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. 
Due to the hurricane in the area you are calling, your call cannot be completed at this time, please try your call later 0 7 8 P we're sorry. 
The number you have reached 99.5 WBAI is now off the hook. 
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. 
on WBAI and please support WBAI. 
Keep this radio station going. 
Give to WBAI.org is the website. 
212-209-2950 is the phone number. 
And a big shout out to the whole engineering crew at WBAI headquarters. 
Please check out WBAI.org to find out how you can donate and contribute. 
Good night. 
  And welcome everybody on YouTube to Off the Hook Overtime, and let's make sure we all made it safely. 
Kyle, are you here? 
Present. 
And on Skypeland, Alex? 
I'm here. 
And Cory Doctorow continues to be with us. 
Still here. 
Great. 
I got half an hour. 
Awesome. 
Well, in that half hour, there's a lot I'd really like to cover. 
First of all, you're on tour right now, aren't you? 
I'm about to go on tour. 
I leave, I think on the 21st, I go to Chicago. 
Not really the tour, although they'll have some book stuff there, but I'm going to go and speak at the university on their antitrust conference, and then the tour starts. 
I'm going to be all over Canada, the U.S., and the U.K., and then finish up in Berlin. 
Wow. 
That's pretty incredible. 
The other thing I wanted to ask you, I saw one commenter on the book talking about the rapid evolution of technology, and whether it's a concern that the technology sometimes outpaces the fiction, and gets a bit so fantastic that you have no idea that this is going to happen. 
I think your books in general do a good job of keeping slightly ahead, or at least dealing with the craziness that's happening in the present. 
One thing that comes to mind, obviously, is ChatGPT, and everybody talking about that, everybody freaking out over it. 
First of all, your opinions on it, and do you see a way it affects your work? 
So, I don't really worry about predicting things or staying ahead of things. 
I don't believe in prediction. 
You know, I think there's an intrinsic kind of fatalism in a belief in prediction, because it suggests that, like, the future is arriving no matter what we do. 
You know, the reason I'm an activist is because I think that we can change the future based on our actions. 
And so, prediction to me always seems like, you know, we don't have to do anything because the future is coming, good or bad. 
It's, you know, here it is. 
I think everyone who said they knew the future was either kidding themselves or kidding everyone else, whether that's, like, Nostradamus or, you know, Alvin Toffler. 
And so, I never worried too much about that. 
In terms of ChatGPT and the other machine learning tools and AI tools, I hate all those terms. 
I don't think it's artificial. 
I don't think it's intelligent. 
I don't think there's any learning involved. 
But in terms of them, you know, I think that the strongest parallel in terms of the way that artists are reacting to it is, unfortunately, the way that we reacted to sampling, where we decided that taking work to make samples from it was presumptively theft, that anything that was made as the fruit of that theft was itself not art. 
And that the way to resolve this would be to create a new copyright that would allow the people whose works were being sampled to decide who could sample it. 
And, you know, at the time, you had samplers themselves who were really quite unconcerned with copyright. 
It wasn't even that they thought of themselves as violating copyright. 
Maybe Negative Land did. 
But, you know, you know, the folks at Public Enemy making Taste of Nation and Millions Toll Is Back or the Beastie Boys making Paul's Boutique, they weren't really thinking about it in the same way that like a jazz musician, you know, playing their solo, dropping a couple of bars of That's Amore into the middle of it doesn't really think about copyright either. 
It's just like how music is made. 
And we created this new right to decide who could sample work. 
It wasn't a legislative reform. 
It was really like some core precedents and some changes in the way that the increasingly monopolized music sector did business. 
And the big three labels today who control 70% of all the music, Sony, Warner and Universal, they have this policy where if you want a sample, you have to be signed to one of the labels. 
And if you're signed to one of the labels, you have to sign away your right to be compensated for your samples. 
And so that means that everyone who wants to sample pays a tax to the label out of their advance. 
That doesn't go to an artist. 
It goes to a record executive or shareholder. 
And in order to do so, they have to say that their own samples now belong to the labels. 
Nobody's going to make a legal album that sounds anything like it takes a nation of millions to hold us back today. 
If they had had to clear every sample on that album, it would have cost $150 per CD. 
And so, you know, today we have people who are concerned, I think rightly, that their wages are precarious and that technology is often used to automate labor out of the picture. 
Or more specifically, to discard skilled laborers in favor of laborers who have less negotiating leverage and can demand less. 
Think of the replacement of taxi drivers with Uber drivers who weren't entitled to unemployment insurance or any of those other things that, you know, a salaried employee might be able to get. 
And yet, I think that they are repeating the sins of the people who are worried about sampling. 
First of all, creating a right to decide who can train a model with your work is not, I think, good policy. 
I think we should not say that the right to study a work and make inferences about the relationships of its components is a matter of copyright. 
You know, if you go around the art museum and measure all the noses in the paintings and come up with a picture of the statistically average nose, that shouldn't be anyone's copyright. 
That's not a thing copyright holders should be able to control. 
But even if we say that they should, I think we should understand that the same thing that happened to samples will definitely happen to that right to train models. 
It's already happening. 
If you're a voice actor, the plurality of your business comes from game studios. 
And game studio recording sessions now routinely begin with something like, my name is Corey Doctorow, and I freely and irrevocably transfer the right to train a model with this recording session to the person who hired me to do it. 
And what that means is that the only companies that have the means motive and opportunity to fire every creative worker they can are also the ones who are going to be able to demand that every creative worker sign away the right to train a model that they can use to replace them. 
And meanwhile, the kids who are today on social media making interesting things with machine learning, who are the equivalent of those early samplers doing interesting things with loops, those people would be comprehensively stopped by that right. 
And so you would snuff out art and you would still allow the labor replacement. 
And I think what we need to think about is what the copyright office has thus far said, which is that we could make machine learning generated pieces ineligible for copyright, which would mean that you could go to Disney and you'd say, all right, Disney, we know that you have control over my union brothers in the animation guild. 
I'm a TAG member. 
You can pretty much impose any contracting terms you want, especially as you're doing these mass layoffs. 
Um, everyone's going to just sign up to them. 
But if you train a model on animators work and fire those animators and make a cartoon out of the, out of that model, that cartoon won't be eligible for copyright. 
It'll be in the public domain. 
Anyone can take it and sell it. 
So, you know, you choose either you pay people and you get a copyright because copyright after all is, is to reward human creativity, not software creativity. 
Um, or you fire all your workers, zero out your wage bill, and everyone can copy your work and sell it for cheaper than you do your choice. 
I think Disney will keep those workers in employment. 
It has nothing to do with copyright or with, with creating a new copyright over the right to train. 
Well, one thing it definitely has something to do with is greed. 
And, uh, I think they will certainly try and, uh, uh, pull whatever tricks they can to, to get as much control over this, this, uh, fairly new technology. 
What do you think of the, um, uh, the petition that a bunch of, uh, AI researchers, uh, like Elon Musk and Steve Wozniak, uh, put out recently saying to put a six month pause on this technology. 
It, it, it, it caught me as, wow, they're panicking. 
They really are worried about this and a six month pause for what exactly? 
So they could get control over it or what are your thoughts? 
So, I mean, let's start by pointing out that they're Musk nor Woz are AI researchers. 
Woz is a technology pioneer, Musk is a huckster, uh, but neither of them are AI, are AI people. 
Um, and, and, you know, it's, the signatories are an interesting mix because there are a bunch of people who are invested in open AI competitors there. 
And I think that there's a plausible way to read what they've written as give us six months to catch up with you. 
You're releasing models too frequently. 
Um, there's a kind of criticism that, uh, uh, the, the critic Lee Vinsel, uh, or Vinsel, I don't know how to pronounce his name, calls Krita hype, like criticism with hype. 
And, and, and it's when you take the most outlandish claims of the person you're criticizing at face value and say, look at these incredible things, this person claims they can do. 
Isn't that terrible? 
Um, and so, you know, I think every, every tech bro would like to pretend to be an evil wizard. 
And I think that when we say, oh, they're hacking our dopamine loops and they're doing all these other things that are kind of, you know, warmed over Skinnerian behavioral psychology and whatever. 
And, and we take that at face value, they actually do them a favor, right? 
You know, after all, like Facebook's product is persuasion, right? 
That's what they sell to advertisers. 
If, if, if we go ahead and say, look at Mark Zuckerberg, he's an evil wizard who invented a mind control ray. 
That just helps them sell ads, right? 
That's like, that's the, he likes that story. 
Um, and I think that there's a lot of Krita hype in here and I'm not the only one to, to, to identify the Krita hype in here. 
Much more important people than me have identified that this open letter is full of Krita hype. 
In particular, uh, Emily Bender and Timnit Gebru, whose work is widely cited in the, in the letters footnotes, say, you have completely misstated my work. 
Um, you know, that is not what my work means. 
We, you know, they, the, the footnotes say things like, you know, this, this important paper says that AI is dangerous and that's why we should pause. 
And what Bender and Gebru wrote in their paper in which they said AI is dangerous. 
They said it's dangerous because it automates bias. 
And they said it's dangerous because, uh, the energy consumption is bad for the environment. 
They didn't say it's dangerous because the AI is going to wake up and become Skynet. 
And so, you know, it's a huge, um, uh, misstatement of their work and really just like a shameless act of Krita hype to, to say, oh, look at, look at, uh, Gebru and Bender and their, and their prophecy that, you know, these, uh, auto completes on steroids are going to, uh, are going to enslave us all and, and turn, you know, make us into human batteries in the matrix. 
They said nothing of the sort, um, and they have been very, very vociferous since, and, and saying it, it's a bit like that, uh, scene in, in Annie Hall where, where, uh, Marshall McLuhan steps out from behind the sign and says, you know, nothing of my work, you know? 
Oh yes. 
We all want that world. 
Oh, I just wanted to add that, um, this very, uh, program Skype, uh, uh, uh, introduced me to a new contact today. 
Um, uh, apparently Bing is sentient and, uh, yeah, it, it introduced itself and, and asked if I needed help with anything and I disregarded it. 
I didn't want to, uh, even say anything. 
Bing is on Skype? 
Apparently, yeah. 
It's like, uh, Bing's a chatbot on Skype now. 
Oh, lovely. 
Yeah. 
They're spamming people with it. 
No, Corey, it's great to hear the voice of reason with this subject, but I, I still see, uh, creative people, artists, writers who are panicking saying, what, what's this going to do for me? 
Uh, somebody can simply replace me with, with, uh, with artificial intelligence. 
Should they be worried? 
Well, look, that's, they should be worried that their employer would like to fire their ass and replace them with software. 
A hundred percent. 
Right. 
I mean, just like they should be worried that their bosses want to fire their ass and replace them with low-waged workers overseas and, you know, a whole variety of things that they would like to do to, to get rid of them. 
I mean, you know, I think a lot of Googlers who thought that the, you know, that it was fine for them to work on projects that were automating people out of a job, uh, because no one would ever automate them out of a job, you know, woke up, uh, earlier this year and went, oh shit, they're laying off 12,000 of us. 
And, and, you know, can you believe it? 
It's just, it's like within a couple of months of them doing a stock buyback that would have paid all of our salaries for the next 27 years. 
Right. 
I think that a lot of people are like, yeah, my boss never treated me good because he loved me. 
My boss treated me good because he thought that he needed me. 
And the second he didn't think he needed me, he, uh, he, he kicked me to the curb. 
And I think that that's like a completely valid fear. 
So one guy you should have on the show, uh, if you can get them in, in September, when his book comes out is Brian Merchant, who used to be at, at, um, uh, motherboard and then at, uh, uh, at medium. 
He actually bought how to destroy surveillance capitalism from me as he was my editor at medium. 
Uh, and, and now he's the tech critic at the LA times. 
And Brian's got this book coming out called blood in the machine. 
That's a history of the Luddites and it's a beautifully researched and really well-written book. 
And, you know, the Luddites, like they weren't anti automated mill technology, right? 
The thing that they were pissed off about is they, the mill owners fired a whole ton of skilled mill workers and replaced them with war orphans that they kidnapped from orphanages and imprisoned in these factories and worked 12 hours a day for a 10 year period. 
Of indenture, which many of them didn't survive. 
There's actually one of them, um, uh, Blencoe, Robert Blencoe wrote a memoir about it that became a bestseller and inspired Dickens to write, um, uh, to write, uh, Oliver Twist. 
You know, Oliver Twist is basically a documentary about life in the, in the textile mills of the English North during the industrial revolution. 
You know, like the reason they wanted a machine so simple a child could work it is because they wanted to fire the adults and hire children who could not fight back, right? 
It is a completely reasonable thing to be worried about, about, uh, automation as a means of transferring power to employers and away from employees. 
But the only thing that's ever worked to solve it is not giving employees the individual right to bargain, but rather creating sectoral collective rights that workers employ as a, as a group, right? 
You know, Taylor Swift lost control of her master. 
She had to sign them away when she was a young artist starting out. 
They ended up in the hands of this guy who's a private equity weirdo hates her guts and she hates him. 
And even after he sold them on, he sold them to the Disney family, to their family fund. 
Um, he made sure that of the portfolio that he sold, he retained a, uh, royalty stream from the Taylor Swift masters for her first six albums, just so that she would know that anytime that she, uh, made a dollar, he was making a dime and that she, he would get richer every time she did just to be a vindictive Dick about it. 
She could not get her master's back, but you know what? 
Every musician in the world, in fact, every person in the world, including you and me have the right to record any song that's been recorded and released. 
It's called the compulsory license. 
And that means that Taylor Swift has the right to record Taylor Swift covers. 
So she went back into the studio and recorded note for note covers of her own albums, right? 
We didn't give her the right to bargain away, uh, who could cover her records. 
We kept that right as a collective right that adheres to the entire human race. 
And because of that, Taylor Swift was able to escape the bondage of this private equity creep, right? 
The most powerful musician in the world could not individually bargain to get her, to get these rights back. 
She needed to rely on these collective rights. 
And if we're going to make any headway against AI as a way of, of zeroing out wage bills and putting workers on the breadline, it's going to be collectively, not individually. 
Wow. 
You know, I've seen that happen before, uh, songs from the fifties and sixties that get rerecorded by the same artist because they got a really raw deal on the original recording. 
Unfortunately, in many cases, they're not able to replicate note for note exactly how the, the, the really good recording was, but it's a terrible situation. 
Taylor's got a pretty good set of sound engineers at her disposal, I imagine. 
Yeah. 
And technology on her side. 
Alex, did you have something? 
Yeah, I just wanted to say, you know, with respect to the, the AI letter that everyone was talking about, about ceasing research and whatnot, I, I went through that. 
I, I, you know, I could understand that maybe there were some valid concerns. 
I could see there were quotations that were erroneous, things like that. 
But, um, you know, what I, what I really found interesting is I, I thought the whole letter would have been much more compelling if Andrew Yang hadn't signed it. 
Well, they forged Bill Gates' signature on it, right? 
He came out and he was like, I never signed this letter. 
Is that right? 
Yeah, that was pretty great. 
I didn't know that. 
Didn't the premier of China also sign it? 
Where that name showed up? 
I think that's right. 
I think Xi Jinping's name was on it too. 
Wow. 
Yeah. 
It's, um, you know, it was such a self-regarding piece of nonsense, you know, uh, uh, like that Riley, Riley Quinn from the Trash Future podcast. 
He says that like, they told themselves, uh, they like fed an autocomplete, a bunch of ghost stories. 
And then they asked it to tell them a ghost story and then they got scared and now they're all running around with flashlights under their chins going, it's really quite amazing. 
Yeah. 
I'm enjoying it by myself. 
I, I, I like to see this kind of panic. 
Um, I mean, it was, I think a lot of people are faintly embarrassed already about like that period where we all thought that like solving Sudoku puzzles and calling a cryptocurrency would make everyone a billionaire. 
I think we're going to feel even weirder and sillier about the period where we thought that autocomplete was the, was the end of the human race. 
Yeah. 
I don't remember, uh, too many people fearing that so much, but yeah, there were, there was a contingent. 
Well, no, I mean, that's what I mean is going on with, with chat GPT now, right? 
We have this like highly advanced autocomplete and we're like, Oh, the human race is over. 
Meanwhile, there's still a need for, uh, commercial and commercial products. 
You know, the, the, the gears of this capitalist, capitalism grind on. 
And I think more to your point about innovation, uh, regarding, um, uh, uh, the Disney workers and animators being replaced specifically in the creative field along the lines of it being unfounded. 
I, I really, I, I, I think that, that, that, um, imperfection, like if you train something to be perfectly like that animator, what if, um, the next project is about, uh, taking something and making it messier, making it not the same way. 
I mean, just, I mean, not, not even something that then you could train a machine to do messily. 
I'm saying like truly just totally left field, opposite direction, that kind of creative development and that, that imagination itself and steerability, I think, um, from a group of creative, um, uh, producers grinding out products like that is still desirable for whatever, you know, it costs and, you know, and their happiness is key to that persisting. 
Well, and you're getting at something important here, which is that there's, uh, Mal Sauter wrote, or Sauter wrote about this, that there is something intrinsically conservative about statistical inference because it, um, it really only wants the future to be like the past. 
That's what statistical inference is. 
It's, it's the, it's the operation on the assumption that the future will be like the past. 
And so, you know, when you think about like autocomplete, right, autocomplete wants you to say the thing that you said last time. 
If every time you write, Hey, you then write hun, autocomplete is going to start suggesting hun every time you write, Hey, uh, and, and that is kind of, it's imperative, right? 
Is to make the past like the, the, like, or the future like the past. 
And this conservatism, it really does limit the kind of stuff that you can, that you can do with statistical inference. 
On the other hand, one of the things that statistical inference is really good at is finding statistical links between things that we didn't suspect were there, which is, you know, the source of a lot of mirth, right? 
You may remember that, uh, they tried to train a vision system to identify cancerous tumors. 
And what it identified was rulers because, uh, all the training data that was of a real tumor came from an oncologist and a radiologist who use a ruler to measure it. 
And so all those pictures had rulers in them. 
And, uh, and then all of the pictures of benign growth didn't have rulers cause they were benign. 
And so what the, what the machine decided was that, uh, rulers are a, are a sound indicator of cancer, which is, you know, true in a kind of not very useful way, but an interesting and amusing one. 
And you could imagine a visual artist or conceptual artist or a sculptor or novelist or any other kind of artist having a spark of inspiration from that insight, right? 
That, that, you know, I just, I was at the Broad Museum in LA last week and we took our kid and saw a bunch of big monumental pieces of, of modern art and conceptual art, which is not my usual thing. 
And the, a lot of it missed me, but the pieces that really landed, they landed because they connected things that I never really thought about. 
And they, they reframed how I saw stuff. 
And, you know, I am all for, like, I do believe that people can make good art with, uh, um, you know, these, these generators, but the good art will be in what the people do with it, not what the generator does. 
And so, you know, the, the writer's guild has just offered a, uh, a new contract to the studios where they said that, um, you can use ML and chatbots and whatever as part of the production process, but the script can only be written by a person. 
And so the, the, you know, write me 50 different ways of writing the scene. 
Okay. 
Well, this is one that's kind of interesting. 
I'll go take a bash at it using that as, um, inspiration. 
And that's fine. 
I mean, people have been rolling dice and throwing, um, uh, the I Ching and, and, and doing all kinds of stuff to, to come up with inspiration for years. 
There's no reason that computers should be out of it. 
I love Brian Eno's, um, oblique strategies deck, you know, like there, there are so many ways of, of, of, of, you know, generating creative sparks. 
Um, but, uh, and you know, William S. 
Burroughs throwing bits of paper in the air and then piecing them together, right? 
Like all of those things can create creative sparks. 
I just don't think that, um, the, the thing that determines whether we get replaced by machines has anything to do with what the software does, right? 
The point of the Luddites is stop paying attention to what the machine does and start paying attention to who it does it for and who it does it to. 
I, I think maybe people will start to understand the Luddites a bit more through this, you know, through what you described just now. 
Well, I, you know, I think Brian's book could not be better timed. 
Uh, you know, that, uh, it's, and again, that's called Blood and the Machine. 
It comes out in September. 
Um, it really, uh, does yeoman service in, in revisiting what the, what the Luddites cause was. 
I sometimes joke that, you know, thinking that the Luddites were animated by their hatred of, of, uh, milling machineries, like thinking that, uh, Osama bin Laden's main cause was ending civilian aviation. 
Right. 
Go ahead, Alex. 
Uh, I just want to say, I think we should take some calls because I know Corey has to, to jump in. 
That's right. 
So, I mean, let's give Corey the opportunity to speak with Rebel. 
Uh, why do you want to put him through that? 
I mean, seriously, we were, uh, testing a new filtering, uh, mechanism this week, but, uh, we'll give it a try. 
What's that number? 
Okay. 
Well, uh, I'm going to, I'm going to request Kyle that we not connect to somebody who's just going to connect us to various recordings. 
Um, and, and just leave it open for another phone number to call in who might have something relevant to say. 
And then we'll, you know, we can take Rebel later. 
All right. 
We'll, we'll stick to calls on, uh, this subject. 
Phone number is 802-321-4225-802-321-HACK. 
Uh, Corey, I just wanted to ask you, did you have any, any feelings on this, uh, recent ruling against the internet archive that, that happened? 
Oh, yeah, it's pretty bad. 
I mean, you know, I think the best thing we can say about it is that they made a bunch of unforced errors and, uh, the judgment is so bad that it's, there's, there's just so many grounds to appeal. 
Like, you know, one of the things that Hachette asked for and that the judge gave them was basically a determination that your use doesn't count as non-profit, even if you are a non-profit, if, if you have a donate to my non-profit button somewhere on it, which is just like, just, just bananas, right? 
It's the kind of thing that a lot of people who don't care about this issue, but do care about like non-profits more broadly are going to want to see, um, uh, some action on, uh, likewise that, you know, the judge basically said that nothing counts as fair use if you can license the use. 
So once there's a, you know, like you may remember the AP had this really weird thing about 15 years ago where they were offering bloggers a license for like $12 to quote up to 15 words of any AP story. 
And, you know, this was just bananas. 
That's not how fair use works. 
And basically by the judge's theory, if that existed, then you wouldn't be allowed to quote because, uh, you could take a license instead. 
And that's, that again is like a thing that's going to make a lot of people who are, don't care about the internet archive, but do care about quotation, like news agencies really, uh, freaked out and want to join in the appeal. 
You know, this was never going to be, um, a, uh, uh, a case that was resolved in the lower court, whoever won, there was going to be an appeal. 
And so here we are, we're, we're headed for that appeal now. 
All right. 
And we have a phone call, a non-rebel phone call, I'm told. 
Let's, uh, see who's on the phone and good evening. 
You're on off the cover time. 
Go ahead. 
Hello, Johnny Fusion calling it. 
Hey, Johnny, how you doing? 
Johnny Fusion is one of our, our 2600 writers and, uh, you're on with Cory Doctorow. 
That's great. 
I'm a big fan, uh, Cory, uh, down and out in the Magic Kingdom. 
It's one of my favorites. 
Thank you. 
That was me 21 years ago. 
Yeah. 
I actually wrote some, some short stories inspired in that milieu about alternative Disney adventures. 
Yeah, cool. 
And they got picked up by Omni in one online. 
Oh, really? 
Oh, I remember Omni. 
That's amazing. 
Yeah, Omni, Omni was the top selling, uh, top, uh, paying science fiction market for a long time. 
That's a, that's quite a coup. 
Yeah. 
And I wanted to go back to what you were talking to on the radio about Amazon stranglehold. 
Right. 
So, like, I'm more the typical writer, the one that cannot make a living off of it. 
Yeah. 
You know, very, very small volume, self-published. 
And, of course, um, I have a couple books on my mundane name, on my non-hacker name, not, not as Johnny Fusion, but, um, on Amazon and on Kindle. 
Right. 
And the interesting thing that they do allow on Kindle is you choose whether your e-book will have their DRM or not. 
And I always choose to leave it off. 
So, if someone wants to pirate my books or copy it or share it, it's fine. 
Because, like, I'm, I'm just making what I call cheeseburger money. 
Right? 
Right. 
Hopefully, each month I get enough royalties to buy a cheeseburger. 
Right? 
Like, like, the best month I got, I got, like, $50, $60. 
Right. 
You know, that was a bumper month. 
Right. 
But most of the time, it's only a few dollars here, a few dollars there. 
But, yeah, I, but for small writers like me, it's like Amazon is our only way to get out there. 
Like, if we don't want to be traditionally published, you know, definitely don't want to pay money for a vanity press. 
Sure. 
You know, the, the Kindle Direct Publishing is just about, because of their monopoly, the only way to get a book out there. 
Yep. 
I think that's totally right. 
You know, I, and I, I don't disagree with any of those things that you just said. 
I think that, and I, and I don't think the problem with Amazon is the ways in which it lets audiences and creators connect. 
And I, and, you know, I think one of the things that tech giants want to do is they want to do this, this trick I call inevitabilism, where they say, like, look, the only way you can have this thing you like is if you take this thing that you don't like, right? 
That, that, like, the two are inseparable, right? 
Like, you know, Google wants you to think that, like, a bearded prophet came down off a mountain and said, you know, Larry, Sergei, stop rotating your log files and start mining them for actionable market intelligence, right? 
The reality is that, like, Google was a search engine that had no surveillance for years. 
That's how it kicked Alta Vista's ass. 
In fact, if you go back and you read the page rank paper, like right there on the first page, it says ad supported search engines are a terrible idea, right? 
People make a lot of noise about Google and don't be evil. 
But like long before they were doing this, don't be evil stuff, they were doing this side, like don't have ads on search engines. 
It's going to wreck them. 
And, you know, in the same way, like the problem with Amazon is not that it connects writers and readers. 
And I think that you could absolutely have an Amazon store that didn't have DRM and that didn't abuse its suppliers. 
I think that it would be a mistake to think that Jeff Bezos was particularly evil. 
I think Jeff Bezos acts the way any sort of greedy would-be monopolist does if they neither are disciplined by competition nor by regulation. 
And, you know, when you give guys like Jeff Bezos the right to use DRM to usurp the relationship between creators and audiences, they will, right? 
And like, you know, I don't want to let them off the hook for this or anything, but I also think that like we should expect a Jeff Bezos to emerge the minute we create the circumstances for a Jeff Bezos. 
And the way to address this is with, you know, limits on anti-competitive mergers, reforming DRM law, minimum standards for contracts. 
You know, the European Union passed the digital single markets directive that has a transparency requirement. 
If they'd done that, there would have never been Audiblegate. 
There never would have been this wage theft from Audible because they would have had to disclose exactly how they calculated every penny of royalties, right? 
So, you know, all of this stuff is like stuff that we can fix in the policy and competition domain. 
We don't have to make Amazon perfect and we don't have to feel guilty about shopping at the monopolist. 
Yeah, I mean, I think another good thing that we could do as far as regulation is to make mandatory interoperability, right? 
I agree. 
So you can take your books, you know, instead of being this Kindle format and Kindle Direct Publishing, the contract is if you want to sell on Amazon, you cannot sell anywhere else. 
It's a lot of people into Kindle devices or Kindle software on their phone or tablet and then you're stuck, like you were talking about Audible. 
But like if legislators got hip to the reality of the digital world, they would make interoperability mandatory. 
Mandatory. 
And that's where regulatory would be. 
So we had an interop bill in the last session with the Access Act. 
It died, but I think it's likely to be reintroduced, probably not in this session, but in a future one. 
The ad tech bill is back, which is it's an interop bill. 
It requires platforms, Google and Facebook, really, but also Apple to a lesser extent, to dismantle their monolithic ad tech stacks and create interoperable components like the marketplace, the demand side platform, the sell side platform, which would give publishers a lot more leverage and more power over the way that ad tech works. 
Today, the ad tech platforms take 50% of every publisher's dollar. 
That's crazy. 
It should be 10%. 
You could raise the advertising revenues of every publisher by 40% just by reforming the monopolies in the ad tech market. 
In the European Union, the Digital Markets Act is mandating interoperability at the service layer. 
So even the Chinese cyberspace directive prohibits companies from taking action to block interoperability. 
I have a book coming out about this. 
As I mentioned, I write when I'm anxious and have seven books coming out. 
Then this one is coming out in September from Verso. 
It's called The Internet Con, How to Seize the Means of Computation. 
And it's about specifically how you do an interoperability mandate and how you legalize adversarial interoperability, reverse engineering and all those other things without endangering internet users and how the two work together to make a very robust policy stack that will really weaken the platform's dominance over our lives and allow internet users to have more control. 
So I think you're right. 
I think that that is an excellent possibility. 
And I also want to say that contract law is a matter of state purview, which means that if Washington state were to pass a law that said, as a matter of public policy, exclusivity deals that lock e-books to platforms cannot be enforced, Amazon would have to leave Washington state or all of those contracts would be null and void. 
And so you would get a lot more power. 
Johnny, thanks for your call. 
Corey, I know you're overtime. 
Yeah, I got to run. 
I got to go to make dinner for the kid. 
All right. 
Guys, thank you very much. 
It was lovely to talk to you again. 
And thank you. 
I'm a life subscriber to 2600. 
It's the highlight of my quarter when it arrives. 
I've got an issue right here that I was just I peruse when I'm in my off hours waiting for a call to start. 
So thank you so much. 
Thank you for everything you do. 
And we hope to talk to you again soon. 
Take care, guys. 
See you soon, Corey. 
All right. 
Corey Doctora joining us on Off the Hook and Off the Hook Overtime. 
And our phone line is open again. 
802-321-4225. 
And I guess just like that, we know what this means. 
Good evening. 
You're on Off the Hook Overtime. 
Who could this be? 
Yes, I think this should be a competitor to Facebook and Amazon. 
Well, no one's ever thought of that before. 
I was just thinking the same thing myself in the conversation. 
I'm just hearing like, what are the causes of this? 
And going back to Corey's book, which is what was the blue? 
I'm sorry. 
Red Team Blues is the name of the book coming out soon or is out. 
Just released. 
Late April. 
Late April is coming out in paperback and other formats. 
And on the Kindle. 
It's going to be on the Kindle because you can turn DRM off on the Kindle. 
I just, in kind of like the character, the main character who's sort of resigned or has kind of come away from the bubble era. 
I think there's this fundamental thing attached to what we think of as tech and these now monopolies that we've nurtured for so long, whether we're talking about Section 230 or whatever. 
All of the different issues that have led us to this path. 
I'm really hearing that there's this addiction, this culture, this association with bubbles. 
Like, it seems like there's a fiending for the next bubble that was insatiable after the 90s. 
And then it kind of birthed this moment where you have disruptors. 
And then, you know, every outstanding startup, it has to be on these huge return rates for the VC and capital that they're infused with. 
So they have to do all this big movement, scale really quickly, get rid of all the legacy people as soon as they're big enough. 
And then, you know, figure out how to steer a bunch of people that don't have any allegiance, don't know what they're doing. 
And then automate and fire them all. 
Like, it's fascinating. 
I think that what I'm hearing in this is this trend away from this addiction to thinking of successful firms as only being, like, these rocket trajectory startup companies. 
It's insane. 
And, like, we were talking about small tech needs more lauding and so forth. 
So, anyway. 
No, I'm with you, Rebel. 
I think we should have alternatives. 
Yeah. 
It's like the phone company. 
Remember, like, AT&T was the big, you know. 
Yeah. 
For a long time, AT&T was the only, you know, phone company in town. 
And then, you know, the government had a, with Boston's breakup. 
And then they said, hey, G&G can't be in the computer business and all that. 
Yeah. 
And it's like the... 
The same thing with... 
I think I can explain it. 
I think Seattle has a little bit of a complex. 
They don't feel like they're as big of a tech center maybe as California or maybe as big a business center as New York or Chicago or some of the other markets. 
Well, they're in Chicago, too. 
They're second offices in Chicago. 
That's right. 
They're getting out of the Seattle area. 
So, I guess you won't want to attribute that necessarily. 
But I think it's this... 
Well, I think they're in Seattle, I'm sure. 
That's the second headquarters. 
Of course. 
That... 
Be that as it may. 
The tendency, I think, is to overcompensate a little bit here and have to be so big and so controlling in as many ways and so forth. 
As far as cutthroat competition and this, it's like a breed of capitalism that is just blindly irreverent. 
Like, just... 
It's strange to me because it's not a feature I would think of as a part of the Northwest, but I think it's also the legacy of Microsoft's emergence as a dominant player, which itself was echoes of the bell system and that monopolistic situation. 
So, out come more firms from the Northwest that are in this spirit. 
And the same thing was happening with Starbucks. 
We talk about local coffee shops that basically got put out by this, you know, automated bean juice squirting machine that it replaced it with. 
And now the workers who are pressing those buttons, they can't even, you know, organize because Howard Schultz doesn't like it. 
I think in many ways, though, the power is in the consumer's hands all the time. 
Because if you reject this, if you go to the local coffee shops, you know, if you go to actual bookstores because you know what they represent and you know who's behind them, you get the final vote. 
And it doesn't matter how much money these other people have. 
If you don't buy their products, they're not going to last. 
You know, talking about big companies and small companies and where their presence is, go look at GoFundMe. 
Where's GoFundMe's main office in Redwood City, California? 
But what is it? 
It's a post office box. 
I think they used to have an office and now they have like 25 employees now and everybody works from home. 
And how does that even work? 
Well, I don't know what they do. 
Well, and that's, I think, an attribute of a technology or information technology firm that is being agile and surviving. 
And that scrappiness, I think, should be lauded more than big catering events and, you know, splashy galas to hype. 
Hype, as Corey was talking about, hype or the Krita hype as well, you know, all of that. 
Don't believe it. 
Don't believe the hype. 
Yeah, you know, this reminds me of something that I experienced a few years ago. 
I remember all the independent bookstores and they were all driven out of business or most of them driven out of business by Barnes & Nobles and Borders. 
And then Borders was driven out of business by pretty much Amazon. 
And when I was in Seattle, I went to an Amazon bookstore. 
It was a new thing they were trying. 
Let's open an actual book. 
It just felt so wrong. 
It just felt so cheap, you know. 
It didn't feel like a bookstore at all. 
It felt like something robotic. 
Yeah, well, Amazon first started selling books and DVDs in 1995. 
Uh-huh. 
Yeah, but not in a bookstore. 
They were doing it online. 
Yeah, virtually. 
Yeah. 
So it's just weird to go back to brick and mortar when you pretty much were working against that for your entire existence. 
And just talking about automated, like artificial intelligence taking, I'm on the do not fall list as many people are. 
But, you know, it doesn't really matter anymore because they now have artificial intelligence calling you or AR or automated things. 
And they wait for the word hello. 
And if you say hello and then you start saying something else or if it hears another noise in the background while it's talking, then it hangs up. 
And or, you know, you know, if you don't say the right words or whatever. 
And, you know, and it's the market is in India. 
So if you get a person, they're not even in the United States, so you can't tell them. 
I mean, if you tell them, hey, I'm on the do not call list, please don't call me. 
Rebel, are you a robot? 
Yeah. 
I'll hang up on you. 
No, I'm kidding. 
Okay, because that's what a robot would say. 
You know, if you ask these robots, are they robots? 
I'll say something like that. 
I'm asking you, are you a robot? 
I'm sorry. 
You may think I'm a robot, but, you know, I'm a real person. 
You can talk to me like a real person. 
That's pretty much almost exactly what they say. 
The reason I ask, Rebel, is because you call us every week and you give the same story about how these robots are calling you and how they're from India and how they wait for you to say hello and you can make them say certain things. 
Yeah, we're aware of this. 
It's happening. 
But the question is, how do you fight back? 
What do you do differently? 
How do you break them? 
I don't know. 
I mean, it's kind of annoying, but it's kind of fun to just kind of put it. 
Like, one called me today saying, we noticed that you were in an accident, an accident, a car accident. 
They're trying to do some sort of a scam. 
And I'm trying to, like, you know, say, yes, I was in an accident. 
Oh, well, were you asking another question and I answered? 
But then it hangs up because I probably didn't answer correctly or whatever. 
You gave the wrong answer. 
Were you driving at the time? 
No, no, I wasn't driving. 
No, I was not in an accident. 
I wasn't driving. 
It was just one of those automated calls that, you know, wait for you to say hello. 
So I said hello and it would say, hi, this is the insurance, the claims department. 
And we're calling in reference to an accident that you may have. 
You may be eligible for a deductible payment or whatever. 
They're probably going to say, you know, you have to pay for it or whatever. 
That's what I was trying to get to, but unfortunately it hung up on me. 
You know, it's gotten so bad, I don't even answer my phone anymore. 
I don't even look at my phone. 
Weeks will go by where I don't even look at SMS messages because most of them are spam. 
It's turned into a huge waste of time, you know, and if you factor in things like Google Voice, that adds in even more spam and it just turns into this crazy nightmare that you don't want any part of anymore. 
And I just wonder, how do we communicate? 
You know, I still use email, but a lot of people don't. 
A lot of people don't use email anymore. 
Well, WhatsApp even gives you spam. 
Yeah, there's a lot of fake and sort of malicious content spread through chat programs like WhatsApp, for instance, a lot of them. 
And like you mentioned, Google Voice, I've played around with that a little bit and it definitely passes along a lot of both text messages, but voicemails with the exact kind of automation, just very personable, chatty robots. 
I've heard the spam that comes to your voicemail. 
It's the same female voice. 
A lot of it. 
Saying the same thing about 18 times. 
And then you hear the same female voice saying something a little bit different a few more times. 
And people, I guess, fall for this. 
And then they like try using my name. 
They're like, is Kyle there? 
If you put your number anywhere where it's able to be seen online with your name attached to it, that's going to happen. 
That is real. 
And, you know, you can put yourself on the do not call list. 
Doesn't make a difference. 
What are you going to do? 
Worst thing that can happen is they get fined. 
You don't see a penny of that. 
They don't get fined. 
They're in India. 
They're not even in India. 
Well, you don't know where they are. 
How do you know they're in India? 
You might think they're in India, but they could be down the block. 
Well, the FCC is taking this a little bit more seriously. 
Yeah, right. 
Prove it. 
Allegedly. 
I saw a couple stories about this. 
Maybe I'll bring a news article for next show. 
However, that's not really too meaningful unless there's some teeth behind it. 
And there's no assurance that carriers are going to universally filter or manage this stuff any better than they already do. 
They have a low incentive as a part of their business model to prevent this kind of stuff. 
And there's a desire. 
I mean, people want to get people tangled up. 
And of course, there's a lot of people answering phones, people that are homebound and otherwise unaware that this is a tactic. 
This is where I'm with Rebel because if you can play with it and mess around with it and maybe get it to drop down to a C prompt on a computer and execute a command, if you can just know the secret words or something that will just set it off and put it into maintenance mode or something like that, it's a good day if you can do that. 
Maybe that's a good idea for the next Hope. 
Well, how are we going to get spammers to call us at Hope? 
I don't want to think about that. 
I don't know. 
And anything else, Rebel? 
Yeah, because they can avoid fines by just going outsourcing to India. 
The company that's doing the telemarketing, they don't have to have their telemarketers in the United States. 
They could just have the people in other countries do it. 
Other countries, yeah. 
It could be fun. 
But you keep saying India. 
It could be Canada. 
It could be Pakistan. 
It could be Vietnam. 
It could be China. 
It could be all sorts of countries everywhere. 
It's not just one. 
Right. 
And a lot of them come from right here in the United States as well. 
Anything else? 
We're going to open up to another phone call. 
Okay. 
Mail from a call from other people that you don't know. 
I mean, numbers that you think you know, like a same exchange, and it doesn't say anything. 
You even say hello and it just hangs up. 
Yeah, it's misconfigured. 
Yeah. 
Or they have too many people or, I mean, not enough people to, you know. 
This is worthwhile. 
This is worth a deeper analysis because there could be people running the systems that are automating that here and then forwarding to numbers that are actually call centers. 
It could be layered and… One of us should try to get a job at one of these places. 
Then we can figure out how it really works. 
What do you think, Rebel? 
Take a trip over to one of these countries and apply. 
They're awful, though. 
He doesn't know that. 
Go on YouTube and go on, like, Scambator and, you know, this is a YouTube channel that people actually, you know, trying it and talking to them and getting them to do things and finding out where they are and the actual YouTube channels. 
Well, you know, we're on a YouTube channel right now, but maybe you should go to that YouTube channel and talk to them about this. 
Well, I did. 
I mean, I, you know, they tell you, you know, what numbers are calling and, you know, things like that. 
Uh-huh. 
Okay. 
All right. 
Listen, we're going to move on. 
Thanks for your call. 
Good hearing from you. 
The 2600 meeting is from Friday. 
That's right. 
There is a 2600 meeting on Friday all over the world. 
So check 2600.com slash meetings to see if there's one near you. 
And if you want to start one near you, email us and, or, or, or tweet at us at 2600 meetings on Twitter. 
All right. 
Moving on. 
802-321-4225 is our phone number. 
Alex, you've been awfully quiet tonight. 
Are you doing your taxes or something? 
Yeah. 
No, I'm trying to multitask a little bit and also a little under the weather tonight. 
I know. 
Some, uh, you know, throat issues, but then also something going on with my eye where I'm losing focus in my left eye. 
So it's kind of, uh, kind of annoying. 
Yeah. 
If you clock yourself in the face and the left-hand side, sometimes that clears that up. 
Yeah. 
I've, I've tried that a couple of times. 
Get your kid to do that. 
He'll do it happily. 
Oh, he definitely would. 
I know. 
I think we're just getting old or declining organisms over here. 
Uh-huh. 
Uh-huh. 
Yeah. 
Yeah. 
But, um, I, I thought today was a good show. 
I mean, it was great to just let Corey talk, to be honest with you. 
It's nice to hear another voice sometimes on our show and a very eloquent one is that. 
Yeah. 
You can't get more eloquent than Corey. 
So, so like, uh, on point, just got, got academic, uh, ref reference. 
Just, it's a, it's a, so many different directions too. 
It's just a real pithy, just in-depth conversation. 
I was, I was happy to hear it. 
He, he not only makes me aware of all the injustices and gets me angry about them, but he gives me hope as well. 
And I think that is really what we should all strive for because, uh, what Amazon is doing is, is, is crazy and it's, it's harmful, but we do have power to do something about it. 
And, uh, especially if we join together and are creative and, uh, it's just, it's, it's, it's a great feeling knowing that, uh, there is hope on the horizon. 
Well, that's one thing that's so interesting about Corey and why I love having him on because he's not just all doom and gloom. 
It's, he identifies these problems, really articulates them so well, and he uses language and words and analogies. 
I think that we can all easily understand and, and then proposes some kind of solution to the problem. 
He doesn't just pose the problem. 
He also poses a solution and the solution is, is very often about working together. 
It's about kind of fundamental rights, bargaining rights, and he thinks about these solutions in ways that are, I think, extraordinarily creative, really, and just based on not emerging in new technologies and trying to invent something new to solve this problem, but based on some of the fundamental tools and building blocks that we've had in society that have been taken away from us. 
And, um, and it's pretty extraordinary to hear that. 
I think, I love having him on. 
I think, uh, I think we should have him on more often. 
All right. 
Definitely. 
I am full agreement on that. 
We have a call coming in. 
I believe this is from the United Kingdom. 
Good evening. 
You're on off the hook. 
Overtime. 
Greetings from London. 
Wow. 
Is this, uh, is this zap? 
Am I the only person that pones from London? 
Well, no, but you have a distinctive voice. 
You have a very distinctive voice that I'd recognize anywhere. 
Well, that's maybe because I'm poning up too much. 
Maybe a bit like rebel. 
Well, never, never like rebel. 
I've got news. 
Uh-huh. 
Go ahead. 
You mentioned the meetings on Friday. 
Yes. 
There's another one starting up in the UK. 
So, this Friday, they're going to be, uh, there's going to be a meeting in Cheltenham, and it's the first one they're holding. 
And where is that? 
Cheltenham. 
Okay. 
Wait, spell it? 
It's the G-E-C-H-Q, the UK version of the NSA. 
Okay. 
So, I just wanted to let everyone know. 
It's going to be at the Bays, Bays Hill Inn, which is 85 Street, St. 
George's Place, Cheltenham. 
Now, can you make sure that that information is also sent either to the 2600 Meetings Twitter account or to meetings at 2600.com, or both, preferably? 
I believe they have done that. 
I did tell them to do that. 
Okay. 
I don't know why they keep asking me to do these things, but I do it for them because that's what I do. 
Well, because there are people that just do everything, and you happen to be one of them. 
So, people just ask you to do things. 
But if we receive that information by tomorrow, it will go in for Friday, and then it'll be in the next day. 
Not the issue that's coming out, because it's already at the printer, but the one after that. 
Yeah. 
No problem. 
That's basically it. 
I don't really have anything else to say, so I'll get off the line. 
Well, okay. 
It was good hearing from you. 
How are things over there? 
I imagine, Alex, you're not in London right now, are you? 
No, I'm in New York. 
Okay, so. 
Yeah. 
For a change. 
I'll also mention about Alex. 
Unfortunately, I was meant to see him. 
He gave me short notice. 
I wasn't feeling good, and it just didn't happen. 
Well, he'll be back. 
He's coming back. 
He'll be coming back at some point very soon, I would imagine. 
And I hope to see you as well. 
Hopefully. 
If I get more notice, it's a lot easier for me to travel and stuff, because my health isn't that good, but I just like talking about it. 
Okay. 
All right. 
Well, please call back. 
We'll check in with you again. 
Yes. 
All right. 
Thanks a lot. 
All right. 
Be well, Zap. 
Good to hear. 
Sounds good. 
And to that, I just kind of respond to Zap for a second. 
Not to worry at all. 
It was kind of short notice for him to cross the city and head over to Chelsea. 
Kind of notice that you gave him. 
What did you say? 
Here I am now. 
Oh, I didn't hear from you. 
That's five seconds. 
How much time did you give him? 
Yeah. 
Well, no. 
It was some time. 
It was just, I think, the same day, or maybe the day before. 
I don't know. 
But he couldn't make it across London, so it's not a big deal. 
But I'll be back. 
We'll get together then. 
Making it across London can be a real challenge. 
Believe me. 
I've tried it. 
I really can. 
Yeah. 
It really, it's something. 
Yeah. 
But I look forward to trying again. 
I really do. 
Yeah. 
Well, there's this new way to cross it now, which is actually quite interesting. 
I have loved it. 
This is what I do in the mornings. 
When I'm going over to King's College to teach, I'm leaving from Chelsea. 
Is this the Elizabeth line? 
No. 
Oh. 
I actually don't take any lines. 
I take something called the Clipper, the Thames Clipper. 
And you just take a boat, you know, east down the Thames. 
And it's like having a little mini vacation every morning. 
You pass by Parliament, Big Ben, the American Embassy, the Battersea Power Station. 
And it's just an amazing way to see London, especially when the sun is coming up. 
The only problem with the Clipper is it's run by Uber, of course. 
But it's a pretty fantastic service. 
It's not incredibly cheap, but I think it's a great way to get back and forth across London. 
Doesn't that only work, though, if where you need to go is near the water? 
Well, possibly, yeah. 
I mean, it's one way to get down the river, right? 
You have to get out, you know, where the river is. 
So if you're heading to north London, that would not be, you know, great. 
But if you're just heading from east to west, anywhere near the embankment there, I think it's a fantastic way. 
Well, I mean, if Uber were smart, what they do is they'd either have one of these vehicles that, you know, turns into a land vehicle. 
You know, you've seen those. 
They get out of the water and now they have wheels. 
Or they would have a dedicated transfer. 
When you get off the boat, there's an Uber car waiting for you and they take you where you want to go. 
Well, there's also another problem, too, because on the way back, you can only go so far. 
I usually get on it in Chelsea at the Cadogan Pier. 
But on the way back, if I'm heading west from the east, then it will only go to the Battersea Power Station. 
And it won't go farther than that because the tide has gone out and the Thames is too low for the boat to continue on. 
Why does it go to a power station? 
A Battersea Power Station. 
Okay. 
It's just a landmark on the river there. 
Oh, okay. 
Yeah. 
It's actually not a power station anymore as well. 
They've made it into a giant mall. 
It was supposed to have all these nice sort of unique shops and stuff in it. 
But I went in it and it just seems like a lot of, I don't know, high-end places, a little sterile. 
I wasn't terribly impressed. 
No, it's above our station, I think. 
Yeah. 
Yeah. 
I think so. 
You know, they have ferries in New York as well. 
You can take a ferry from, I believe, Rockaway to Manhattan, which I've always wanted to do. 
You know, take the A-Train all the way out there and then take the ferry all the way back. 
Yeah. 
There's a lot of places where you can take ferries here. 
And it's kind of surprising. 
Yeah. 
We never do it, though. 
That's the thing. 
But we talk about it. 
Yeah. 
We do talk about it. 
Yeah. 
Yeah. 
That's half of it. 
Yeah. 
These are pedestrian ferries or water taxis. 
Yeah. 
You can't drive your car on it, so don't try. 
Yeah. 
Do not use the F-word. 
No. 
Don't. 
Unless you really mean it. 
What's the F-word? 
Ferry. 
Oh, oh. 
Yeah. 
Well, that's what we're talking about. 
Yeah. 
I know. 
I know. 
I'm just like, there's, you know, real ferry systems out there. 
This sounds more like a little smaller. 
Yeah. 
All right. 
I don't mean to split hairs. 
It sounds fascinating. 
It's fine. 
I think that's it for tonight. 
We're at the one hour mark, so I'm ready to call it a night. 
You, Alex? 
Yeah. 
I'm all set. 
I mean, we could do one more if you want. 
We're going to have one more call. 
I was sure. 
Yeah, but there isn't a call. 
So, you know, I think Zap is a good way to end it. 
The call is over. 
Yeah. 
Yeah. 
We've got no calls. 
No calls. 
All right. 
Our listeners are requesting that we stop, so I think we should. 
Sure. 
Because they have lives, too, you know. 
They have things they've got to do. 
Yeah. 
Yeah, no doubt. 
And most of our listeners are overseas, and it's later there, so they're really sleepy and cranky. 
Yeah, that's fine. 
You know, we haven't heard from some of our friends in Bulgaria recently. 
No, I haven't heard from Popsin in ages. 
Maybe it's too late now, because we just did Daylight Savings. 
Does that make it later for him? 
I don't know. 
No, it gets complicated. 
Sometimes it gets so complicated, you can't even do it. 
And that's where I think we might be now. 
Maybe, yeah. 
All right. 
Then we're going to call it. 
OTH at 2600.com is our email address. 
You can watch this and other OTH Overtime shows on our YouTube channel. 
You can watch it, but you're just going to see an image that doesn't change. 
Yeah, you can watch and listen. 
All right. 
You can turn it on, watch it for a second, then go off and do something else while it's playing. 
But yeah, that's at channel 2600. 
On YouTube, we're the Hacker Radio Show on Twitter. 
And by the way, we also archive all of the audio for both the shows and Overtime on 2600.com slash off the hook. 
So if the audio is terrible on YouTube, which sometimes it is, there's almost always a better copy on 2600.com slash off the hook. 
Just a little tip for you there. 
We'll be back next week for both Off the Hook on WBAI and Off the Hook Overtime for Alvor on YouTube. 
Hope you have a pleasant week. 
Write to us, OTH at 2600.com. 
Share any kind of stories, stuff you've hacked, things that need to be hacked, hacks that are talking about hacking. 
Let us know and stay tuned. 
Good night.