stop enforcing
antitrust law, you get monopolies.
It's like when you stop putting out rat traps, you get rats, you know, people
have been looking around at our monopolized markets for the last 20
years as they became increasingly concentrated in the web turned into,
you know, five giant websites filled with screenshots of text from the other four.
And they were like, oh, the great forces of history are so mysterious.
How did we get here?
And the answer is we used to have rat traps and we didn't have rats.
We stopped putting out rat traps and now we're overrun by them.
We know exactly how that happened.
Go ahead, Alex.
You know, speaking of these monopolies and how to break them and this question
that you've raised Emmanuel of, you know, do you really think that somebody
like Amazon would go after you if you developed a business around unlocking
things, I'm going to go right back to, you know, how we started the show.
I think the answer to that is unequivocally a yes.
You know, we started the show with Corey talking about DCSS.
Remember you were sued not for creating a business around something, but for
publishing code on your site and in the magazine that would allow somebody to
just unlock a DVD to crack a basically an encryption system that was, as I
understand it, a monument to stupidity.
Fact that, um, and one of the things that's fascinating, I just want to
mention this as an aside is if you recall, and God, I can't believe it was
like 23 years ago now, but, uh, the judge who presided over the DCSS case, the
2600 versus MPAA case was Lewis Kaplan.
And do you know what case he is presiding over right now?
Well, you're on, you're on mute Corey.
Yeah, Corey, you're muted.
Sorry.
You mentioned this the last time I was on.
You got to tell them this is mind blowing.
Well, actually I think there's, well, he's overseeing the SPF trial now.
Oh, I didn't realize that it was, I was thinking Steven Donziger, but yes,
as we have to, wow, Jesus.
Yeah.
Oh, the Southern district of New York is a hell of a place.
I can't believe he's still on the bench, you know, no disrespect, but wow.
He seemed, he seemed old then.
You were just young then.
That's true.
Yeah.
Um, he must be getting up there, Lewis Kaplan.
He really, he really must.
But you know, judges in the Southern district tend to have a lot of
longevity, uh, for, for better, for worse.
There was a judge, uh, judge leisure who, um, you know, he took about like
11 months to get back to me once on a, on a motion to dismiss, um, but he
came back with like a 93 page opinion, you know, and I think he was 92 years
old or something at the time.
So, you know, it was, they're impressive.
That's that's something.
No.
So now Corey, this is the third time you've done this, right?
Yeah.
And, um, um, have, have, have things changed?
Has the reaction gotten stronger?
Has the resistance gotten more, uh, yeah.
I, Amazon has definitely, uh, the, the Paul has gone off of it.
Right.
I think, you know, so today, like Amazon's got this $31 billion a year
advertising business that they, you know, whenever anyone talks about
monopoly and ad tech, someone's like, Oh, well, wait, isn't Amazon
now competing in that space?
There's, there's the Amazon ad marketplace, except Amazon's
ads aren't like the other ads.
I mean, there's problems with the other ads too, but what
Amazon's ads are, is their payola.
When you search on Amazon, the first five screens are 50% ads.
The first screen is all ads.
And those ads are sellers bidding against each other to match your query,
even if they're not what you searched for.
Uh, and the $31 billion that Amazon transfers from sellers to itself.
To stick stuff in front of you that you explicitly didn't ask to see instead
of the thing you did ask to see is something that raises the price
of all the goods on Amazon.
Amazon has this thing called the most favored nation status deal, which,
um, requires each of its sellers to promise not to allow their goods to
be sold more cheaply anywhere else, even direct from the, from the
manufacturer, which means that if you're paying $31 billion a year in
aggregate to Amazon, you've raised your prices.
In fact, the total junk fee burden on Amazon sellers is over 50% now.
So the, uh, on average, uh, Amazon marketplace sale, uh, accounts, uh,
more than 50% of the money that you spend goes to Amazon and not the seller.
The way that they make that up is they raise their prices, but they
raise them everywhere because of most favored nation.
Uh, and that means that the prices at target are higher
because of Amazon's junk fees.
Uh, they're higher at Walmart and they're hired at your corner.
They're higher at your corner bodega.
Um, this is why the attorney general of DC is suing Amazon.
So I think people are starting to clock that there's that the Amazon
story of low prices and great quality and lots of convenience is, is really thin.
And that's, you know, even if you don't care about people dying of
heatstroke in the warehouses or peeing in bottles in the vans, um, there,
there are lots of people who are very frustrated and angry with Amazon
for very, very, very good reasons.
Um, and then on top of that, you have just a string of kind of
horror stories, uh, about the way that they treat authors, about
the way that they treat, um, cities, you know, uh, after, after that
hunger's hunger games deal about, uh, where their headquarters would be.
Um, they promised to stick one, you know, right in the, uh,
right outside the beltway there.
Uh, they rung all kinds of concessions and, and, and, um, uh, subsidies
out of the local city, and then they just rubbed them, they just said,
Hey, you know, we changed our mind.
Uh, thanks for the, thanks for the subsidies.
Uh, you know, we'll, we'll see you later.
Um, so I think that like there, this is a moment in which
people are just tired of big tech.
I think the story that big tech would make our lives better has,
has been comprehensively debunked.
So this is our moment to seize.
Yeah.
Like where is small tech being lauded?
The, you know, and that, that I, I, I fully am with that sentiment.
Yeah.
I, I mean, I think the place that's being lauded is in, um, uh, is, is in, uh,
Mastodon, it's in the Fediverse as the Fediverse grows, I think, uh,
small tech is, is having its moment.
Yeah.
No, we've certainly seen that with Elon Musk losing his damn mind and, uh,
Twitter going down the tubes.
Uh, Mastodon has definitely been, been blossoming.
Hopefully it becomes more accepted by people who, um, aren't so technical.
It'll become easier to use faster.
Um, and, um, we'll, we'll find other, other solutions.
What'd you say about, about the cities though?
That really resonates because we dodged the bullet here in New York.
Uh, in fact, you know, AOC deserves so much credit for fighting that, uh,
being literally the only politician fighting it and had, um, Amazon gone
through with their plans, uh, for Brooklyn and Queens, um, I dare say it
would have been a catastrophe.
We, we see Amazon buildings, uh, throughout the Island, Long Island
that are obviously Amazon buildings.
They, they have that, that, uh, how would you describe it, Kyle?
Just this.
Well, the fulfillment centers are like white, gray, and blue, but the, uh, the
supermarkets that they're opening just basically are popping up in, in mixed
retail and it's like a green, like a chartreuse and black stripe over the
entrance.
And there are these buildings that they've just abandoned.
They're not, they've changed their minds and they're just taking up space.
So yeah, they, they have you over a barrel and then they, they decide to do
something else and you have no options.
Yeah.
I mean, you know, there, there, I'm sure there are people out there who are such,
um, you know, ethical and forthright folks that even if they had you in, uh,
at their mercy, they would exercise that power wisely.
But I think that Amazon has shown itself institutionally and individually in the
character of its managers to not be one of those companies.
Amazon is not a company that ever hesitates to use its advantage.
You know, one of the things that we write about in choke point capitalism is that,
um, Amazon had a program after it reached a critical mass with publishing where it
was really controlling, uh, the, the future of publishers.
Um, and you know, was tired of subsidizing their products because, because, you
know, the, the platform life cycle is first, they're very good to their end
users, uh, and they do things like subsidize the products that you're buying.
Amazon was like losing money on every sale so that your books were cheaper and
they decided that they were tired of that.
And so they wanted to, um, take, to get more money.
And so they said, we're going to go to each of the small publishers, the, the
independent publishers that we represent here.
And we are going to ask them for a discount that we know that they can't
afford an unsustainable discount that will eventually cause their businesses to
collapse.
And we're going to see how much of that discount we can get out of them, just,
just as a, like to see, you know, how far we can, we can go, right.
What kind of discount we can get.
And that program was called operation gazelle.
And the reason it was called that is that the project managers who are doing the
negotiation were sorted to think of themselves as cheetahs,
bringing down the sickly gazelles in the herd.
Oh my God.
The only part of that program that Amazon's lawyers objected to was the name.
The conduct itself was fine with them.
I can sort of see their point because it just makes them look so bad.
It really does.
Absolutely.
But you know, this is the, this is the, the, the kind of business it is, right.
You know, I, I'm always skeptical of people who, who want to like ascribe a
character to a company, you know, we used to say, Oh, a Fox is the Fox is the bad
boys and Fox movies and, and Disney are the squeaky clean ones.
And, you know, there's such different characters, such different corporate
persons and, you know, like Bob Iger and Rupert Murdoch were able to like, you
know, consolidate a merger without any of this seeming to bother them at all.
And so, you know, like either we're, we're asked to believe that, you know,
they're star-crossed lovers, like the Montagues and the Capulets, or, you know,
the difference between them was, was just always a minuscule and unimportant
difference in that they really had much more in common, like, you know, mutual
desire never to pay taxes or allow unions or, you know, bear any corporate
responsibility for their actions.
And then everything else was just like a, a kind of difference at the
margin that, that barely mattered at all.
Didn't even register as a difference with that made a distinction.
Uh, and, and so, yeah, I, I, I really think that like, even, even against
that, it's pretty clear how Amazon thinks of its, its business culture, right?
They think them, they think of themselves as an apex predator and they think of
their, uh, chances for a future success as being determined by whether, uh, they
can, uh, abuse their suppliers in ways that their suppliers can't resist.
Coy, have you considered writing a book about Amazon and
then offering it on Amazon?
Uh, well, you know, what we did do is the chapter about how Audible rips
off authors in chokepoint capitalism is the only chapter of the book available
on Audible and we made it an Audible exclusive.
Oh, wow.
And so if you go to Audible and you look up chokepoint capitalism, you
will find just that one chapter.
And you know what?
I encourage you to return it for a full refund if you buy it, buy it, listen
to it, return it for the full refund.
This is one that you can do that guilt-free with.
Uh, but yeah, I, I, I mean, Brad Stone's pair of books about Amazon are
pretty magisterial as these things go there, you know, we don't, the literature
doesn't need another book that I would write.
I would just be quoting Brad at that point.
So yeah, I don't think it, I don't think, I don't think it needs my intervention.
There's, there's already a good literature revolving and, you know, it,
besides that, if you want a really definitive paper on Amazon, um, it's
Lena Kahn's paper when she was a third year law student, she wrote a paper
called Amazon's antitrust paradox that, uh, was a rebuttal to Robert Bork, the,
the judge, uh, and scholar who created the, the Reagan ideology of, of getting
rid of antitrust law with a book called the antitrust paradox and who more than
anyone else is responsible for the lack of antitrust enforcement over the last
40 years.
And she wrote this paper as a third year law student to rebut his, his book.
And it was such a persuasive and important paper that it upended the way
that people think about antitrust.
And today, six years later, she's going into her second year as the youngest
ever chairperson of the federal trade commission, which is to say the most
powerful, uh, consumer welfare regulator in the world.
Um, she is a remarkable person.
That, that gives me hope.
That gives me a lot of hope.
Um, I like to focus on the book a little bit because, um, it's an accomplishment.
Red team blues comes out later this month.
Um, I'd like to play a clip, uh, that, uh, from, from the audio book, uh, read by
Will Wheaton, a great choice by the way.
And, um, um, this actually comes from your podcast, so it's behind the scenes.
So we'll hear a little bit of the prep and, um, and, and get into the beginning
of the book with, uh, a very moving tribute.
And you'll hear the director, Gabrielle Dequere giving Will his direction.
Obviously that won't be in the final audio book here.
All right.
Here's, here's an excerpt from red team blues.
Um, it is perf it's perfect.
Nope.
It's great.
Yeah.
Let me back up here.
We go.
Ready?
Okay.
We're rolling.
For Dan Kaminsky, 1979 to 2021.
Hacker.
Pen tester.
Mensch.
Rest in peace, Dan.
One, one evening I got a wild hair and drove all night from San Diego to Menlo
park.
Why Menlo park?
It had both a triple Michelin star place and a dear old friend, both within spitting
distance of the Walmart parking lot, where I could park the unsalted hash, leaving
me free to drink as much as I cared to, and still be able to walk home and crawl
into bed.
I'd done a job that turned out better than I'd expected well enough that I was set
for the year.
If I lived carefully, I didn't want to live carefully.
The age for that was long past.
I wanted to live it up.
There'd be more work.
I wanted to celebrate truth.
Be told.
I also didn't want to contemplate the possibility that at the age of 67, the new
work might stop coming in.
Silicon Valley hates old people, but that was okay because I hated Silicon Valley
professionally.
That is getting close to Baker's field.
I pulled the unsalted hash into a rest stop to stretch my legs and check my phone.
After a putter around the picnic tables and vending machine, I walked the perimeter of
my foolish and ungainly and luxurious tour bus, checking the tires and making sure the
cargo compartments were dogged and locked.
I climbed back in, checked my sludge levels and decided they were low enough that I
could use my own toilet.
Then finally, having forced myself to wait, sat on one of the buttery leather chairs and
checked my messages.
That's how I learned that Danny Laser was looking for me.
He was working the usual channels, DMs from people who I tended to check in with when
I was looking for work, and it put a shine on my evening because, 67 or no, there was
always work.
For someone with my skill set, Danny Laser had a problem with his trustless coin keys,
which relied on the best protective cryptographic secrets in the world nominally.
So I messaged him.
One rest stop later, just past Gilroy, I got his reply.
He was eager to see me.
Would I call on him at his home in Palo Alto?
My pathetic little ego swelled up at his eagerness.
I told him I had a big dinner planned the next night, but I'd see him the morning
after. Truth be told, putting off a man as important as Danny Laser, even for 24 hours,
made me feel more important still.
I could tell from his reply that the delay chafed at him.
I felt petty, but not so much so that I canceled my dinner.
My dear old friend was a lively sort, and it was possible we'd walk from the restaurant to
her place for an hour or three before I returned to the Walmart parking lot.
Dinner didn't disappoint, and neither did the fun and games afterward.
It was a very nice capstone to a very successful job and a very good prelude to another
job for one of the nicest rich men or richest nice men in Silicon Valley.
Danny was old Silicon Valley, a guy who started his own UUCP host so he could help
distribute the alt hierarchy and once helped Tim May bring a load of unlicensed firearms
across state lines from a Nevada gun show.
He'd lived like a monk for decades, writing cryptographic code and fighting when the NSA
over it and had mortgaged his parents house back east to keep himself and a couple of
programmers in business in a tiny office for a decade while he and Galit lived in a 30
foot motorhome that needed engine tuning once a month just so it could trundle from one
parking space to the next.
It was a bet that there would come a day when the Internet's innocence would end and
people would want privacy from each other and their governments.
And he kept doubling down on that bet through every boom and bust, living on ramen and
open cereal boxes from the used food store, refusing to part with any equity except to
promising hackers who join him.
And then the bet paid off and he became Daniel Moses Laser with a 75 percent stake in
Key Pairs LLC, whose crypto libraries and workflow tools were the much ballyhooed picks
and shovels of the next Internet revolution.
Key Pairs wasn't the first unicorn in Silicon Valley, but it was the first one that never
took a dime in venture capital and whose sole angels were Danny's parents back in Jersey
to whom Danny sent at least 100 million dollars before they made him stop, insisting that
they had nothing more they wanted in this world.
Galit picked out a big place in Twin Peaks that you could see Alcatraz from on a clear
day, gutted it to the foundation slab, bare studs and ceiling joists, completely rebuilt
it while being mindful of both Danny's specification for networking receptacles throughout
and Galit's encyclopedic knowledge of the arts and crafts movement.
One day, as she was bringing out some Mendocino grig and a cheese board for the two of
them to enjoy from their half built porch, she gasped, complained of pain in both arms,
then her chest, and then she collapsed and was dead before the ambulance arrived.
All right, we're going to stop it on that cheerful note there.
The opening words to Cory Doctorow's Red Team Blues, as read by Will Wheaton.
We are here with Cory Doctorow on Off the Hook here on WBAI and Cory, I am intrigued.
I understand this is the beginning.
This is actually part of a trilogy.
It's not even a trilogy, it's like a series of unknown duration.
So this is Marty Hench's last adventures, you know, 67 year old, hard charging
forensic accountant who's ready to retire and has this one last job.
And after I wrote it, so I wrote it in like six weeks flat.
I just like, blam, came right out of my fingertips.
And a white hot fury, a white hot fury, you described it.
Yeah, the last time I wrote a book this fast, it was Little Brother.
So I had a feeling I had something special.
You know, I gave it to my wife who like I should note here that I write when I'm anxious.
So I have seven books in production right now.
My wife can't read them all.
She's got other stuff to do.
So it is often the case that I write a book and she kind of, you know, pokes at it over the course of weeks or whatever.
But she always glances at it when I finish it.
And so I gave it to her.
I rolled over at two thirty in the morning.
She was sitting up in bed with her phone.
And I said, what are you doing?
So I just had to find out how it ended.
And then my editor emailed me the next morning and it was just like four lines.
Now, remember, we're on the radio and there's certain words you can't say.
Yeah. He emailed me.
That was an effing ride.
Wow.
And bought three of them.
And the problem was that how do you write a sequel to the final adventure of Detective?
And what I realized was that so long as they went backwards in time, I could write any number of adventures for this detective.
And moreover, that I wouldn't have to worry about continuity because I could I could retcon everything as I went.
I could do the continuity backwards.
I could backshadow instead of foreshadowing.
You've hacked time.
You have hacked time.
So there's three of these.
They're all written.
One only this one is, you know, finished through its editorial process, but they're all coming out over the next 18 months or so.
And the next one is about prison tech and about, you know, the use of digital rights management for email, music and books in prisons and in private prisons especially.
And then the final one or the third one, which may or may not be the final one, is his first adventure.
And it's set in the heroic era of the PC in the 1980s.
And it tells how he drops out of MIT, falls in love with spreadsheets, becomes a CPA, goes out West.
And his first job is working for one of these weird early PC companies called the Three Wise Men.
That's run by a Mormon bishop, a Catholic priest and an Orthodox rabbi.
And it turns out that it's an affinity scam, that they use multilevel marketing to prey on their parishioners.
And he quickly comes to understand that he's working for the wrong people, that he has been tasked with hunting down and ruining the business of three rogue employees.
One is an Orthodox woman who's come out as queer.
One is a nun who's joined the Marxist liberation theologists in Central America.
And one is a LDS woman who's left the faith because they wouldn't support the Equal Rights Amendment.
And that these three rogue employees are actually jailbreaking these computers.
They're giving people the tools they need to bring their spreadsheets out of the lockdown environment of the Three Wise Men computer.
They're giving them tools to use standard floppy disks in the floppy drives because they use proprietary floppies.
And they've even re-sprocketed their printers.
So you need a special kind of fan-fold paper.
And they're selling a sprocket replacement kit that de-re-sprockets your printer so you can just use commodity fan-fold paper.
And it turns into a kind of gang war over proprietary PCs set in the early 80s.
Jell-O Biafra's got a cameo.
It's all San Francisco in the heyday of punk and queer liberation.
It's got lots of callbacks to Armistead Maupin and the Tales of the City.
It's really fun.
Wow, that is awesome.
Really, really incredible.
And I found a review, actually, of one of the review copies of the book.
The reviewer says, I'm not that knowledgeable about crypto or tech jargon, but it's not really necessary to follow the story.
What surprised and pleased me the most was the subversion of the usual detective novel formula.
You think you're going to be following one mystery, but that's quickly wrapped up in the first third of the book.
And that's when it really takes off.
That's right.
That's right.
Yeah, Marty, spoiler, Marty does find the keys.
But that's just that's just the beginning in terms of the people who stole the keys and the people who would prefer that they'd stolen the keys.
And a bunch of rogue three-letter agencies are all in on the game.
You know, this is an anti-finance finance thriller.
It's a book about how speculation and finance took the dream of tech and turned it into just another grift.
And and it's about someone looking back at the kind of the last days of the bloom of tech who believed in its promise and confronting what became of it.
It's a it's a melancholic novel, but also one that is quite angry and one that is, I think, ultimately a call to action for seizing the means of computation, for bringing tech back to its users to steal our revolution back.
Yeah, it's interesting, especially that investigative angle, because it employs so much technique and skill that you might find hackers totally in tune with and fascinated by, even though you're in this world of finance, which seems absurd, but also the character and not familiar, really, like, you know, boardrooms or sort of a cushy
world that they kind of go between and so forth.
But also the chasm that crypto and digital finance has in characters involved, like the first character that's being described as being kind of an outsider, a leader in one of these entities, emerging startups and so forth.
That whole culture itself, though foreign there, that that distinction in some of the characters you're introducing us to really, I think, pulls in a little bit from that with with little attributes that remind us so much of hacking.
And I think our audience can identify with.
Oh, sure.
And, you know, I think crypto is one of these the most divisive issues in the world of cryptography.
You know, this is a group of people, at least outside of government service, who were forged together by the crypto bands and the crypto wars of the 90s, when when crypto was classed as ammunition and the NSA didn't want any civilian to have access to it.
And in general, there's, I think, a lot of camaraderie among cryptographers and cryptocurrency.
You know, it's it it it does some interesting practical stuff with things that cryptographers have long dealt with merely as theory.
And I think at first a lot of cryptographers were very enthusiastic about it as a puzzle, if nothing else.
And, you know, the more speculative it got, the harder it became to sort of maintain that stance.
And today there's a real division.
And, you know, there's still people who are doing things with crypto that I think of as as interesting.
I mean, you know, Chelsea Manning is working for a crypto firm and they're doing stuff with identity and, you know, trying to figure out things like secure enclaves as a way of doing crypto without having to, like, burn whole forests down and so on.
I saw her a little while ago at South by Southwest.
She was very excited to learn that I'd written a novel about secure enclaves.
That's not a subject that many people are interested in, but I think it is an intrinsically very fascinating interest.
Corey, we're in our last minute.
So I want to give you the opportunity both to say something to to new writers that hopefully might inspire them in this difficult time to actually put something out that will get read by people and give us all kinds of contact info.
Of course, you're welcome to join us on YouTube at eight o'clock if if you're able to.
But if you could please share that information, great.
Yeah, absolutely. Well, first things first, I'd be a bad promoter if I didn't tell you that if you go to Red Team Blues dot com, you'll be sent to the Kickstarter.
That's that's just for starters.
In terms of advice for for young writers, the one piece it's very quotidian, but the one piece of advice that I wish I'd taken more seriously when I was a baby writer is to write every day.
Because something that you do every day becomes a habit and habits are things that you get for free.
And I think the secret of writing every day is to understand that although there are days when you'll feel like you're writing trash and there are days when you feel like you're writing brilliantly.
And although when you go back and look over your work, some of it will be trash and some of it will be brilliant, that how you feel about it when you're writing it is not related to the quality of the work that you feel about it has more to do with whether you're fighting with your partner, getting enough sleep, have low blood sugar.
All of those exogenous factors and that the only way to overcome writer's block is to really recognize that on those days when it feels like every word is unworthy and you shouldn't even try that you have no idea you might be writing the best work of your life.
And just like if you've ever been in one of those VR experiences where you have to walk across a plank while wearing a VR headset that makes it look like you're walking out over this Empire State Building observation deck.
And you know intellectually that you're just standing on the carpet, but your brain is telling you that you're standing over 150 foot drop.
You just have to make yourself do it in the same way when there's some part of you telling you that these words are unworthy and you shouldn't write them.
You have to feel the feeling and do it anyway.
Awesome.
Well, I hope you keep doing it.
And thank you for all that you've done and you continue to do.
And we will be back in about seven minutes on YouTube.
Write to us OTH at 2600 dot com on YouTube.
It's channel 2600 or follow the link that's right now being displayed on the main 2600 dot com page.
We'll be back again next week at 7 p.m.
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