Enzittification with Cory Doctorow & Brian Merchant

24:31So the man seminars are these free junkets for federal judges where they teach them about antitrust law and they're run by rich guys. And they fly them to luxury resorts and they explain how antitrust law should work. And there's been quantitative work on this where they took federal judges and they looked at their decisions before and after going to a man seminar. And they found that after going to a man seminar, they weighed more heavily in favor of monopoly. And so they built up this edifice of precedent and theory and orthodoxy. And so when Obama's FTC said, oh, we're going to let them walk, what they were doing was just continuing a grand tradition of Bush I, Bush II, Reagan, Carter, Clinton, right?

25:12Like this was the way that things were done. It was an absolutely wasted opportunity, but it's more or less what Trump did afterwards. And it's what we did all the way up to the Biden administration, which for reasons I think that have nothing to do with Biden's own ideology, but have everything to do with the way that he operates as a party power broker, where he wants to give everyone a little of something. We got a handful of appointees at the tops of some of the most important agencies that really oriented themselves towards smashing corporate power. Lena Kahn at the Federal Trade Commission, Jonathan Cantor at the DOJ Antitrust Division, Tim Wu, who was in the White House for several years, and so on.

25:55And these people have really transformed things. We've seen more policy transformation in the last four years than in the last 40. It's been head-spinningly great. It's wonky. It's hard to get your head around. It's very structural, right? It's about changing the rules of the game, which takes a while to show up in the game, right? But boy, oh boy, it's pretty substantial. Do you think it could go anywhere, though? Do you actually... We talk about hope. Should we have hope from this? I mean, it's very tenuous. It has been great. You know, Lena Khan in particular. I mean, I wish the administration would do kind of a better job of touting its wins because all of this stuff is just so popular.

26:36What Lena Khan has done in awakening sort of the FTC from its kind of – Koma. Yeah, its decades-long Koma and then attacking some – I mean, who doesn't hate Ticketmaster? Like who doesn't – who loves logging onto the internet as it is today? Like these are entities that are popular to go after. Junk fees, non-competes. Yeah. Amazon, which has recently turned so hostile to its own third-party vendors and small businesses that it relies on to operate, that it's strangling. This is a perfect example of what the Democrats and Biden are supposed to be all about standing up for the little guy, the small business owners.

27:19And I think the problem with all of these gains is that they're just tethered to an administration, right? So if Trump, I mean, some of them could be more durable. They could be. But I mean, Lena Kahn is not going to be the head of the FTC if Trump wins. They're already fucking coming for her. I mean, Democratic donors are coming for her too because tech companies don't like Lena Kahn either. So you have guys like, I think it was Reid Hoffman. Reid Hoffman, yeah. Oh, God, Reid Hoffman. But that company that just turned down a$36 billion acquisition offer from Google did so because they didn't want to go through the antitrust hell.

27:56It is the security company. And so, you know, you have had, if nothing else, four years of companies not being acquired and instead trying to be product led and make a thing that people want that they can sell for more than it costs to make them, which is, you know. That's an insane idea. I was raised by socialists, right? And even I can recognize that this is what capitalism is supposed to look like. My dad ran a part of the NHS. like i'm the same way but also this is also something that really fucking bothers me about tech you showed me your framework laptop beforehand and for the listeners the framework is a laptop that you can actually effectively rebuild replace the motherboard and the screen and all these things as a regular user there is still cool shit happening but also i assume that company makes more money than it spends on its stuff tech can do this and i feel like the common there's this weird paradox at the moment.

28:49We've got tech saying, well, it's actually, these companies should be able to, to quote Ilya Sutskeva, formerly of OpenAI, we should be able to scale in peace. By the way, Ilya, if you somehow hear this, you will never have a moment of peace as long as I have a microphone. Now that you've said that, I'm going to be watching you. I'm going to be popping out of the toilet like the skibbity meme that the children look at. But the thing that frustrates me is they want this world where they can burn as much money as possible, but also the biggest of them can print money, print so much money, more money than any company should have while also providing less services.

29:25And it's just, how is it, how do they not want to be the company that just makes more money than they spend, that people like? And is it just that they don't give a shit? Is it Sundar Peshai and his ilk just don't care? Well, I think that what you're looking for, the phrase you're looking for here is what Lena Kahn calls too big to care, right? If you think back to the moral philosophers of capitalism who were writing at the time of the Luddite uprisings, and they were saying, look, the thing that a profit-driven economy as opposed to a rent-driven economy will get us is a world in which instead of the Lord knowing that the peasants will have to bring in the harvest every year because they're legally obliged to, they can't leave the land, the capitalist will have to mobilize capital, bring free labor into contact with it, alienate them from the surplus of that labor and watch over their shoulder all the time for someone who shows up with a better machine, a better process, a better pitch for their workers.

30:25You know, if you own the building that a coffee shop is in and that coffee shop goes bankrupt because a better coffee shop is just open across the street, you're fine. Actually, you're great because now you have an empty storefront you could rent on the same block as this new hot coffee shop, right? If you own the coffee shop, if you're the capitalist as opposed to the rentier, you're fucked. And so every capitalist aspires to being a Rontier, right? They don't want to operate in an environment in which they're like the fastest gun in the West, who's always waiting for that kid to show up and say, draw.

30:57Brian, actually, bridging off of that as well, I think it's time to actually ask you just a very basic, what did the Luddites actually ask for? Because I've heard people who do not like this theory and people who do, but explain for the listeners, because you hear this phrase Luddism mentioned quite a lot. Yeah, well, you know, So there's no enduring Luddite manifesto that where all the Luddites and the people who were out on the streets who were part of the campaign of the 1810s who were organizing basically against this new sort of – this new class of entrepreneur that was rising up to basically exploit their labor, to use machinery, to divide labor, to use children.

31:42run it and to sort of may force them to compete and to sort of and to drive down their wages. So they are against the Luddites are basically against all that. They were truly a they were in many ways, you know, a reactionary force. They had their back against the wall. They weren't a proactive political party or anything like that. So you can't necessarily say every Luddite believe this or this is what they wanted. But there are a number of things that are clear about what they were that what they were seeking. And you can really boil it down to basically a seat at the table. This was a profoundly anti-democratic way to develop and deploy technology that they were experiencing.

32:24And they went to great lengths even before they became Luddites to point this out. They went to parliament and said, these new machines are being bought up by this new rising class of capitalists. They are being staffed by either migrant workers or children or precarious workers. Napoleonic war orphans. Right, exactly. They literally would pipe in orphans from London into these factories to staff them and they wouldn't pay them until they turned 18. And so the Luddites or the people who became Luddites would point this out and they would ask for some very basic, very common sense reforms, asking for minimum wages, protections from fraud.

33:05And that went on for 10 years and they got laughed out of parliament time and time again until any regulations that did govern the trade were thrown up altogether. And so when the Luddites become Luddites, they're basically protesting all of the above. The fact that this was a profoundly undemocratic process, that they are being forced to either succumb, to either go work in the factories or to find it and give up, which wasn't an option, by the way. This isn't a diverse economy of, you know, that we recognize today. Learn to code. Right, exactly. You can't even learn to code. You grew up in a weaving town.

33:43Guess what? Your jobs are pretty limited to weaving. So these are people who are remarkably at sort of the whims of the market and when the market was as poor as it was and these capitalists were in control of it to the extent that they were, they tried. They tried to reason with a lot of these factory owners. They tried before it came to what it came to when they sort of organized this guerrilla rebellion that was incredibly popular. This was the new Robin Hood movement basically. And what they wanted was, yeah, a seat at the table. They opposed the machinery hurtful to commonality. That was a line in the letters.

34:22It almost seems like it wasn't because the common misunderstanding of Luddism is that they just wanted to destroy the machines because they didn't like them. And it sounds like, I don't know, if the market forces would have given a seat at the table for the workers, they might not have fucking resented them. Yeah, I heard Corey make this observation too. Again, if someone had come to town with the machine and said, all right, let's figure this out. Let's get together. Like, how can we all benefit from this machine? I saw it over there. I bet the whole town could really benefit from having access to this machine that makes our working lives a little bit easier.

34:52Maybe we can make the machine better if we talk to the people who'd use it. Yeah. Maybe we can all make a little bit more money together. You still have your – if you're the merchant capitalist who was – before was kind of the middleman in charge of distribution, maybe this will make you more money too. But it didn't work like that. It always developed where either somebody would come in from out of town with a lot of money and set up something truly enormous or a factory owner would recognize or a prospective factory owner would recognize the capacity, the productive capacity of these new machines and then try to build them for personal gain.

35:31And this whole process really was deeply conflicting to the vast majority of factory owners too because they saw a handful of people using the machines this way in a way that then at the time was very clearly corrosive to the social contract. If you have one person saying, I'm going to use this machine. I'm going to hire kids to run it. I'm going to sort of profit as much as I can, drive prices as low as I can to get these guys. You're fucking up the entire town economy. You're fucking over your neighbors. It's a disgusting thing to do. And you were hated for it. So the people who did it were willing to be hated.

36:04They were willing – they were the ones who were willing to take that ire. And few were – and a lot of – some people walked away from the trade rather than automate their machines. And some sided with the Luddites and were quietly kind of like cheering, like, yeah, go smash those guys' factories. But by and large, who did the state – once the state threw its lot in with the factory and backed them up with arms and with punitive policies, it was pretty clear how it was going to work. I want to point out two things that I think are really important that Brian omitted here. The first one is that Brian wrote the definitive book about this.

36:39It's called Blood in the Machine. You should read it. It's very good. And the second one, which I think you just skipped over maybe too quickly, is that they already had the legal right to a seat at the table. They did, yeah. There were laws in Parliament that gave them that right. The firms involved were moving fast and breaking things. And the Luddites went to parliament and said, we would like the law obeyed, right? And this is an early example of Wilhoyt's law, you know, that capitalism consists of exactly, or conservatism consists of exactly one proposition that there should be powerful people whom the law protects but does not bind and everyone else whom the law binds but does not protect.

37:18And this is what the Luddites were actually, you know, the thing that drove them into the streets was they watched these people effectively stealing from them and parliament going along with it. And they were like, well, I guess we just got to do some self-defense here. And I think you can draw a direct fucking line from this. From Luddites to people who would call someone like me or someone better like Molly White a cynic. And I think it's this thing where what people, like everyone at this table, Molly White, David Gerard, when talking about cryptocurrency, Gary Marcus, when talking about AI, Roger McNamee, when talking about everything, these people are not cynics or critics.

38:01I guess they are critics if you just frame any criticism as being a critic. What they're doing is saying, hey, can we apply very basic fucking societal structure to this stuff that is thieving, that is burning things? hey, do we want this thing that seems to enrich, in the case of cryptocurrency, a very small and shadowy group? And the ones who aren't shadowy are very annoying. And these people like the Winklevosses, who lost a billion dollars of their customers' money, that's fine. But when you talk about this stuff, well, you just don't like technology. You just don't want progress. Motherfucker, none of this is progress.

38:38From the very beginning, this was the goal. It was clear to anybody in 1812 when the Luddite movement was at its apex that this was a popular movement, that people were coming out in the streets to cheer the Luddites, not the factory owners, because they felt solidarity with them. Because they saw the shape that industrial capitalism was taking. They knew who the winners were going to be. They knew who the losers were going to be. And they cheered the Luddites on. And so when the state comes out and it has to sort of make its case against the Luddite, it has to demonize the Luddites. It has to try to win, and it does so again by frame-breaking a capital offense.

39:15You break a machine. You can get killed. You can get hung. Oath-taking too, right? Oath-taking too. Saying that you were a Luddite became a hangable offense. You could get hung. That's why there's no real records left of sort of their meeting minutes or any letters between. There's very few and far between. Classic union busting. Yeah, classic. And then they mobilize troops. There's more troops in England fighting the Luddites than there were fighting Napoleon. They brought them back from the front, right? They brought them back from France to fight the Luddites. The tens of thousands at one point.

39:46So you could literally see – you could see the lines drawn sort of as industrialization was very literally almost a civil war. And the state's making the case against the Luddites. And it's the propaganda. You can call it that. It's propaganda at the time. And it's proclamations and it's declarations. It's casting the Luddites as backwards looking, as deluded, as malcontent under the – they must be – they're smashing the thing that's part of their job. Yeah, they're smashing – this form of criticism is already there. So when the Luddites do lose, when they are hung en masse, that language is used in the trial against them.

40:30And we can see why, because the state needs to have this enemy. They have to be able to paint this portrait as anybody who's against the shape that technological development is taking. Anyone who's criticizing any element of that, like, wait, are there too many losers or winners? No, shut up. You're a Luddite. Get out. Stand down or we will hang you. And I think that this is a really I'm so glad you went into this specific thing because it really feels like now. Now, I don't know if the state is, I think the state's laziness is more like a lack of focus is the problem. It's not that the administrations are being like people who don't like AI are stupid or people who don't like crypto.

41:11They're just like, I don't really get this. These people got so much money and I love money. I love getting paid. I love being lobbied. This is great. So I'm going to go with the guys with the money versus the fact that I think that actually the optimists, I don't just mean Andreessen or Bajali. I mean the AI fantasists, all these people who claim that if you're against AI, well, you don't care about progress. I actually have a counterpoint, which is they are against progress. They don't want anything new to happen. They want whatever money, they want the next Google. And when I say the next Google, I don't mean Google search.

41:45I mean the giant monopolistic entity that just spits, like, eats people and shits out money. And I'm just going to put it bluntly. They, they are the cynics. They are the pessimists. Posimists, like the scale AI guy, like all of these people who go around saying, well, if you don't believe, we need to do this. We need to train as much as possible. That's what the future likes. Like, fuck no. These people don't care about tech. Can I – I'll give you a little gloss on this from Mal Souter. Please do. Who's very smart about this and who was the first person to point this out that I encountered, which is that AI and indeed all statistical methods of prediction are intrinsically conservative.

42:26because if what you're doing is predicting what should happen next based on what already happened, what you're doing is you're driving a future that looked like the past. So think of it this way, right? You pick up your distraction rectangle and you type hey, and then it finishes it with darling because that's what you type every time. That's what I call my clients. You might want to type hey, asshole, but it wants you to type hey, darling, right? And now if you type something you've never typed before, it's going to pick the thing that most people say, right? So you're going to get either the statistically average version of who you used to be or the statistically average version of who everyone is.

43:01There is something intrinsically and inseparably conservative about the project of making the future look like the past. Now, I want to mention something that, again, I learned from Brian's very excellent book, Blood and the Machine, which is that Frankenstein was a Luddite novel and was widely understood as a Luddite novel. It's a cautionary tale about what happens when an entrepreneur gets to build a machine without talking to his neighbors about what it should do. And it was really widely understood as this. And the irony here, and I say this as a fully paid up member of the Science Fiction Writers of America and a science fiction novelist.

43:36The irony here is how many of these torment nexus building weirdos read cyberpunk as a suggestion instead of a warning and defend what they're doing as carrying on the visionary tradition of science fiction. The first science fiction novel ever was Frankenstein, and it was a novel about why you shouldn't just build whatever goddamn machine you feel like building. What I like about the Ready Player One one, first of all, one of the worst books ever written in my life. Oh, be nice to Ernie. I think that book is fun. Respectfully, no. I think that book is very fun. I believe it is. We are not going to turn this into a debate on that book.

44:17Sure. I'm getting in so much trouble. Ernie, I like your book. Ernie, come on the show. You'll kill me. But the thing is with that is that book is not a positive book. No. Nothing about that story feels good. But also the central plot is this shantytown this child escapes from every day. and then using his distractions from his terrible life, he is able to decode the thoughts of a deeply troubled, mentally unwell man as he is chased by greedy people who don't really care about any of it. And all of them are obsessed with not the interest in the stuff, but the existence of the stuff. And Mark Zuckerberg sees something and goes, that's actually the single best I'm going to build this.

45:03That's just what Corey was just talking about, right? It speaks to the conservatism of a lot of these tech gen. Once they've built a company that's big enough to where you're casting around for your next thing because you don't actually want to do any real innovating yourself, you outsource it to a sci-fi novel. That's why we've seen this sort of generation of sort of wish lists from cyberpunk, from the metaverse. I mean, that was just Mark Zuckerberg saying, hey, yeah, let's – my next thing is the metaverse. Then that comes from Neil Stamson. Your future is being a legless, sexless, low-polygon, heavily surveilled cartoon character in a virtual world I stole from a 25-year-old dystopian cyberpunk novel.

45:45Exactly. Elon Musk, the Cybertruck. That's from Blade Runner for some reason. It's from Blade Runner, which is epic and based. Or now OpenAI, which says, oh, you know, it's going to be like Her, the movie Her. They're just saying like that. Right. Like that. That's sort of the extent of the imagination at work here. And I do think that that is like an inherently sort of conservative and restrictive way to operate. And it's – we're seeing the limits of it now. I don't even know if they actually want to build these products or if they just want to win a hype cycle and sort of get – it's a way that they can get people to talk about it.

46:21I just want to call out that Ed's Elon Musk is eerily similar to FW to Clark. Well, if you're a legless, formless creature, you feel your life's restricted, perhaps you could check out one of the following products. And I guarantee you, the following products will not in any way embarrass me, have some kind of almost ironic connotation with what they run. So please enjoy the following ad.

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49:19So today's show is brought to you with support from Square, who I really love. They offer quick payment processing, really easy to use terminals. Everything spins up really quickly. Every store I use them in, I don't really think about the experience, which is exactly what I want from any kind of tech. The loyalty programs work really easily. They're over at Court Street Grocers, S &P, Van Leeuwen Ice Cream. They're just a very easy to use and straightforward piece of tech. I can't recommend them enough. I've heard great things from businesses using them, and as a customer, never upset to see them in a store.

49:50Square keeps up so you don't have to slow down. Get everything you need to run and grow your business without any long-term commitments. And why wait? Right now, you can get up to$200 off Square hardware at square.com slash go slash better offline. That's S-Q-U-A-R-E dot com slash G-O slash better offline. run your business smarter with square get started today and we're back so i think it's funny you brought that up brian where it's like it's not even obvious that they care about what they're building it's not even about the stuff anymore and when i look at a company like google or microsoft what do they do like if you really sit down and say what does google do what does microsoft do You can look at Apple and say they make consumer electronics.

50:42That's fairly, I think that that's a fair thing. They make laptops, they make phones. You use them and sometimes they force you into an abusive system called the App Store. But nevertheless, you can tell what they do. Google and Microsoft are like holding companies. They're private equity firms that have no formal shape. Because this whole week I've been sitting down and reading about something we will get to in a minute, which is how OpenAI can compete with Google search. By the way, they cannot. It's impossible. It's actually impossible. But it just feels that it's not that they don't have focus, it's that they can't have focus.

51:18That there's simply nothing, they can't make anything anymore. They can make more similar stuff. But when was the last time Google came up with something truly innovative? Yeah, I mean, it's, you can kind of tell by the rush and its desperation to sort of build some sort of an AI product that can work or that can at least capture some attention. Because it's not, I mean, it's not this overview AI thing that they rushed out the door and were just ruthlessly and widely and deservedly mocked for making. It does, you know, it's not even clear, I think, to anybody how that serves Google's bottom line.

51:54If anything, it loses the money. It loses the money because they have ostensibly this remarkably potent revenue generator in terms of Google search. I mean that's the only real answer to your question I think. What does Google do? It runs a search engine that it has gotten tired of running or its backers and partners have gotten tired of running or people are convinced that it's no longer the future and that it's not going to be useful to anybody. But I mean, to me, the search engine is still far superior than to using a chat GPT or any generative AI product that I've come across yet. And it's, you know, it's the talent, as I understand it from Google has has been shifted away from running the search operation, the search department.

52:40Now it's all on on AI, which is, again, this nebulous form that I don't even think it's not like Google. Google sounded famously this red alert that said all hands, like, we got to catch up to open AI. We got to figure out a way to make this happen. And we just see this sputtering, all these little false starts and turds rolled off into the internet that are more mocked than used and certainly not profitable. I want to try and make the heroic case for Google, which is a tough case to make. Go for it. I'm going to make it. So Google, I think, you said when was the last time Google made something truly innovative?

53:16I think it was 25 years ago. Google has not made a successful product since Search. They've bought a lot of successful products. They bought their mobile stack. They bought their ad tech stack. They bought videos. You could argue like Go, for example. Wasn't Go fairly recent, their coding language? Their programming language, sure. So I'm getting to that. They bought YouTube, right? Yeah, they bought YouTube. They bought YouTube after Google videos failed. So they made a video platform that didn't work, and they bought one that did. Great. They bought their ad tech stack. they bought their customer service they bought docs they bought collaboration they bought maps they bought all of it sorry my actual ignorance here where did they buy docs from who's who's i forget it was a company it was a no but that's that's something like i feel like i'm fairly well versed in tech it was a startup i thought they built no no they didn't build they so like depending on how on on how you want to parse it right because you have things like um their hot mail clone which was very successful uh you know gmail yeah yeah right but it's it's a they made that in-house they didn't buy that from someone however it's a clone of hotmail right sure uh and so they have these these products but what they did for these products and and and this is the heroic part the part where i'm going to be bend over backwards to be fair to them there we go is they know they scaled them and they made them reliable right that's crazy and look one of the things that we critique capitalism for is that it is under-invest in maintenance, it under-invest in infrastructure, it under-invest in what we could broadly call care work.

54:46And at its best, what Google did was in a kind of patrician way, became a serial acquirer of nascent competitors that didn't necessarily extinguish those competitors, although they did in some cases. But what primarily they did was they scaled them up to utility scale, and then they maintained them to a very high degree of reliability. Now, I think that if you want to understand Google's internal culture, and I think you did a good job talking about it when we wrote that the man who killed Google, is that it's a distinction between people who want to do care work and people who want to do rent seeking.

55:23And so, you know, there's a version of even keyword advertising that I think we can tell a heroic story about, right? If you are a novelist and you've written a science fiction novel and it's like a novel by someone else, right, it's comparable to it, then you could buy the ad word. And you could say, when someone searches for Neil Stevenson, launch this guy's career by saying, at the top, having one little ad slot that's like, have you read so-and-so's? It's the foundation of the good bits of capitalism, if you can call it, like the honest marketing. Sure. Like, we're like this, You like this.

55:59You might like this. Yeah, yeah. And so there's a lot, you know, being able to reach into these niches. This is also a thing that Facebook has done quite well. And, you know, when Facebook has defenders, they are often small business people who could not address a market without fine-grained targeting. Right. Now, that fine-grained targeting needn't be behavioral. It could be content-based, right? You could target, if you want to target plus-size cheerleaders, you could find the Facebook group for plus-size cheerleaders and sell your uniforms to them. And I'm sure that there are a bunch of people who are plus-size cheerleaders who are really pissed that the uniforms for plus-size cheerleaders suck and who'd be really great to see those ads.

56:36Right. You don't have to spy on them. You don't have to follow them into the bathroom. You don't need to know who they are. Yeah. But that's what they've done at their best, right? And the rent seekers just want to make money by providing as little to everyone else as they can and taking as much in as they can. They want to own a factor of production and they want to be insulated from the risk because other people who produce useful things will have to license or buy that factor of production from them in order to do the useful thing. But whether or not they do the useful thing or not, like think of NVIDIA, right?

57:09Nvidia selling video cards to people who are going to go out of business. That doesn't matter to Nvidia. Nvidia gets a stake in it. Think about Unity, right? Who said, oh, we're not just going to sell you the dev tools to make your video game. If your video game succeeds, we're going to get a royalty for every game you share, right? And they called it shared success. Now, note that this rhetoric of shared success is not the rhetoric of shared risk. Kind of like a parasite shares your success. That's right. Yeah. You know, shared risk, right? Shared risk, shared reward makes a certain degree of sense.

57:45If they're saying, okay, well, I'll tell you what, we've got a deal where we will give you discounted or free tools and development money and whatever. We'll invest in your company. Right. And as a form of shared success, and we will also take a shared risk in your failure. That's a very different matter. Yeah, because shared risk is inherent to actual shared success. We are taking a risk. But it's almost, I think this keeps coming back to basic evolution, Darwinism, probably two different things. Now, I did not do well in science, but nevertheless, I'll get around to this. There are no predators for these people anymore.

58:21There's nothing they're afraid of. No discipline. Like there's the cartel thing is they don't want, they want everyone to stay the same. So they know who they're looking at every day. We can bark bark anyone out of the area if we don't like them. We can make growing difficult. We know the venture capitalists. We know the commercial real estate owners. We know the people in government office. We can make this really difficult and really easy for us. But also, it feels like we need predators in the tech industry and not the kind who worked at Google like Andy Rubin. And I think – well, as long as you have a company, I mean, that has any degree of success or that becomes as big as Google does, I think just like the base logics of capitalism are going to mean that you do – you grow the number of people who are the rent seekers and who are interested in protecting those revenue streams at any cost.

59:15And the halo of a company like Google may dim. It's still kind of extant. I just wrote this article about a former Google privacy engineer named Tim Libert who was a big security and privacy guy in the academic field. He went to Penn. He did a time at Oxford and he was a professor at Carnegie. And he really was really a big critic of Google. And then Google hired him and he agreed to go because he thought this – well, all the things that I'm talking about, all the things that I want to fix, Google is the largest purveyor of these issues of privacy. He looks at cookies and the way that Google tracks your data.

59:59So he figured if I'm going to have a shot at fixing this, I'm just going to go into the mothership. And sure enough, the way that he describes it to me is his job was split between two basic tasks. One, he's talking to other younger hires who still kind of believe in the idea of a technology and a service that can really help and serve people and who want to try to make sure that Google meets its privacy commitments and is in line with the law. And then he would go into the meetings with the executives and management. And they would spend most of the time telling him why they couldn't do all the things that he and all of the people who are actually working in the trenches at Google wanted to do.

1:00:42and it just became this two year long clash of well there's this privacy law don't we we have the tools and the capabilities to fix it do what don't we want to do it and he's in a and then butting up against management why would we do why would we do that that would it's we would we could it would be easier just to like pay the fines as they come than to actually a fine as a price and they need to i feel like they really need to change the fines so they scale sure or here's my other theory and daron samoglu said this as well i'm gonna take it a step well laterally put them in jail and i'm only kind of kidding i mean if for example the crowd strike situation i brought this up on the last better off live as well satire nadella should be looking at potential jail time or the kurt ceo of crowd strike should be jail time or personal liability if you work for a public company with excess revenue of blah blah and you make it so that they can't just do stock splits or some weird shit so they get away with it, including stock revenue, you should potentially forfeit like tens of percent.

1:01:44And it's funny that you say this because the other part of the story is Tim built this system called Web X-Ray that can search for every privacy violation that a company is committing on the web. And the idea is to make it into like sort of an assembly line for class action lawsuits and for lawsuits. So you can say, OK, you know, maybe Google – maybe people emailing Google and saying, hey, you're in violation of Germany's new privacy law. Can you please address this? isn't really, but if you can say, okay, boom, here's a search engine that can show you exactly how many times a minute or an hour it's violating these laws that are on the books that have costs attached to them, then maybe you can sort of, so there are people sort of like fighting against this.

1:02:28This is maybe a good time to talk about the structure of regulation and how, what regulations work and which ones don't and why and so on. So one of the key things to understand about regulation is that a regulation that's hard to administer will be administered less. Right. Right. So if you make a rule, for example, that says if you're a platform that competes with the platform users, so you're Amazon, you sell your own goods, but you also sell goods by your competitors. As a fairness requirement, you must put the best match for the user search at the top and not just your own product. So this is what's called a ban on self-preferencing.

1:03:07The problem is, to administer that, you have to be able to kind of peer into the mind of the Amazon executive who decided to put the Amazon product at the top of the search. Because if they believe that they made the best product, then they haven't violated the rule. And I was going to say, it feels like the word best is the problem there. Right. So best is, it's a very difficult thing to discover. Moreover, if you have a sincere but incorrect belief about what's best because we're really good at talking ourselves into thinking that, you know, with the stuff we make is good. And being empathetic, maybe you truly have seen more of this thing being built.

1:03:45Like you know more about it. That's what they'd say. Yeah. So you might have a good reason to do it and you still might be wrong. So as an administrative matter, figuring out whether or not someone is self-preferencing is really hard. Now, this isn't the first time this has come up. When the Sherman Act was passed in 1890, the first antitrust law in the United States, self-preferencing was a huge problem because you had railroads that owned freight companies. And they competed with the freight that they shipped, right? You had banks that hadn't been split where you had retail and investment. So you had banks that loaned money to local businesses and owned local businesses that competed with their debtors, right?

1:04:21And so we didn't create a rule that says, okay, you must treat everyone fairly because determining the fairness was too hard. What we said is you have to be structurally separated. You either are a bank or you're an investor, but you can't be in a bank that invests. You are either a railroad or you're a freight company, but you can't be a railroad that owns a freight company. This is called structural separation. And the thing is you do lose some efficiencies. Maybe there's some cool things you can do with vertical integration, but what you get is administratable rule because I can tell really easily whether a railroad owns a freight company.

1:05:00I can't tell whether they're dealing with it fairly, but it's really, you can, from orbit, you can figure out whether a railroad owns a freight company. So just imagine you're a dumbass. Look at me. It should be pretty easy. Why has this not been done with, I don't know, Microsoft and OpenAI, for example? So this is very interesting. So think about the ad tech platforms. Ad tech, it splits into three pieces. you have a demand-side platform, a sell-side platform, and a marketplace. So the demand-side platform represents advertisers. The sell-side platform represents publishers who have places where the advertisers can place an ad.

1:05:35And the marketplace is where the agents for them gather together to bid. And so when you land on a webpage, that lag before it loads, that surveillance lag, is all of these little auctions taking place where someone says, you know, I have an 18 to 34-year-old manchild from Queens who has been recently searching for gonorrhea and owns an Xbox. Who will pay to advertise to them, and how much will you pay, right? And so there's this little thing going on in the background. Okay. So Google and Facebook each own a demand-side platform, a sell-side platform, and a marketplace. And moreover, they have rigged the game so that if you use one part of it, you pretty much have to use the other parts.

1:06:12And they're both publishers and they're both advertisers. Then how does that be going? So 51 % of every advertising dollar goes into Google and Facebook. Sick. The historic share for all intermediaries in advertising supported media was 15%. So they've tripled the share for intermediaries in this. So this is like if you and your partner were getting divorced and you showed up and you realized you both had the same lawyer who was also the judge, who was also trying to match with both of you on Tinder. And then after the divorce was settled, you discover that you didn't get the house. Your partner didn't get the house.

1:06:46The lawyer got the house. This is the thing. So last year, we had a bill introduced in Congress called the America Act. And one of the great tragedies of American politics is our brightest political science graduates go to work in the Senate where all they do is come up with acronyms for acts. And so, you know, the America Act stands for something like – Only stock us. A is for America, the country that I love. M is for motherhood, the value I admire. So the America Act says to the ad tech platforms, you have to split. You have to be structurally separated. You can represent sellers. You can represent buyers.

1:07:19You can be a marketplace, but you can't be all three. And the two main co-sponsors of the America Act were Elizabeth Warren and Ted Cruz. Wow. That is a pretty bipartisan bill because even someone as terrible as Ted Cruz can look at an arrangement in which someone represents the buyer, the seller, and is the marketplace and is capturing 300 % of the traditional share for representatives who perform this function and say, this market cannot be fixed with a code of conduct. This market can only be fixed structurally. Or at least recognizes the politics of taking on big tech, right, as something that is applicable to his constituents, right?

1:08:00Because I think, you know, I don't know that most of his, most Texans might necessarily care about all that, but they do care about fairness. They do care about the fact that big tech has gotten so powerful. It is really interesting how we've come to the place where it has become a truly bipartisan sort of coded man. But what happened to that? Look, nothing moved out of the Senate last year. So it doesn't mean it's dead, though. It's sunk into the abyss. So how do we move this shit forward? Like, to the real meat of it, what do we do? How do, like, maybe it's not us. And my editor, Matt Hughes, he suggested an idea.

1:08:36I can't do this because it would make me moderately corrupt. But I'm just saying, American software patents, right? They're extremely, and Matt, this is Matt's idea, you can there are a lot of patents you can file patents for anything I'm not saying you do this in fact I know a lot of my listeners right now you're holding up a drugstore you're working on a new kind of tasteless poison and you're just regular stealing it's a Friday it's an easy day for you here's an idea surely someone could just anticipate the things that open AI was going to do in the future and just start filing patents and then use those patents to mire them in endless lawsuits, bullshit lawsuits.

1:09:15Not saying they should do that, but if you're not doing that, how do we actually break these people up? Is there a way for regular people to contribute towards this actual change? Because it feels like relying on the government is the problem. Well, let me tell you a story. Let me tell you a story. I don't mean that in like the, by the way, the anarchic, like we can't rely on the government. It doesn't seem like the weapons of government are works. Let me tell you a story about a man who was in the wilderness, a man who had ideas that everybody thought were crazy, a man called Milton Friedman.

1:09:48Oh, Christ. In the 1960s, Milton Friedman had this idea that all of the gains of the Great Society and the New Deal should be rolled back. So there are problems with the New Deal and the Great Society. They excluded black people. They excluded gay people. They excluded women to a large extent and so on. That wasn't Milton Friedman's problem with it. Milton Friedman's problem with it was who it included, not who it excluded. And he was like, we need more forelock-tugging plebs, right? Like, you shouldn't expect to have a dignified retirement. You shouldn't expect that your children will go to school for free and so on.

1:10:16And people would say, Milton, people like that shit. How are you going to make that shit happen? And he would say that in times of crisis, ideas can move from the periphery to the center. So our job is to keep ideas lying around so that when the crisis arises, we can move them into the center. And that crisis was the oil crisis of the 1970s. So I like to quote Milton Friedman because I like to imagine that he looks up from that spit that's protruding from his mouth and gargles a curse as he hears his words. Him and Jack Welch. Yeah. And, you know, the demons laugh and they throw more molten shit on his naked body.

1:10:51But, you know, if there's one thing that Milton Friedman has bequeathed us besides this theory of change, it's an abundance of crises. Right. Right. We have so many foreseeable crises on our horizon. Crises of technology, climate crises, economic crises, legitimacy crises for the Supreme Court, and so on. And having these ideas lying around, like being part of a group of people who say, look, right now this is impossible. But this is like just because it's hard, it doesn't mean that we should do something easier if it won't work. You don't look for your keys under the lamppost. I get it. If you wanted to get there, I wouldn't start from here.

1:11:30But this is the thing we have to do. And if we keep talking about the thing we have to do, then when the crisis comes and someone says, Jesus Christ, we've got to do something. Here we are. We can say here's the thing we have to do. So it starts with breaking them up then. I mean I think that that's – well, I think both Corey and I would probably agree that that's pretty high on the priority list. It makes a lot of things easier and it would make a lot of things better. And it's something that's also within sort of the realm of possibility for a lot of reasons. Again, that sort of – it might be a flimsy bipartisanship right now, but it is a bipartisanship nominally.

1:12:03And so it's something that's actually sort of more imaginable than a lot of other goals might be. It's happened before. Bell systems. Yeah. And I think there's a lot that you can do. I think there's – as we've seen the tech industry sort of is wealth concentrate and it sort of calcify and each of those things that Corey mentioned earlier on gets sealed off to most people. Well, you see more anger and you see an industry that doesn't historically have a lot of interest in organizing or in sort of activism becoming much more so. So I think that is another area that's ripe for action. You probably have a lot of listeners who are in the tech industry or related to the tech industry.

1:12:47And currently underneath cars outside Google. The mechanics might be. Yeah, they're doing mechanics, right? Yeah, they might already be unionized. But they should. But organizing, I think, is a really, really ripe area where you can really start to move the needle. Could software developers actually unionize? Yeah. 100%. They can. So when I – one of my organizing efforts, I was at Medium and Medium was – at the time, they've since jettisoned all of their editorial employees like me. So there's none of those left. They've done that like three times as well. Yeah, that was – I think it's the last time.

1:13:23The third wave. It's like coral bleaching. Yeah, they just launch them out of a cannon every once in a while. But it was half editorial and half tech and there was genuine and really sort of animated interest in organizing and we got so close. We got within one vote and it wasn't – for them, it wasn't about – I'm sure they wanted their salaries to be a little bit higher or whatever. But that wasn't the driving, motivating factor. It was they didn't like a lot of the direction that Medium was going. They didn't like a lot of the policies that Medium had. They didn't like a lot of, you know, what the founder, the power that the founder had to wield over the entire platform.

1:14:08And organizing is one way to sort of claw back some of that power. I mean, in some cases, it's almost like when you have a weird situation like Meta with Zuckerberg atop as like the boy king who is just going to rule that forever barring some. Unfireable. Right, exactly. Exactly. But most tech companies are not like that. And you can begin to sort of wield more influence internally if you join some of those efforts. There's a lot of great unions and organizers working in that space right now. So that's just one thing that you can start to get involved in. Yeah. Let me say, you said, can we do this?

1:14:43And you said, we have to break them up. Well, like the thing that stops us from unionizing is also the thing that stops us from breaking them up, which is that they're powerful. And so the reason that we practiced antitrust law the way we did until the Carter administration was not just because we wanted to preserve choice or competition. It was because when companies get too big to fail, they become too big to jail, right? Once a company is more powerful than the government. IBM was sued for antitrust violations from 1970 to 1982. And every year for 12 consecutive years, they spent more on lawyers to fight the DOJ antitrust division than all of the lawyers at the DOJ antitrust division cost combined.

1:15:16combined for all antitrust cases in America for 12 consecutive years. And there's no way to limit their ability to fight back as well, because that would be undemocratic. So once they're a monopoly, right, then the best time to stop monopoly forming is... But look, before there is a law, there must be a crime. You know, Lenny Bruce points out that if we have a law against fucking chickens, someone must have fucked a chicken at some point, right? So before we had antitrust... Average bit offline, listener. Before we had antitrust law, we had monopolists. Right. Right. That's where we got the antitrust law from.

1:15:49And specifically, we had monopolists like John D. Rockefeller, who was still the richest man that ever lived, the most powerful, the most ruthless, terrible piece of shit. And we brought him low. And like the way that we did it, it happened in living memory. It was like 1912. So there's people alive today who are mentored by the people who did it. right? And then there's people alive today who are those people's mentors who are still working and still on the job, right? It's not like embalming pharaohs. It's not a lost art from a fallen civilization. It's a thing we know how to do. And yeah, like breaking up - How did we bring him low though?

1:16:21Ha! It's a great story. It's a woman called Ida Tarbell. She was the first woman in America to get an undergraduate science degree. She was trained as a biologist. Sick. She was the daughter of a Pennsylvania oil man who was destroyed by the Standard Oil Trust. And she went to work for Collier's, which was the biggest magazine in America at the time, or one of the biggest. And she serialized a two-volume muckraking history that pitilessly laid out exactly how the John D. Rockefeller scam worked. It had a very good title. She called it The History of the Standard Oil Company Volumes 1 and 2. It was super viral.

1:16:55And at the end of it, the inchoate political will that we'd had that said, like, something is really wrong, turned into a very sharp political will that said, we know how the scam works and we demand that something be done about it. And the Sherman Act, which had been hanging around for 20 years, finally was taken off the shelf and mobilized against John D. Rockefeller. And we brought him low. So this is, I'm so glad you brought up the story, which I just learned. First of all, I'm going to look at cool people who did cool stuff. if Maggie's not done that she needs to hear this and she then became a leading suffragist and was one of the greatest orators of American history she just first of all go I to Tarbell original poster yeah like genuinely like amazing but also I think this speaks to something I'm speaking to anyone who is a reporter who's listening to this right now there is this common sense that why are we doing this why are we cataloging this they're still going to do these things why bother and the answer is that fucking story.

1:17:53Hindenburg Research. I don't know if I agree with all their methods, but the fact is we need more people out there, and I do this too, where you don't necessarily write these fuckers are bad. They are. Write why and write in detail because it sounds like historically that actually eventually works. You know, there's a phrase out of the finance sector called MIGO. It stands for My Eyes Glaze Over. And it's the idea that if you make the prospectus thick enough, people will just assume that it's good because they can't possibly read it. Like the pile of shit that big must have a pony under it.

1:18:26Unraveling Migo, whether that's, you know, Margot Robbie in a bathtub explaining synthetic collateralized debt obligations or, you know, my last couple of novels, The Bezel and Red Team Blues are about explaining how real world private equity scams, cryptocurrency hustles and so on, how they work. Is, I think, the first step on the path to making people feel like they can see where the weak points are in this very large but very brittle edifice, and they can start go kicking at the weak point. Because I think that something, Google is very powerful. They have tens of billions of dollars, like$16 billion of profit every quarter.

1:19:02They are unbreakable by traditional means. However, they are also culturally weak. They are a patchwork of people who've been there two minutes and 20 years. They don't fire some people. Ben Gomes, the guy who ran Google search before, Prabhupada took over. They put him in the corner and SVP of education because they know if Ben left, he could very easily at least raise money to completely a real Google competitor. But the thing is, the asshole doesn't talk to the mouth or the elbow. There is no form. As they get bigger, they are weaker on some levels. And I think it's just something I'm doing with the show.

1:19:38And actually, both of you have done amazingly with your work, is breaking down these weak points, these pain points. Brian, you did the great thing about the Mechanical Turk, for example, how it's very similar to how generative AI works. And it's just, I think it's strange. I've heard, and I won't name names, but I've heard people kind of make the suggestion that, well, why? Why should we bother? Well, they're so powerful. And the answer is they're actually terrified of this. They do not want this. This is scary. Do it every day. Yeah. Look, I mean, again, We mentioned this earlier, but look how Google reacted when a single credible competitor entered the field.

1:20:17They ran around like chickens with their heads cut off and they scrambled to find a product. It was internal turmoil. It was – if anything, it wasn't the reaction of a company that is convinced of the power and security of its products and its placement in the marketplace. This was a company that is, as you were saying, pretty profoundly insecure and reliant on all these deals in order to maintain its position where it's paying out a great deal of money. I mean this – it seems to me more like a house of cards that could collapse if the right one is pulled out. And to add onto what Corey was saying, another work that I read while I was researching the Luddite book, which was one of the first efforts to sort of, quote, rescue the Luddites from condescension was E.P.

1:21:13Thompson's The Making of the English Working Class. And it tries to tell the story of like how did we get to the point where workers came together and said, wait a minute, we have enough power to actually drive some change. How did that – because it didn't exist before. How did workers start to see themselves as part of a class or have solidarity? and it's just filled with all of these examples of little fights that have otherwise been completely lost to history where people stood up for something and were crushed and then everybody forgot about it by and large. But the neighbors didn't forget.

1:21:51The local newspapermen didn't forget. The families didn't forget. They're recorded in oral histories. They form this tapestry. So I feel like it's always a bad idea to feel like nothing that we're doing matters or registers because it is and it can reverberate and it can echo and it can coalesce and it can snowball really quickly. And if things aren't really working out for you right now, if the crowbar won't get the ATM open, if even driving a car doesn't get into it, but you still have some leftover money, perhaps you could check out one of the following products. I think that this will solve probably every problem you've ever had.

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1:25:58So I want to bring up one way in which Google is unexpectedly weak, in which its strength is a weakness. and this is characteristic of all the big tech companies, which is that they do the same shitty thing everywhere, which means that if there's a case built against a tech company by a regulator in a big powerful country like the United States, all of those facts will be almost identical in much smaller countries like South Korea. We've actually seen this where cases against Apple for antitrust have been effectively recycled in South Korea and Japan and successfully so, right? So all of the world's governments are facing the same adversary.

1:26:37So even if these companies are bigger than most countries, they're not bigger than all the countries. When you say a shitty thing, what do you mean? Oh, you know, like Apple has this Dengeld system where they take 30 cents out of every dollar you spend on an app. And it's super anti-competitive. And they have all these ways that they block people from trying to circumvent it. And it lets them control certain markets. And it's just, it's illegal under most countries' systems of law. Here's a fun fact for you. After World War II, the American technocrats who went around and rebuilt the legal systems of Europe and Japan just basically copy-pasted American antitrust law.

1:27:13Oh, yeah. So, and here's another funny thing. They were keenly aware of how important monopolies were to the rise of fascism and the Axis powers. And so one of the things they did when they got to Germany and Japan and Italy was smash their monopolies. Because they said monopolies lead to fascism. But the thing is as well is monopolies are bad for everyone. It is a bipartisan issue. Roger McNamee, who I mentioned earlier, he was an early Facebook investor. Yeah. Really good friend of mine. He's wonderful. He really was like, I was talking to him about something I was writing. And I, within shittification, I did the rot economy, which is very similar.

1:27:49but I know my central failing in it and it was these monopolies and it's just this sense where you get these Sam Altman types who want the monopolies you get these Andreessen types want to invest in monopolies for the money but they're shitty businesses monopolies are like Google is probably is an incredible business but inevitably must die like this it's going to die eventually and fast or slow it must because eventually you run out of humans well I this is the problem amazon is facing right they keep uh looking at the rate at which they're burning out um warehouse workers and saying well all available semi-skilled workers will have worked at an amazon warehouse and no longer want to do so or have been permanently maimed by whatever originally was 2024 was their initial projection that was their clarion call that made them start uh investing more heavily in automation not in treating workers not in making it better to work there yeah no no not not in the slightest no just in in in uh adding more of that now i have a lot of lefty comrades who are skeptical of this anti-monopoly stuff.

1:28:52And they say, look, I don't want a million choices. I don't want to go to Amazon looking for a light bulb and find 10 million light bulbs. You already do. Right. Well, you do. Right. Exactly. Right. I want to go and like, I want to live in an orderly regulated world where I don't have to use the magic of the market to make sure that like my water isn't poison or that things aren't bad and so on. And there is something to that. And not everything has to be. We can have regulated monopolies. We can have state-owned utilities. Things like healthcare. Yeah, sure. There shouldn't be competition. A hundred percent.

1:29:23But the thing that competition gets you is not merely choice. It's a weak corporate sector. People really fail to understand this at their peril. Because although these companies appear to be at one another's throats, when you look more closely at it, they're really quite chummy. We've circled around this several times. Yeah. So, you know, Apple says, oh, we're the non-surveilling company and Google and Facebook are the bad ones. They surveil and we're so different from them. But Apple like puts a surveillance tap in the pocket of every iPhone owner by defaulting to Google. I mean, Apple wants to block surveillance unless they're getting paid for it.

1:30:03So they block Facebook surveillance but not Google surveillance. Yeah, they don't do ad tracking unless it's theirs. And they do their own surveillance, right? Google and Facebook allegedly are great adversaries in the ad tech sector, except they have this illegal collusive arrangement where they divided up ad tech like the Pope dividing up the new world called Jedi Blue. You have Sheryl Sandberg moving from one firm to the other. She was a Googler before she was at Facebook. And before that, McKinsey, and before that, Larry Summers' Department of Treasury. And Facebook is stuffed with ex-Apple people, and Apple is stuffed with ex-Facebook people.

1:30:34The way that you ascend through the ranks of a highly concentrated sector is through lateral moves because within the firms, there are no boxes on the org chart for you to rise up to. Either someone has to die or become disgraced. And so it's only when a firm seeks someone from outside that you can actually jump up the rank, which is why you see, for example, people from Disney jumping to Universal and people from Universal jumping to Disney to ascend the rank. Just to push back a little bit, isn't some of this just domain expertise, though? In the sense that that's why they're doing it? Sure.

1:31:09And this is another problem with regulation, is that when a sector becomes highly concentrated, the domain expertise is siloed within the firms that you're hoping to regulate. And there's a not wrong point that people make about the revolving door, which is that if a sector consists of five companies, then everyone who understands those companies works for one of them. So where else are you going to get a regulator, right? Of course they hire ex-Googlers. And at this point, you have people where you only really hire if they've worked at a big tech firm. Sure. Because that's the only way you will know how to work very similar machines.

1:31:40Although I'm speaking of regulators here, right? Oh, sorry. The reason the FCC is hiring ex-Comcast people, supposedly, is that who understands how the cable networks work, except for people who work for one of the two or three big cable operators, right? So there's a grain of truth to this. It's not entirely true, but there's a grain of truth to it. and the fix for it is not to let cable companies mark their own homework by parachuting their own people into the regulators. The fix is to make them small enough to be comprehensible, right? To make them small enough that outside parties can see what they're doing.

1:32:13But also a marketplace with tons of choices, it makes for a weaker corporate sector, but stronger companies, I would argue. Because if you make a good fucking product, you can win a market. And I realize that this is not a perfect system at all and that doesn't always happen but at least to some extent apple has dominated because they are imperfect and i know listeners i know you always say i'm not hard enough about apple i'm doing an app store episode it's so hard to write you want to write 5 000 words jesus fucking but the thing is with apple is they've done pretty well because they make good phone phone good laptop great like the laptops are great these are good pieces of tech that do the job well and yes they use monopolistic forces to keep where they are but it also feels like google's phone division they're like why does this never work and it's because it kind of like android phones are good but they've really why doesn't google try and pay for iMessage well they shouldn't they should actually really push rcs much harder but they don't push it that hard they could put a lot of more money behind rcs or try and find a way to work with i know it's coming in but it's like google doesn't really give a shit about android doing super well they just don't want Apple to have everything, I guess.

1:33:22It's so strange. It's hard to play criminology here, but I want to say that while competition is obviously imperfect, that in tech, we do have a kind of secret power. And you started this conversation by asking what excites us about tech. One of the things that excites me about tech is a kind of nerdy principle, which is that all computers are touring complete universal von Neum machines. They can all run every program, which means that any program running on a computer that you have, whether it's your pocket distraction rectangle, your laptop, or your game console, another program can run that modifies how it works so that it works for you and not someone else.

1:33:57Your printer can always take someone else's ink. Your car can always have its surveillance technology disabled and so on. And what that does is it means that with tech, you have this separate competitive capacity, which is the ability to compete by modifying existing technology, right? Like Lexmark used to be IBM's printer division. Right. And they made laser printers and there was a company out of, not Malaysia, Taiwan, that made refill kits for their toner cartridges. And the toner cartridge had a little crude microchip in it. This was in the early 2000s. This was when embedded systems were expensive and very primitive.

1:34:36It had a 64-byte program and when you used up all the toner in the cartridge, the 64-byte program would toggle a switch that said, I'm now an empty cartridge. And if you put more carbon powder in the cartridge, it wouldn't work because the cartridge told the printer it was empty. So Static reverse engineered this 64-by program, not very challenging. They made another chip and it reset it to one, right? I am a full cartridge. And when that happened, Lexmark sued them. And they sued them arguing that they had violated their copyright, that they bypassed an access control for copyrighted work, which is prohibited under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.

1:35:16And the judge at the time said, where is the copyrighted work? It's not the carbon in the printer cartridge. They said, no, it's the 64-byte program. They said, well, you know, 64-byte programs, software is copyrightable, but a 64-byte program isn't. It's not even a haiku. It doesn't rise to the level of complexity that attracts a new copyright. And so they threw the case out. Punchline, today Lexmark is a division of static controls, because they went from refilling the cartridges to buying the business. Ah. Right? So today, if you were to try and make that argument about HP, which has this disgusting habit of pushing out fake security updates that break your printer's ability to use third party ink.

1:35:57It breaks on its own. Sorry. That too. But if you were to do this and you were to go back to court and say, the program in the chip, in the chip in the cartridge that stops you from using third party ink doesn't rise to level of copyright ability. That's like a 26-cent system on a chip that's running a full Linux stack with, like, BusyBox and a network stack. You could probably attach a monitor to it if you wanted to, right? And, like, there's just no argument that that's not copyrightable. Now, with tech, if we could clear some of these rules that have been mobilized by big tech to block new market entry, to block reverse engineering, to block all this other stuff, we could do lots of things to compete.

1:36:34Like, the iPhone is a great platform for someone else to make an app store for, right? obsidia i was one of the like i was really into the homebrew community on iphone yeah and you know what some of it was broken as shit but you could do so many there were weird little things that connected the systems probably in ways that were extremely leaky but they would they were drowned in the water now geo hot makes weird autonomous car things that kind of work it's just yeah but you know if you remember in the early 2000s apple was dying because uh microsoft wouldn't make a functional version of Microsoft Office.

1:37:08Right. And the way Steve Jobs resolved that was not by begging Bill Gates to fix Office. He just had technologists at Apple reverse engineer Microsoft Office and make iWork, pages, numbers, and keynote that perfectly run Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. Now, it was janky at first because Microsoft kept cycling the file formats in order to break compatibility. But that hurt Microsoft more than it hurt Apple because Apple had their own internal file formats. Microsoft just had these file formats and they kept making them more obfuscated and complex. and then they had to support them all. So eventually Microsoft sued for peace and they standardized those file formats.

1:37:40That's where we get docx, pptx, xlsx. Those are the XML versions. And the reason you can copy and paste style text into a browser and then into LibreOffice and then into iWork and then back into Office is because they're all using this standard. If Apple could not use the courts to shut down something like Cydia and if they were required to just have hand-to-hand guerrilla warfare with Jay Freeman and his engineers, they would eventually sue for peace because they are fighting an asymmetric battle where they have to make no mistakes in the iPhone and Jay and Geohot just have to find one mistake they've made.

1:38:21And every time they do that, they have to go back to the draw. The IRA talking to Margaret Thatcher. We only need to be lucky once. Yeah. And it should be pointed out that Apple's in-house design. were watching what they were doing in those jailbroken systems. And a lot of the things that were really popular, they ported into iOS and future designs. You know, obviously not the interoperability or the things that would be more radical, but just like design flourishes and features. Like they were watching that community and taking notes from it. Every good designer starts by paving the desire path.

1:38:55And I mean, one of my favorite examples of this where, yeah, the courts would, I don't know how the courts would have gone in because this is video games, But the originals of World of Warcraft were from numerous forums, from numerous guilds. In EverQuest, there was a big thing with the Plane of Time, with the Shadows of Lukeland expansion. Anyone who knows this story, by the way, email me. I love you. Easy at betteroffline.com. But long story short, there was a massive bug with the final raid. And a bunch of people, for all being one of them, said, I'm fucking done with this game. This company doesn't give a shit.

1:39:23They can't even finish their goddamn work. It's disgusting. and Blizzard, who are now kind of horrible, thanks to Activision and Kotick and all them, said, huh, what if we just got all these high-level players and asked them, how would you like EverQuest to be better? What would a better MMO look like? World of Warcraft was an amazing MMO. I genuinely loved WoW at the beginning and to this day, I'm sure I've picked it up. And it does that because this crazy idea of we could really compete with pretty much the only successful Western MMO, with some exceptions, by taking the things they like and doing better at them, by iterating on their work and doing great things.

1:40:01If we could do that in tech, even the small examples we have in tech of that working are so good. I mean, Anchor being my favorite one, like they have gallium nitrate, they've managed to make shit really powerful and really small. And yeah, it's made every other battery manufacturer have to fucking compete. I'm sure they didn't do it first, but Anchor has made a successful business out of seeing other people's shit going, what if this was good? Let me make one more point about why user adaptability is good. It's not merely because it lets firms discover new ways of pleasing us or because it lets us make our lives easier.

1:40:40It's because when our technology doesn't work for us, it is often because the circumstances that we're in have changed for the worse. Right? Your printer, you need to get one more page out of your printer and it's really desperate and it won't print because it doesn't have any magenta in it, even though you're printing a black and white document. And the black and white document you're printing is the thing that you need to bring to the bail bondsman because your kid's just been arrested, right? The people who - Barrel of blindness again. The people who make the technology can never anticipate all the ways that the people who use the technology are going to need to use it.

1:41:10Right. Not just in the immediate future, but in the decades that will come afterwards, because this technology lives in our stack forever and ever. If you want to read an amazing document about how technology accretes, the British Library's postmortem on their ransomware attack, where they talk about how they were early adopters. And then because they could never shut down the system, they just put more and more layers on top of it. And each layer was a seam that could be exploited by ransomware creeps. It's one of the most important tech documents I've ever read. so you know when things are broken when people in the future are trying to maintain or adapt the things that you've made when the climate emergency hits and the power goes out or the internet is not available or not available continuously or a website that's supposed to be checked every time you launch for a license key goes down because there's been a big cyber attack or because crowd strike has gone down that is the moment where being able to change how your technology works is going to be the difference between success and failure, a good life and a bad life, sometimes life and death.

1:42:09And the hubris of thinking that you can anticipate all the ways that people are going to use it, all the bodies they'll be in, all the circumstances they'll live through, is so monumentally arrogant and reckless. And ultimately, although you may not always make the best decision about how the technology around you should work, that decision should still always vest with you. So as we wrap up here, I want to finish around generative AI. Brian, do you see any value? This is such an asshole question to end on, I realize. So we've got like 10 minutes, but like, do you see any value in this? I think this is a good thing to wrap.

1:42:51I think like a lot of the technologies that have kind of surfaced or have become fixations of Silicon Valley over the last five years as it's sort of cycled through the latest next big thing as its investors are desperate to find said big thing because it hasn't really had one in a while. I think, you know, generative AI has found a few more use cases than whatever, the metaverse or Web3 or crypto. So therefore, it's been a little bit stickier. And, you know, as a technology itself, Is there something interesting there? You know, yeah. Like I think that there's – we should be having researchers and developers looking into large language models and how to make them better and how to make them more interesting, seeing what they can and can't do by kicking the tires.

1:43:45Do we need every major tech company running massive data farms doing basically the same thing as the cost of energy and compute skyrockets? And a company that made video game chips as of two or three years ago is now suddenly more valuable than Apple and the entire GDP of – or like the London Stock Exchange I think I saw. Something like that, yeah. Then you have an issue. And this is the problem with our current mode of technological development. It's not just is this technology in question good. Is this in any way a sensible way to go about seeing how it's useful or who it could be useful for or what use cases it might have?

1:44:29And I think absolutely not. I think it's so hard to distinguish that question right now because it's gone from zero to 120 and it's spinning out in all directions and it's – so many bad decisions have been made in its rollout. It's been deeply non-consensual to a lot of the parties whose work has been harvested into this thing. So you have a bunch of people who are furious at the way that the models were trained in the first place. It's being set against creative markets where people are now worried about their jobs. So you have them angry on the other side. You have ordinary people who are just worried about, is this going to automate my job?

1:45:11How is it going to affect me? And so you have this immense climate of not just fear but also of anger. And it's really hard to pull out, you know, like, well, is generative AI like a good technology? In terms of the use cases to which it is being put, right now I would say absolutely not. It feels almost like the most egregious example of everything we've been talking about. When these companies have no natural predators, when they have no one to go, shit, you can't do that, customers will be mad. Because otherwise they'd say, so what is ChatGPT exactly? Why are we doing this? They're just like, more, more stuff.

1:45:50Well, again, I would say I would push back on that a little bit because it did rack up organically, you know, 100 million users or whatever. So there were some people who were like, this is a fun toy to play with. Okay, but then we transitioned to like, well, that's not really going to make us any money. So how do we get it to make any money? And then all of a sudden it's like, oh, maybe we can just like automate some stuff. And it becomes an enterprise software that it's selling – that's being sold to consultancies, to fintech firms, to anyone who will listen to an open AI salesman's pitch. And that's how we wind up where we are today, where you have hundreds of thousands of these enterprise seats sold to a dubiously useful technology.

1:46:36people are rightfully concerned that it's threatening their livelihoods. Even though it doesn't do a good job, it sucks. This is a point that Corey makes a lot, is that it doesn't actually often create a superior product. It almost never does. It's good enough for a manager to say, all right, we'll take it. It's cheaper. But I wanted to push back on one thing, and I don't necessarily know if you disagree, but I don't know if ChatGPT grew organically. And the reason I say that is this. When you have no hyper-growth markets, when you have no big new thing, and you have what I would argue is members of the media willfully engaging in a marketing campaign run by, and I would, by the way, like all evil systems, I don't know how much of this was conscious.

1:47:22I don't think people sat around and, and now we shall all agree to write about Chad GPT. No, I think that just a desperation in the media for something new to write about connected with a desperation in venture capital which connected with the desperation in the market. Boom, yeah, and then into the vacuum comes this new, apparently viable product about which any number of narratives can unfold. Exactly, and you can anthropomorphize it. It's telling me to leave my wife. Wow, you know, like... Kevin Roos, the goat of freaking out about the computer. But you really, you know, whether or not... The one thing that I would say in its corner that maybe some of that was...

1:47:59That's fair. is that it hasn't claimed that user growth has increased much since then. We're like a year later, they're still saying like, well, we've still got 100 million users. So you'd think that if they were inflating that figure, they would at least, they would find some metric to put together. Now we've got 200, yeah, exactly. Some Muskian, you know, minutes viewed per syllable generation. Yeah. So I think that, you know, maybe a useful analogy here, although not a perfect one, is gamification. Right. So if you've read Jay McGonigal's old work on this stuff, you know, Jane was doing this incredible stuff where she, on the one hand, she'd suffered a neurological injury and she needed to do a lot of very repetitive and difficult and generally low compliance rehabilitation for it.

1:48:48People don't recover from those injuries because it's so hard to do. And she made a game out of it. Right. And it really worked. And she started, she's a game developer, she started figuring out how to bring these out. So there's some marketing crossings. Was she at Ubisoft? I don't remember where she was, but she, you know, she, she worked on I Love Bees, which was the AI movie. And she worked on a bunch of other, like really Texas Hold 'em, Texas Tombstone Hold 'em or whatever it was called. Tombstone Hold 'em. People got married playing these games. Like they were really fun. Right. And, and then a bunch of people said, oh, well, we could use these to get Amazon warehouse workers to gamify how long they can go without urinating so that they can meet quota.

1:49:26Right. Right. And we look at that and we go, oh, this is horrific. But playing games is not horrific. Right? And I've been following people doing weird, playful things with stuff we would now call generative AI for a really long time. There's a guy called Shardcore who's like a digital artist who's making weird videos and stills forever. Really cool, fun stuff. You know, literally a decade of this. Which lends itself to a generative AI. Yeah. And, you know, today I look around and I see people who like play a D &D game. And then at the end, the LLM has generated a transcript of the game. It generates a pricey of the transcript.

1:50:01It illustrates it with fun, epic moments from it. It doesn't matter if the orc has six fingers, right? And everybody looks at that and they go, ha, ha, ha, that's great. And then they fire the customer service reps for your insulin. For the company that runs the thing that generates the orc pictures. No, no, for the people who supply you with dialysis or who determine whether or not you can legally get insulin on your insurance, and you find yourself arguing with a chatbot about whether you're going to get dialysis. Yeah, whether I should live. And then you die, right? Yes. And that's not a problem with the existence of tools that do weird shit.

1:50:39Right. That is a problem. Now, the thing is, the total addressable market of epic illustrations from last night's D &D game is very small. Yes. And it may be that some of the productive residue of this bubble will be standalone models that run on commodity hardware. Which is kind of what I'm saying, yeah. Yeah. And in the same way that like the productive residue of the WorldCom bubble was a lot of dark fiber in the ground that's being lit up now, the productive residue of the dot-com bubble was a couple hundred million humanities undergrads who were coerced into dropping out and learning Python, Perl, and HTML.

1:51:15Right. And went on to create a bunch of really playful things that turn into Web 2.0. That might be a productive residue. It doesn't make the bubble good. Bubbles are always bad. They steal from retail investors, mom and pops, and leave them eating dog food into their retirement or sleeping in a cardboard box. They're very bad. Right. But Enron was a bubble that left nothing behind. NFTs left nothing behind, but like shitty JPEGs and worse Austrian economics. That's because the tech was bad. Yeah. But in this case, maybe something good comes of it, right? It doesn't make the thing good, but maybe something good comes of it.

1:51:45Maybe there's a productive residue. Maybe not. I think it's so, yeah. I mean, you've probably been watching the Olympics or at least read about like the, I think one of the really telling, one of the telling things here is you can look at how these companies are like trying to advertise generative AI services. So in the first like Google, you know, Gemini or I forget what it was called. Maybe it was already overview, but it was like, you know, embrace this technology. And then you can use it to scan all your photos and it'll tell you, our new AI will tell you what your license plate number is.

1:52:17Is this a problem anybody has? You can't just go outside and look at the. So that one is the useful one, but also I don't know if it's generative AI. it's just OCR they've now started wrapping these things in to try and sell the dog shit or look at this one, did you see the ad for Meta's AI where it's like they're like walking through Little Italy and going and and she's like grandpa weren't you here when it was you know the beginning of Little Italy and she's like Meta tell me what Little Italy looks like, now we can see it and it like produces like a slop picture of like a pretend And little, little, when it's just like, there are photos of little Italy that are in a public archive.

1:53:02You can also look upwards. Or the Google one where they were like, oh, you can have your, does your daughter want to write a letter to an Olympic athlete? Did you see this one? Yes. And it was like, have Google Gemini generate and use generative AI to write the letter. And it's like, obviously, this has been roasted because it's the whole point of an activity like that is you get to you introduce your child to this, you know, this this art of writing something down and engaging with this dream of, you know, and you actually participating in an activity, not just like, oh, fuck it, hit a button.

1:53:39Can you imagine what it'd be like to be the athlete after that video runs who gets 20 million A.I. slot letters? Oh, brother, where do I begin? So I have a friend who's a professor who tells me that now it used to be that if someone asked you to write a letter of recommendation for a grad student, you'd be very selective because you wouldn't want to just say yes to everybody because it's a lot of work. And then the people who got those letters really valued them because they knew that you were very selective. But now you take three bullet points about anyone who asks and it expands it into an AI slot recommendation letter, which means that they're now getting so many recommendation letters that they ask AI to summarize them back into three different bullet points, three extremely lossy bullet points.

1:54:20And the entire system is broken down. Hose in the arse, hose in the mouth. My favorite one of these commercials, by the way, was the co-pilot ad for Microsoft on the Super Bowl, where one of the things, eager-eared listeners will hear this and say, I just smashed a window, but I know this bit. It said, there's a bit where you type in, say, write the code for my 3D game. It doesn't do it. I did it. It creates a document telling you how to make a 3D game. And I think that the point I'm coming towards here, I'm glad you brought this up with both of you, is GPT really isn't the problem. Transformer-based architecture cannot do the things they're saying, but it isn't the problem.

1:54:59The problem is the people building generative AI are actually deeply uncreative because, Gory, you're the person you cited who makes the cool art. That's someone who's effectively like, I don't know, this is a very messy way of describing it, but getting a robot with 60 arms and throwing paint to the wall to make something random. That is art because you are operating the machine. But generative AI, the way it's being peddled is depriving people of actual operational expertise or any kind of domain expertise. You're not writing a letter that you care about because you're not writing the letter.

1:55:30Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I wrote a whole newsletter about this because it was bothering me so much how many times I've heard it said mostly by VCs and AI advocates saying, well, it democratizes creativity. it democ... I mean, in what what is more democratic than just producing art already? This is not something that needs to be further democratized. And you know what actually democratizes creativity? Access to the arts. Time and space to access the arts and contributing. The best way I got better at writing was writing, but also reading, which was my privilege of my parents being able to afford the internet, afford books.

1:56:15These are the actual ways, but none of these people are creative. So how the fuck would they know? And this is my whole point is if anything, it's doing the exact opposite. Yes. It's creating an automated process by which you can pump out as much shit as possible, thereby pitting people who create art for a living and hope to make a living off of it against a machine that can generate as much slop as the client can handle. And it's just pushing down wages. It's making it harder for artists to make a living. It's doing anything but democratizing and it's making extant relationships between like a publisher and an artist or a writer and somebody who's commissioning work much more important, thereby depriving people who are new to the field of opportunities.

1:57:03Ted Chiang makes this point in his great New Yorker essays about AI that it's just – it's depriving – it's kicking down that ladder basically. It's like people who practice a craft by doing stuff that's less than authoring a novel that you know you're going to get a full rate for or you might still just be learning to ply the trade by writing a marketing copy. Well, generative AI is going to vacuum up all of those jobs and those opportunities. it's the anti-democratizing force really. I was just trying to look up a book but I failed. There's a wonderful artist, cartoonist and graphic novelist named Linda Barry.

1:57:45And I co-taught a workshop, a writing workshop that she was also teaching at. And Barry is a great believer in the idea that you can, anyone can draw. And that drawing is itself a gateway to a kind of creative understanding of yourself and the world. that is uniquely powerful. And as someone who doesn't draw, I was skeptical of this claim. She's written a couple of very good books about this, and she's also won a MacArthur Prize. And I came in and I looked at what my writing students had done after spending a week drawing with Linda Berry. They were not there to learn to draw. They were there to learn to write.

1:58:21And they were remarkably, like they had a free and loose arm in a way that a lot of writers, this is a very intensive writing workshop called the Clarion Workshop. It's for science fiction writers at UCSD. And I'm a graduate of it and a board member of it and an instructor. And it's often characterized as a kind of boot camp. And usually when you get in, it's a six-week workshop. And I think I was teaching week four. And by week four, these kids are zombies. These kids were not zombies, right? They were really open and free and really thinking expansively. So, you know, I think that like giving everyone a week with Linda Barry democratizes art.

1:59:00And I think there's, you know, look, I think like typing prompts into an LLM is in its own way like being Jackson Pollock and throwing paint at the wall. If that's why and how you're doing it. Right. Like if you're fooling around. Right. If you're fooling around, you can get to somewhere that you can't get to if you're trying to get there on purpose. And I just don't think that we're being invited to fool around. Yeah. I think that that's the whole thing. I think artists would not give a shit about generative AI if it wasn't being put in opposition to their livelihoods, if it wasn't threatening their economic security.

1:59:40Many people they want can go play around at home and make different variations for their own personal enjoyment. And I don't think anybody would begrudge them that if that wasn't simultaneously being used as a justification, as a promotional material essentially by these companies who are then going to go sell other firms. And I know you're gagging to go to an app, but I want to say one last thing here. We've got to wrap this bad boy up. So I want to say one last thing here, which is that if you pauperize every single commercial illustrator in the world without open AI, you will pay the kombucha bill for 15 minutes for their senior engineers.

2:00:17That the only reason they're doing this, this is a great tragedy. The reason they're doing this is not because there is a huge market opportunity in pauperizing commercial illustrators. It's that it is a exemplary opportunity. It's not that the market will then return their investment. It's that it will be a very visible example of what you can do with OpenAI. It's a convincer. They are effectively— One of the few that actually works, right? One of the can be dependably relied on to produce results that you can point to and say, hey, look. That kind of works. Yeah. Yeah. So, guys, it's been so wonderful having you.

2:00:52I could go another three hours, but that's just me. Corey, where can people find you? So, I'm at pluralistic.net. And as I mentioned a few times, I write science fiction novels and other kinds of books, mostly published by Tor Books at Macmillan. You can get them wherever you get books. Brian? Yeah. I write a newsletter called Blood in the Machine. It's also the name of the book of the similar theme. You can check either out. Yeah, bloodinthemachine.com. Yeah, that's all. So you, and also, hopefully I'll put all of the links to this stuff in there, but it's always good to hear it out loud. Guys, thank you so much for joining me.

2:01:30And listeners, thank you so much for listening. When you get out of the clink, you can email me at easyatbetteroffline.com and that for my Canadian and UK, just to know Canadians say Z as well. E-Z at betteroffline.com. You're like serial killers where everyone we look just like everyone else and we say Z. That's right. Fellow Canadian. I just learned I met a Canadian. It's wonderful. All right. Thank you so much for listening. and Corey, Brian, thank you so much for joining me. Thank you, thank you.

2:02:03Thank you for listening to Better Offline. The editor and composer of the Better Offline theme song is Matt Ossowski. You can check out more of his music and audio projects at matosowski.com, M-A-T-T-O-S-O-W-S-K-I.com. You can email me at ez at betteroffline.com or visit betteroffline.com to find more podcast links and, of course, my newsletter. I also really recommend you go to chat.wheresyoured.at to visit the Discord and go to r slash betteroffline to check out our Reddit. Thank you so much for listening. Better Offline is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

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2:04:24Mount Jaro terzepatide is an injectable prescription medicine that is used along with diet and exercise to improve blood sugar, glucose, and adults with type 2 diabetes mellitus. Mount Jaro is not for use in children. Don't take Mount Jaro if you're allergic to it or if you or someone in your family had medullary thyroid cancer or multiple endocrine neoplasia syndrome type 2. Stop and call your doctor right away if you have an allergic reaction, a lump or swelling in your neck, severe stomach pain or vision changes. Serious side effects may include inflamed pancreas and gallbladder problems. Taking Manjaro with a sulfine onurea or insulin may cause low blood sugar.

2:04:58Tell your doctor if you're nursing, pregnant, plan to be or taking birth control pills and before scheduled procedures with anesthesia. Side effects include nausea, diarrhea and vomiting, which can cause dehydration and may cause kidney problems. Once Weekly Mount Jaro is available by prescription only in 2.5, 5, 7.5, 10, 12.5, and 15 milligram per 0.5 milliliter injection. Call 1-800-LILY-RX, 800-545-5979 or visit mountjaro.lily.com for the Mount Jaro indication and safety summary with warnings. Talk to your doctor for more information about Mount Jaro. Mount Jaro and its delivery device base are registered trademarks, owned or licensed by Eli Lilly and Company, its subsidiaries or affiliates.

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