 Welcome to the library. We're so happy you're joining us here on this beautiful Sunday afternoon, Sunday fun day, a lot of stuff happening at the library, at the Civic Center, farmer's market, you can't beat it, it's our favorite heart of the city. Thank you. You're welcome, and that's Anissa. I'm Anissa, I'm your librarian today. Nice to meet you. Okay, no heckling from the crowd. The San Francisco Public Library would like to acknowledge that we occupy the raw mutush alone land, and as their unceded ancestral homeland, who are the original inhabitants of the San Francisco Peninsula, we recognize that we benefit from living and working on their traditional homeland, and as uninvited guests, we affirm their sovereign rights as first peoples, and wish to pay our respects to the ancestors, elders, and relatives of the raw mutush community. Last week we were fortunate enough to host the amazing Karina Gould, who's the head of Segorte Lantras, Indigenous Women-led Organization out of Oakland. We have the YouTube recording for Time Limited, Google SFPL, Segorte SFPL YouTube. You're going to find all the amazing things we do and film for later viewing. We have an amazing day today. It's packed up. If you stick around, you're going to see our last National Poetry Month event featuring Tongo and a feature of black poets, including Tashaka Campbell, Dante Clark, also who did an event at North Beach today, stacking it up, Melanie Clay, and Tongo Isen Martin, our poet laureate. On Wednesday, coming up, 5-3, Chad L. Williams in conversation with Sarah Ladipo Manica on the story of W.E.B. Du Bois's reckoning with the betrayal of black soldiers in World War II. Next Tuesday, the 9th, 6 p.m., writer and TED speaker Chris Adigica and a former Microsoft executive discusses how rapid change in technology is affecting society positively and negatively. That's Tuesday, 5-9. SFPL.org slash events for all of those things. Pick up the newspaper in the back. It has all of our events listed in it. 6 p.m. All right. We have the amazing folio books out here. Yesterday was Independent Booksellers Day. We did really well in San Francisco keeping our bookstores open during the pandemic. We did not lose too many, thankfully, and we got a few new ones. So, we love our bookstores. There will be bookselling throughout the event, after the event, and a book signing. And we're going to ask you all to just immediately leave the auditorium because then we have the poets coming in. So, yes, we love authors. We are here today for... We have two really true friends of libraries and SFPL library. We're here to celebrate Cory Doctorow's new book, Red Team Blues, about cryptocurrency shenanigans that will awaken you to how the real world works. All right. Cory Doctorow is a science fiction author, activist, and journalist. He is the author of many books, most recently, Radicalized and Walk Away, Science Fiction for Adults. Choke Point Capitalism with co-author Rebecca Giblin, a book about monopoly and creative labor in markets, In Real Life, a graphic novel, and the picture book Posey the Monster Slayer. His novel Attack Surface is a standalone adult sequel to Little Brother, which was an SFPL, one city, one book, way back in 2008. Cory Doctorow was included, inducted into the Canadian Science Fiction and Fantasy Hall of Fame. And then another Bay Area library lover and supporter. You can find them speaking at many libraries throughout the Bay Area. Anna Lee Newitz writes Science Fiction and Nonfiction. They are the author of three novels, The Terraformers, The Future of Another Timeline, and Autonomous, which won a Lambda literary award. As a science journalist, they are the author of Four Lost Cities, A Secret History of Urban Age, and Scatter, Adapt, and Remember How Humans Will Survive a Mass Extinction, which was a finalist for the LA Times Book Prize in Science. They're also a writer for New York Times and elsewhere, and you can find their monthly column in New Scientist. And are the co-host of the Hugo Award-winning podcast, Our Opinions Are Correct. Alright, give a big hand for today's presenters. Nice to see you all. Yeah, thanks for coming out on a Sunday to think about crypto. In fiction and reality. So I wanted to start by telling a little story about how I first met Corey, which I don't even know if you will remember, but I was standing in line outside the DNA lounge, waiting not for a music band, not for dancing, but for a hacker conference called CodeCon to get started. And it was a little over 20 years ago. It was a conference where I first saw someone talk about BitTorrent. I think in fact that was where BitTorrent was first presented. Yeah, it was Graham. I think he was like, hey guys, I have this great way to share information. And it's also where I first met Dan Kaminski, who's the person you dedicated this book to, who's sadly not with us anymore. Anyway, Corey was walking up and down this line of hackers and nerds and journalists with arcs of his first novel, advanced copies of Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom. And he was just like, hey, oh, do you want to read my book? Here, here's an advanced copy. It's free. You can just have it for free. Just take it. And I was like, who is this guy? Wow. Yeah, give me a free book. So after that, I began following Corey's career and we both worked at EFF together, or kind of one after the other. You sat in my desk. You had my desk after me. I did. I inherited your player piano scrolls, which was very exciting. So it really made a lot of sense to me when I started reading Red Team Blues that it's set in the exact kind of hacker milieu where I first met Corey, and in fact features some of the very people and ideas that I was exposed to that long ago day at the DNA lounge. And so I wanted to start just by asking you about your main character, Marty, and how he fits into this very specific kind of hacker culture that we have kind of in the world of security and what is now called crypto, which in the past would have been something else. Right. Egold. Egold, yes. So Marty Hench is the protagonist of this book. He's a 67-year-old forensic accountant, a hard-charging forensic accountant. And his origin story is that in the 1980s as a kind of excited, spittle-flect MIT undergrad, he encounters the personal computer, falls in love with spreadsheets, drops out and enrolls in a CPA course in a community college instead, and realizes that nearly everyone who encounters the spreadsheet, who isn't an accountant, immediately starts thinking about how they can use it to hide money and that he can use it to find money. And he comes out here, he comes out west to San Francisco following the PC Gold Rush, and he ends up spending the next 40 years unwinding every single significant financial fraud in Silicon Valley. Every weird thing that a tech bro can imagine. That too. So he is this guy who's kind of grown up in this moment before the dream curdled. He came out really not just frightened, as I think many of us were when we were reading Cyberpunk in the early 80s, of what could happen if computers went wrong, but also excited about what could happen if it went right. And he is around all these people and kind of enmeshed with all these people, some of whom yielded to the siren song of money and sold out in some way or another, and some of whom resisted it, but all of whom are now in this sort of mid-2020s moment looking back on the 40 years and asking themselves what happened. And you know, I have a, this is the first book in a trilogy, and I have another trilogy set in the Bay Area, about a 17-year-old who is Marcus Yellow, the hero of Little Brother, who's discovering technology and the power can give him in the way that it can harm him as well. And I feel like they're book-end characters, right? Someone at the start of their journey and someone at the end, both of them kind of reckoning with the human factors of technology, like how, you know, I think that there are a lot of security specialists who are really alive to the way that people can have sort of cognitive blind spots and how they can be exhausted. There's kind of an old wheeze with security that makes a little cameo in this, where if you trigger a false alarm often enough, you can convince the person in charge to just turn off the alarm and then you can do something bad. I think that, you know, there are lots of people who are alive to that kind of fatigue, but nevertheless are like, oh no, I can convince 100 of my closest friends to quit their stable jobs, come work for me and my venture capitalists put their kids' college funds on the line, and when my venture capitalists squeeze me, I will totally be able to stand up to that venture capitalist and stick to my principles and let my 100 friends be stuck on the bread line. I will definitely meet that challenge and that like, on the one hand, very keen awareness that is like, goes into your thinking about security and penetration and defense that is just completely missing when it's like, what will it take to get me to sell out is I think one of the things that's like right at the core of this moment now among those people we met 20 years ago in Jamie Zewinski's lounge there in Soma. Yeah, I think one of the things that struck me about this book is that it's very much, I mean it's obviously very much in the tradition of hard-boiled fiction, noir fiction, and a lot of the time in noir stories, including in films like say the Maltese Falcon or whatever, you have a detective who is kind of an agent of chaos in many ways. It's not like a Sherlock Holmes type detective and he or she, usually it's a guy, has been exposed to so much crime that he kind of understands how crime works and usually the person that he's trying to help is someone oftentimes who's kind of been on the straight and narrow. A normie. A normie who has just made one really dumb mistake. And in this novel, the dumb mistake is going into crypto. Step one. Step one. Before you collect underwear, go into crypto. So I wonder if you could just talk a little bit about why you decided to do that. Tell us your feelings about crypto. So look, I mean crypto is an interesting thing, you know, in as much as like we're all, I think many of us, at least fatigued from hearing people go on and on about it and tell us, you know, why we're going to get, you know, the have fun being poor if you opt out of crypto, all that nonsense and watching the rise and fall and you couldn't escape it and it was, you know, the Super Bowl and South by Southwest and it was just like this kind of ubiquitous thing. And one of the things I find really interesting about crypto is that a lot of the rhetoric of people who believe in it does not sound that different from my own, right? We should have a decentralized internet. People should not invade your privacy. Outside finance, capital, Kirtle's everything. Services that are run for the benefit of their shareholders will ultimately cleave from doing things for the benefit of their users and so on. And like, I'm like, yeah, we're like, we're totally on the same page here. And then we get to, and that is why the answer to everything is to put up a toll booth and charge very small amounts of imaginary money to use it and that will create markets and the markets will make everything great. And by the way, the web should only be usable if you buy, if you trade your filthy, useless American dollars that you can only buy everything with. To me, to me for my weird crypto tokens that I have that you will then be able to use to talk to your friends and fill out your social security paperwork and go on an online dating service and whatever. And this is where I'm like, well, wait, we know about how markets fail and so on. And today, as we look back on the years of crypto, I think that what we see is this effort to replace trust with math, right, to take the need to build an institution that is worthy of your trust and then trust that institution with mathematics that just obviate the need to have that interpersonal trust. And what we see is that over and over again, the people involved in those projects were scammed by people who betrayed their trust and that there was no way to kind of, as hard and as gnarly and as failure-prone as trusting people is, it is not something that you can substitute math for. And indeed, when you look at all the kind of legendary scams of crypto, the one that was really comprehensively foiled was the first ever smart contract that the Ethereum people put together. And the Ethereum people call themselves like the progressive wing of it. I think there's some validity to that claim. Maybe it's a little oversold, but they call themselves the progressive wing of the cryptocurrency movement. They built their first smart contract, and a smart contract is a computer program. And computer programs have bugs, and this one had a bug, and someone used it to clean them all out and steal $50 million, as well as all the people who trusted them. And they got together and they said, look, we grounded our entire project here in the idea that once a transaction happens, however, we all trust each other, and we trust each other to just use it once. And so tell you what, we're going to fork the Ethereum blockchain. We're going to take back the $50 million. We're going to put an eraser in in the system whose primary virtue is that it has no eraser, and we're going to do it because we trust each other, because that's the only way we can make this work. And it's really funny that the lesson that they took away from that was like, we're going to have to nerd harder to make sure there aren't bugs in our contracts, but it turns out that like human trust is actually superior to mathematical trust. That's so interesting the way that you put that. It made me wonder if in some sense the smart contract or cryptocurrency is a way of hard coding the idea that humans are inherently bad. Humans are inherently evil and greedy, and going back to like 18th century ideas about like how to build an economic system, like well we've got to build it assuming everyone is greedy, everyone is out to get you, and there can't really be a social contract without some kind of... I beg your pardon. I wouldn't put it in the 18th century. I'd put it like in the early 19th century. I'd stick it in that kind of Austrian economics bucket that says like, incentives matter. Incentives very clearly matter, right? They're not dispositive, they're not the sole factor, but incentives do matter. All other things being equal, people will maximize their own utility, which I think is less true. I think there are lots of instances in which we see people on the one hand just making mistakes, right? And on the other hand being selfless and doing things for each other. And that if we build a system where if you are as selfish as possible everybody is better off, that's a system that's going to be easier to manage than a system in which we have to appeal to better angels of people's nature. And we're now living at the tail end of like a 40-year experiment in which that has been our sort of central organizing economic tenant, right? It's the Reagan Revolution was basically grounded in this idea. Thatcherism, you know, kind of neoliberalism was grounded in this. And it has been absolutely the case that it turns, that if you run around and tell everyone you have no duty to anyone else, greed is good, solidarity is a trap that either makes you the sucker at the table at best or it makes everybody worse off at worst. That you really can sort of breed a generation of predatory people who really believe and act like it, right? That's definitely the case. And those people can in fact become very powerful. So follow ProPublica's reporting or the American Prospect. There was just a big article that I wrote up last week about the private equity takeover of nursing homes, right? And it's just like it is as bad as you think it is, right? And it's just terrible. And it turns out that like if you tell people you own no one anything and being as selfish as possible is good, you will find some people who will figure out how to take over big parts of your life who operate on that basis, right? But it doesn't actually produce the outcome that we wanted. It didn't make everyone better off, right? You know, like you and I have spent many years in various ways being involved in copyright debates. And one of the signal changes in copyright since about 1976 more or less the Reagan years has been an increased emphasis on individual bargaining rights for creators so longer-lived copyrights that cover more works and cover more uses. And a decreased emphasis on collective rights for all artists. So like anyone can record any song. You can record a Taylor Swift song. I can record a Taylor Swift song. That's like a right that's been enshrined in music since the earliest days of copyright. You pay a fixed license fee and you can record it. There's no permission needed. But if you want to sample a Taylor Swift song you need permission from Taylor Swift. And everyone including Taylor Swift has had to sign away their right to be compensated for their samples to the big three labels. So if you want to sample a song you take like an artist takes money out of their pocket and hands it to a label and then the label just keeps it. That's another artist. So now artists get paid less for making that music. Meanwhile Taylor Swift who is the most powerful bargaining agent in music. There is no one on the labor side of music with more bargaining power than Taylor Swift when she couldn't get her masters back there was no amount of money that would make the private equity guy who bought her masters who hated her and wanted to make her miserable. There was no sum that he would sell her masters for. But because everyone can record a Taylor Swift song she went back into the studio and re-recorded her own albums. If you go to buy her album on any of the services or stream them you can either stream the original or the Taylor Swift remaster where the private equity guy doesn't get a penny. So this collective bargain turns out to serve people who are less able to resist imbalanced negotiation and an individual right very lucky and even then maybe not is something that you just end up bargaining away you know contrast think of all of our tech worker pals who for a long time thought that they never needed a union because they were so intrinsically valuable they would get free kombucha and massages forever at their workplace right and then Google like does this stock buyback right and then immediately lays off 12,000 engineers the stock buyback would have paid their wages for the next 27 years and you know they don't do that at a moment in which all of their technological needs are met and there's no reason to keep those people on the payroll Google search quality in my life has never been lower than it is right now. Totally agree. Yeah and so we've all been talking about this yeah. Yeah so laying off 12,000 workers right now that's you know that that is very weird in terms of like a quality focused firm. It's okay Corey because they're gonna have bar the magical AI that's gonna tell you a bunch of lies and that'll be great. Habitual, getting florid paragraphs from a habitual confident liar is really what I've always thought of as the answer to the fact that all I get is SEO spam. It's higher quality spam. That's right. You know we've now spam with complete sentences. So we've been talking about complicated economics already and I wanted to ask you as I was reading this book I was so curious whether you were writing kind of fanfic about the paradise papers is that is that in there or sort of yeah like the IRS files and all those other things so I want to say like we're making it sound very high-minded and there is like a high-minded thing going on in this book but it is like foundationally a kind of cracking fast moving adventure yarn. Oh it is I mean reassure everyone like I ate this book up like you it is super fast paced it is delightful it's full of zingers I want to talk to you in a minute about the humor in this book but it is also built on this edifice like incredibly complicated financial dealings technical dealings and again this fits with it's noir roots which is often about untangling incredibly complicated schemes and conspiracies and I feel like the paradise papers are kind of your conspiracy that you're nudging yeah yeah no you're right so like there's a there's a term out of the finance sector called me go which stands for my eyes glaze over and it it describes like this prospect of you know or this this this tactic of making a prospectus like so thick and complicated that the mark assumes that there must be something valuable and like a pile of poop big enough must have a pony underneath it right and there's a lot of there's a lot of good kind of service journalism that is about figuring out how to keep people's eyes from glazing over while you untangle this stuff right so think about Margot Robbie in a bathtub full of bubble bath describing how collateralized debt obligations work in the big short right or think about John Oliver right and and a lot of what I do in my newsletter is this right it's just trying to like figure out how to tease it apart and there is a there is a kind of intrinsic comedy in this where you have like this matryoshka like a nesting Russian doll you open it up and there's another layer inside you open it up and you open it up you're like something really good is going to be in here and you open up the final one it's just full of poo right and there is like a kind of there is a kind of bathos there right and and I think that you know fiction is a good way of untangling this stuff sometimes like it's a way to to make this work I actually got a great review this week from Henry Farrell is a political scientist writing on Crooked Timber about how the one thing that like all manner of experts could learn from science fiction is how to do what what Joe Walton calls including which is like introducing these complex technical subjects without just like making them boring and making them into an info dump and which I hope I do I don't claim I never have committed info dump but like I mean I love a good info dump I think any Corey fan in the audience has annoyed an info dump here and there and you know what like and it's the difference between an info dump and just an interesting aside is just the quality right like I will read Neil Stevenson describing how to eat the ideal bowl of Captain Crunch for all week like that is literally the best three pages or like a hundred pages of like gunshot ballistics right you know no problem yeah can I tell you a stupid writer trick about guns sure so I learned this from James McDonnell when I was teaching at viable paradise with him I'm a guy I'm Canadian so definitely not a gun guy and and he said look if you write anything about guns you'll get something wrong and the gun people will go crazy and they'll send you hate mail however if you add the word modified in front of the name of any gun they will tie themselves and not figuring out what amazingly cool modification you came up with to make the gun do that impossible thing and they will think that you are the greatest gun guy they will make you their king they will carry you about on a beer made of rifles they will fire you a 21 gun salute whenever you appear and you will be their god so awesome or just use other weapons just people shovels or whatever ninja stars yeah exactly ninja stars no one can argue with that I wanted to just ask you a tiny bit more about what you were saying about how you can use fiction to talk about these really complicated issues and I wonder how much do you think about that when you're setting out to write something like red team blues like are you consciously like yeah I want obviously I want to tell a great story but like do you think like and I want to weave in like an understanding of like offshore banking and how fucked it is so kind of so here's the thing is I um I write a blog as you know as you know blog I have for 20 some years been a blogger and what that means is that every time I see something that seems like it's interesting and part of a bigger story I try and figure out what made it interesting I try to write about it for a stranger right which means that you got to approach it with some rigor like you and I think of both shared the experience of making notes and then going back not knowing what the notes mean because we just we just cheated ourselves you know if you're right for a stranger you have to you have to be more kind of comprehensive and that itself is very ironic and it makes a kind of super saturated solution of fragments of stories and novels that kind of float around your mind and then as as the kind of the story crystallizes you know I may even not remember exactly how you know fully hedge synthetic CDOs work you know kind of off the off book but I like I know which blog post I wrote about it where I broke it down and so I'll be like I like as I'm writing I'll be like you need an eye watering scam here like I just finished the second one well in fact I finished both the second and third one of these the second one is called the basil it comes out in February and it's about prison tech and the villain of the prison tech book is real estate baron who sells his family's real estate holdings and converts them to real estate investment trusts REITs which were deregulated I want to say 99 or something and they went from being way for like a mom and pop landlord to like build a granny flat that helps them in their retirement in a tax sheltered way to a way that like billionaires buy hotels fire all the staff pay no tax get rid of their unions extract giant fortunes from it and so on and so it's like REITs are really interesting and they're straight out of the the pro-publica IRS papers paradise papers also very important but the the IRS papers are really interesting because it's like specific named American billionaires that's that's what I'm finding wild about Steve Balmer oh my god that guy is like the the Kobe Bryant of tax evasion it is wild yeah I mean the paradise papers were exciting because apple was named yeah facebook twitter I mean and they killed a journalist over them yeah yeah so they're it's it's pretty intense so when you're when you're putting together a book like red team blues like one of the things I really loved about it was that it's full of zingers and humor and like I mean as you said earlier it's kind of easy to make fun of crypto douches but I wonder again if you could talk a little bit about like where you see humor fitting into the story and why you wanted to foreground it yeah well you know like it's it's not a I don't know I can't remember if it's called a Larry stew or a Harry stew or whatever like the male equivalent of a Mary Sue oh I think you can just name Mary Sue yeah okay thank you gender is fluid thank you so it's not exactly a Mary Sue but you know in 20 some years of public advocacy on highly technical issues I figured out how to make them at least a little funny sometimes right in a way that kind of keeps the audience rolling with you and and it's not just like gratuitous it's not just to get the laugh it's like it's the it's to Levin otherwise deadly subject right and you kind of work some gags into it and I have a lot of those gags at my fingertips you know as he's thinking through it and I have that mindset of always looking for the gag that fits into the otherwise very dry technical explanation how you how you make it funny and and so Marty is your Mary Sue what you're confessing kind of kind of right in the sense that like I'm using the techniques that I use in public advocacy to try and make the work that Marty is doing which is often very gnarly to make it a little like less gnarly and you know the other thing about Marty is that the way that he sleuths much of it is very different from Sam Spade the way that he sleuths is by like doing blockchain analytics right and so like that there's no business with blockchain analytics right it's just like a guy describing what he did with a spreadsheet right and so it's a little it's a little slow moving same with you know like a lot of what he does to solve his problems involves talking to people who are his friends where they try to figure out what he saw in the spreadsheet and again there's no business there so I give him a lot of business some of which is comedy but like he's got this bus right so Marty's deal is that he'll take if he takes your job he won't charge you anything for it but he wants 25% of whatever he recovers and so at one point he has a rock star whose manager has stolen all of his money which happens more often than you think that's why Leonard Cohen stayed on on tour until he died that's why George Clinton is still touring and he manages to find all the money the manager stole and the rock star had bought a luxury tour bus continued touring and not go broke and now he doesn't have to so as part of the settlement he gives Marty this 33 foot luxury tour bus with marble countertops that he calls the unsalted hash and he drives it from from Walmart parking lot to Walmart parking lot eating eating at Michelin star restaurants and living in his tour bus and the thing like I don't know if any of you have ever gone like on an RV holiday there's a lot of business with the RV is my sludge tank full enough is my sludge tank too full can I poop in my RV or do I need to find a rest stop because there's no more room in the holding tank and so it gives him a lot of business he's just always like what am I going to do and then at a certain point again without being too spoilerated at a certain point he ends up with homeless people in San Francisco spending a lot of time in this library this building is a starring character in the book and thank you and he's just got like a bundle buggy he can't take the bundle buggy into the bodegas and so he's like trying to figure out how do I buy enough pepperoni sticks that I can stave off hunger and not get up and stop camping on the electrical outlet that I managed to snag at SFPL main branch and have it snagged by someone else so that I can sit there and eat while I'm doing blockchain analytics on the free wifi and it just gives him all of this business to do that gives you a kind of rolling logistics problem and you know I love the sub-genre of adventure fiction where someone stranded on a desert island and they're figuring out how to survive with just coconuts and vines and napping their own flint and I've got to tell you this is an under-considered genre of MacGyver tactics of poor people in America is just like this totally missing element of our fiction it's so goddamn ingenious and incredible to talk about invention under conditions of adversity and like it's wild to see and you know I kind of got into it after reading this book called Prisoners Inventions that just had a 20th anniversary edition it was written by a man who's incarcerated in California for most of his life and who is an incredible draftsman and anthropologist and he drew all the inventions that his colleagues made and also described their use and their refinement and it was like you have to like it's total like that caveman youtube channel where it's like first I make the tools that I'm going to use to make my tools and then I make the things with those tools and then a storm comes along and wipes it out except in this case it's like first I make the tools and then I make the tools with the tools and then a storm comes along and throws it all away and you know like that kind of MacGyver stuff is so satisfying to read and you know the fact that it's like not present in our literature it's just a massive blind spot it's so interesting that you put it that way because there were a couple of threads in this book that I thought kind of ran counter to a typical hard boiled story one of which is that rolling logistics is called competence porn you know like a story where this is not a term I made up I mean this is a commonly used phrase I mean the Martian is a perfect example of like a competence porn story where like a guy is stranded on a desert Mars and has to build potatoes from nothing and that is everywhere in this novel and it is deeply satisfying like I feel like every character we meet who lingers in the story for any amount of time is just something like it might not be tech it might be jewelry it might be figuring out where to sleep in San Francisco if you don't have a house and yet I feel like in a lot of in a lot of noir we don't have competent people they're like bumblers who like are kind of sad sacks and make mistakes and so I wonder these kinds of characters because they're fun I mean it's like a fun adventure but the fact that you link it to poverty and you link it to these characters who are not usually granted that kind of role like not usually treated as like the hyper-competent astronaut or whatever you know it's like no it's a hyper-competent guy living in a tent I'm leading to a question here I wonder if you could just talk more about the role of poverty in the story and the role of wealth versus poverty because I think it's really stark and it's not something I see in a lot of techno thrillers well it's I mean it is the motif of San Francisco poverty amid wealth I mean what could be more of a San Francisco story than that I noticed that the first time I came here in I was struck by it and today I think by comparison in 92 was like probably what did you see in 92 where you were just like holy crap so we stayed in the tenderloin and yeah we stayed in the tenderloin it was 1992 it's funny I was just thinking about this yesterday there was this thing about 7 or 8 years ago maybe a little longer where people were saying look the tenderloin as we understand it is like the result of Reagan era de institutionalization that's where it comes from and so there's like a demographic bulge everyone who ended up in the tenderloin was sort of the same age had the same spectrum of pathologies it's not a cohort who are likely to live very long and there would come a time just sort of where, because there wasn't another cohort about to be kicked out of the institutions even if there was another role in Reagan it was like this was it and then it would go away and of course Fentanyl has kind of moved in the opioid crisis more broadly has filled up that gap has refilled it and I think back then it was not long after de institutionalization so it was like 6, 7 years after de institutionalization and I feel like the people struggling in the tenderloin then were it was like a faster moving kind of poverty like people were just walking faster more fights on the street people hadn't been exhausted yet they were younger it wasn't people dealing with both senescence and homelessness at the same time it felt very very chaotic in 92 when I came back in the did I say 92 it wasn't 92 it was 88 and then when I came back in the mid 90's to work here it had changed so much even by then it was much more about looking at people and feeling like these people are at death's door not like that these people are in merely in crisis but that this is the they're reaching the end of a crisis like it felt like the moral injury was much worse by the mid 90's and that moral injury only got worse as the years went by and I just checked out of a hotel in the tenderloin and walking around it's unbelievable and so especially when contrasted with the rise of this new bubble that's what I was going to say and given that the bubble itself one of its claims to legitimacy is that it can figure out how to solve our problems and if like here we are in the backyard of it and to be honest I think it's worse in Palo Alto where it's people in our V's and people who work who are green badges who are working in on the campuses for the trillion dollar companies living in Ben Axel on the streets of Palo Alto being chased from parking spot to parking spot in the name of like improving the quality of life in the city like if anything it's even more kind of ghastly because like it's one thing to say well there's a bunch of people who don't work in tech aren't important to tech and tech can't figure out how to take care of them but these are people who are like they're all that stands between you know Googlers and like Listeria they're the people who are like cleaning the floors right they'd all be the food poisoning if it wasn't for these people and tech can't figure out how to deal with them that's wild right like that is like if you want an indictment you couldn't ask for a better one and of course when you're talking about money and cryptocurrency then you really are talking about the this distributional question right not just how much money is there but who has it and who gets to decide how capital is mobilized what are the thoughts in this book that I don't know if you picked up on because it's a very kind of esoteric weird economic thing is modern monetary theory which is a thing that I am fond of and that many people are very skeptical of but it's an idea that I think empirically describes how money comes about and that more philosophically makes some claims about how money can be used including the idea that federal spending is only inflationary when it tries to buy things the private sector wants to buy and like there are a whole bunch of things the private sector is canonically not trying to buy including the labor of everyone who doesn't have a job and that we could just create federal jobs for everyone who doesn't have a job and it would by definition not be inflationary and so you know it's like when you have a character in this novel who is preaching this I love that at the end she gets like a series of wildly popular YouTube lectures and she's kind of like a David Grabery figure in some ways because she's beloved of her students but kind of reviled by her colleagues She's more of a Stephanie Kelton to be honest the deficit myth she's Bernie's finance person but there is I have to say it's lovely to have a book where there's a heroic economist a heterodox economist who is just like down with the students and does karaoke with them after she retires sorry I didn't mean to interrupt so you're talking about monetary theory and crypto is the antithesis of this idea crypto is the idea that we cannot allow publicly accountable people to be in charge of the monetary supply because publicly accountable is another way of saying publicly beholden and they will just print money until we're all broke and it really is like to talk about the Austrians again it is the foundation of the underlying economic theory and it really just says like if the spreadsheet says there isn't enough money to make this factory work even though the factory is built and has the raw materials and there are people who want to work in it the factory can't be turned on because the spreadsheet doesn't have enough tokens to make this factory and that's like it is the model inverting and becoming the territory and you know it is the world we live in now and the opening scene of walk away is a scene in which they walk into a factory that has literally been turned off because the spreadsheet says it shouldn't be turned on even though the materials are there the workers are there and people want the things that it can make and they just go and turn it on and they call it a communist party we are not members of the communist party we are having a communist party it is like having a birthday party does not make you a birthdayist and having a communist party doesn't make you a communist we are having a communist party we are just partying with the means of production sees the means of computation I think it is really telling that a lot of the kind of crypto bros generally they are bros are the ones who are pushing for things like universal basic income which is super problematic in all kinds of ways imagining that this weird economic system is going to somehow help everyone gain wealth through hand wavery through basically shenanigans and you know to like give them their due the weird irony of crypto is how much internal solidarity there is how much crypto is about like me and my friends are all going to make it because we are going to hang in there hold on for dear life don't sell your tokens we are all going to agree not to sell our tokens because we are all taking care of each other in a system that exalts selfishness it is like a weird contradiction that is hard to unpick and this is why I am not I don't write it off there is I think there is an impulse at the core of it that I think are really good and positive I just disagree as a technical and economic matter with the methodology before we open it up for audience questions I wanted to make sure that I asked you about another very famous essay that you have written recently about in shitification how many folks have read Corey's ideas about in shitification it has become a huge meme and you started it by talking about tiktok but it really feels like it fits the entire social media landscape so I wonder if you could walk us through in shitification tell us how far we are into it now so I meant to tell you hello from Burke Gladstone we are doing a whole hour on in shitification I was very jealous when I heard you on the media I was like how come Emily gets it I don't get it now I am feeling really good about it it's because I am rad you are totally rad so in shitification is an idea I have been developing in my newsletter for quite some time now the tiktok essay was the one where it blew up and it is this idea that there is a very specific life and death cycle to online platforms and it is that online platforms when they start I am going to do a little bit of economics jargon here they allocate surplus to their end users it means they give them goodies so think about Uber losing 40 cents on every dollar of every ride for 10 years spending 30 billion dollars of Saudi Royal family's money to make you switch from using taxis in BART to using Uber and once those users are locked in in some way so maybe BART goes away or like the funding for BART gets drawn down because everyone is using Uber taxis will go out of business maybe all your friends are on Facebook so you can't leave anymore maybe you have switched over from producing for a variety of platforms just producing for YouTube or just watching YouTube or whatever once the users are locked in some are all of that surplus is withdrawn the goodies are taken away and they are given to business customers so Facebook when it started was like we are the platform unlike MySpace we are never going to spy on you and show you what your friends are and show you what they have to say once you and your friends have all taken each other hostage because you are all locked in there and you can't agree on where to go to dinner much less like all 300 of you leaving Facebook tomorrow and going somewhere else Facebook then withdraws the surplus from you and says to advertisers hey we are going to spy on these people after all and we are going to give you a really clean deal for advertising to them it's going to cost a pittance we are going to make sure every ad is delivered and they go to media companies and they say hey nobody has ever subscribed to you because you are not on Facebook but if you come on Facebook we will just non-consensually shove you in people's eyeballs all you have to do is post an excerpt and a link and some of them will subscribe to you and so now as a user your feed isn't just the stuff that you have asked to see it's a bunch of stuff you haven't asked to see both media and advertising media companies retool around Facebook Facebook encourages them to do it by subtly withdrawing some surplus from them actually we are not going to show your stuff to people unless the whole article is there not an excerpt so people don't have a reason to leave and then they are like actually we are not going to show it to them there is a link back to your website we are only going to show it to your subscribers if it's just the article so it's no longer a funnel you have to use our ad system their ad system then becomes increasingly and shitified they do a lot of ad fraud I mean they pay media companies less for putting ads on it they start dealing with political parties feeding new propaganda and I think there is like two forks of this one is like they are out there soliciting it and I think the other one is that they are just not policing it I think there is a lot of ad fraud not ad fraud but fraudulent things advertised on Facebook where it's not like they want the frauds there they are just like well it would cost us N dollars to police the people who buy ads and in terms of the number of users who leave because we have got them locked in it's less than N and so we will just like we will tolerate this degree of shit in our platform and so gradually they start to draw down surpluses from end users from business customers and reallocate them to their shareholders and eventually they reach this point where the whole thing is just a pile of shit what they are trying to do is they are trying to get a basis this equilibrium where there is enough surplus left in that you are still locked in and the business customers are still locked in nobody leaves but it's very hard to serve that crest it's such a brittle equilibrium one live stream mass shooting one horrific privacy scandal one horrific labor scandal one horrific whistleblower complaint and then people go as we see with Twitter and you see them thrashing now we talked about Google before Facebook has decided that although like two years ago they said it was unimaginable that you would ever talk to your friend in any way except for on Facebook now they are saying like the future is for ordained and you are going to be a legless, sexless, low polygon cartoon character and a heavily surveilled virtual world named after a parody in a dystopian cyberpunk novel and this is the thrash this is the thrash at the end and we could go on some more but this is the foundational life cycle I think that a lot of platform capitalism is now in that terminal stage I think watching Elon Musk speedrun it is actually really educational because normally these guys they draw with like a very fine tipped charcoal art pencil and Elon Musk like Donald Trump he just grabs the crayon in his fist and just scrolls with it and things that you know happen so slowly and in such faint lines that it was hard to go oh I see what's going on you know you're never sure about causally what's going on Musk just says one day you can't put links to mastern on your bio because it will help you leave right like and you can't embed tweets in your sub-stack newsletter because that would make you leave yeah it's funny Malka Older who is a friend of ours who writes fantastic science fiction and is also a humanitarian aid worker she always says that disasters are when you really learn about the politics of a country because it's a fast-motion experience of a political response and normally politics are kind of spread out over a period of time and preordained phases of elections and you're kind of you know you get lulled into a sense of security but when you have a disaster everything floods everything's on fire and you see how the government just scrolls in crayon in some cases or doesn't I was going to say that sounds like Warren Buffett you know when the tide goes out you find it he's swimming naked yeah exactly and I think that the Twitter disaster is just that we're seeing kind of in fast-motion platform degradation in shitification shitification now it's just a bunch of poop emojis anytime you want to ask Twitter a question they send you a poop emoji so literally yep poop emojis galore okay so on that note we're going to open it up to audience questions if you raise your hand we have two folks with microphones or one human with a microphone and she will bring you the mic and please speak into it hi Corey my name's Spocko oh hi Spocko nice to meet you finally I don't have so much as a question as a oh no don't do that Spocko that's a that's a joke my I was around 20 years ago I was helping the founders of Google Facebook those people tell their stories and get out there and helping to become you know multi rich one of the things now I'm looking at is how to take away money from the people who have abused the system and I started off with getting advertisers to leave right wing radio like KSFO and I met Corey when EFF helped defend me and beat Disney in a copyright case and I kept doing so the next I'm looking at is doing dealing with the ad fraud etc but specifically how not only people being frotted but how people are being attacked online the threats the death threats etc and right now I'm showing my face but I'm not giving my real name I want to know is there any kind of mechanisms to make it so that it is more expensive for the social media companies to get away to not let death threats and those kind of things you know come out there how can we make it more expensive for them I'll tell you what the trick is there's a lot of people I'm sure given this crowd in the city you all know what I mean when I say section 230 section 230 is a Clinton era law that immunizes platforms from the bad speech acts of their users so if you libel someone on facebook it's your problem not Mark Zuckerberg's problem this goes for like the people who host your podcast this goes for the people who index your search results this goes for lots and lots of people and there is the sense that this is a giveaway to big tech right because it absolves them of the need to moderate everything that people say I am very very skeptical of that account I think that if we were to ask big tech to enumerate all of the ways in which everything we say could go wrong and block it if we think that it could incur liability for them that they would paint with a very broad brush and they would clobber all controversial speech and preferentially controversial speech from people who when they get clobber don't get to make a big noise about it we already saw what happened with this because Cesta Fosta which is the rule that is nominally supposed to stop sex trafficking online and make platforms libel for that Cesta Fosta passed and rather than carefully assessing adult material and sex worker ads and so on to see whether they have a nexus with sex trafficking all they do is block everything that is remotely similar to sex trafficking they don't care in part because sex workers when they complain people are like we don't care right and so we are already seeing how that would work out and one of the most prominent advocates for abolishing section 230 is Mark Zuckerberg who has repeatedly called for it to be abolished and has said basically I can afford to hire the moderators to comply with a world in which there's no section 230 and guess what none of my competitors can right you want to stand up a Macedon server where you host 10 of your friends are you prepared for one of them to get so angry at the other one that they sue you right because you hosted their bad speech and if that friend has the vindictiveness and the capital to just drag you through the courts for five years and bankrupt you do you even want to host your friends and so the question is how do you create a rule like this that doesn't become a capital mode and I don't know how you do it I think that that we don't lack for rules about bona fide threats that ascribe liability for bona fide threats we don't have a capstone like enforcing those rules in part because anonymity makes it harder but we've already established that you don't want to speak with your real name because anonymity lets you be a critic of bad actors and so I don't think abolishing anonymity is going to help either I think it's thorny and I worry that we're going to get stampeded into trying to hurt big tech and we're going to end up helping big tech we're going to end up making rules that turn into capital and so this happened in Europe in 2019 where they there was a proposal to help artists whose work gets ripped off on YouTube and elsewhere by creating a rule that says that if you offer a platform you have to build a copyright filter and filter everything users submit to it it's now sort of being implemented in law and we're talking about hundreds of millions of dollars in capital expenditure to host any kind of content in Europe there's a question of whether it's going to survive a GDPR challenge but if they if this really becomes the rule then it's just Facebook, Tik Tok and Google and its products that can survive that rule right there's no room for smaller firms including firms that were like Google when it was good to exist in that regime and so you know I think the artists groups thought that they were punishing Google and I think Google was like oh yeah hurt me right do it by all means you know Luke oh hi I have a question this is sort of a meta question it's difficult to explain but there's this idea in economics that if you have the interest rate and you take one over the interest rate that's approximately how long it takes for something to compound so right real GDP is at 3% and that means that every 25 years it doubles approximately so that means that in one lifetime 75 years real GDP has to go up 8 times or it contracts by a large amount so that means that in every generation we can't that this is real GDP this isn't more entertainment there's only so much entertainment you can have there's only so many movies you can have there's only so big your house can be there's only so many hamburgers you can eat but either real GDP has to go up by 8 times which means that resource extraction has to be 8 times greater or we have to become 8 times more efficient in extracting those resources so my concern is that if we don't keep having these revolutions in technology ever more quickly from the internet to the cell phone to AI even exponentially faster eventually we'll just hit a point at which GDP worldwide collapses and I I mean as a futurist you're speaking of a lot of the details but that's like the biggest question in my biggest concern in economics it's an interesting point I think that there's a I'm now blanking on whose law this is every target becomes a every measurement becomes a target so GDP as a measurement of well-being worked very well retrospectively right if you if you took the periods in which people were thriving on other metrics like health like education like reported satisfaction and then asked what was happened measured a certain factor in the economy you could see that when that factor went up that those other things went up as well so retrospectively it worked really well but it turns out that you can make GDP go up without doing the things that make people happy and so this is if you know the page rank paper the first Google paper on citation analysis for improved search among other things it opens with this benediction that says our warning that says that any search engine that's based on advertising is eventually going to suck people it's very funny right because like people are all about like oh don't be evil don't be evil is table stakes writing your seminal paper in which you say don't make a search engine based on advertising or you'll end up sucking that's like a much much cooler weirder thing about Google but you know what it says is nobody ever makes a link to another website unless they think there's something important about it we can go and count the links right and we can then tell you what's important on the web we don't have to do textual analysis of the websites we don't have to the way Alta Vista was doing count how many times the word cat appears on the website and decide that that's the website that's most relevant to cats what we can do is count how many links go to a website that seems to have some nexus with cats and we'll rank them that way and they were absolutely right retrospectively looking back over the web in a world in which page rank didn't exist this turned out to be a great way to find latent semantic content in the web right that that no one had ever noticed before however making a link isn't hard and so as soon as there was a reason to make a link that wasn't because you thought a page was important but instead because you wanted to be at the top of Google counting links seems to be useful so the measurement became a target and I think that there are lots of ways to conceive of human thriving going up that don't involve increased productivity and that don't involve increased material extraction right they can involve increased efficiency of distribution so I write when I'm anxious I have 7 more novels coming out or 6 novels or 5 novels a graphic novel and nonfiction book in November there's a book coming out called The Lost Cause it's about truth and reconciliation with white nationalist militias Seton Burbank yeah Seton Burbank and it really digs into an idea from the seriously wrong podcast called Library Socialism that is based on the idea that if you have very very high quality goods that circulate in a community that you can actually reduce the material bill for an increased material lifestyle so like I think if everyone here who's a homeowner probably has a drill I certainly do I own the minimum viable drill right because I need to make 2 holes in my walls per year and there's no reason for me to buy a better drill but this drill is like one step away from turning into white hot shrapnel every time I turn it on and I have a whole desk drawer devoted to nothing but this stupid drill if instead there was enough drills circulating in my community that were location aware and gathered usage information to improve the drill and were designed to gracefully degrade into the material stream after they were no longer repairable and were designed for repair you could actually have a better life a life where whenever you needed a drill it was there but you didn't have to maintain it it wasn't a terrible drill it was an amazing drill and we would significantly reduce the material bill associated with every homeowner who each of us had this drawer with this terrible drill that's like just an insult to advanced civilization and multiply that by like lawn mowers and a million other things and you end up with an extremely materially comfortable world that is arguably more materially comfortable than the one we inhabit today with a lower energy material and labor bill than the one that we have now and it's a stat that's harder to juke because it's a stat that is much closer to human thriving when you need a thing can you get it when you're done with it is it a pain in the ass to have is it a good thing that's a much harder stat to juke than did number go up can happen in lots of ways that don't produce the material conditions that the number is meant to be a proxy for a much smaller question sure this book was marketed as a next Tuesday thriller is that a phrase that you made up and what does it mean my editor made it up the inimical Patrick Nielsen Hayden inimitable Patrick Nielsen Hayden and I think it means near future it's a good phrase though I like next Tuesday thriller so it's like five minutes into the future five minutes into the future on a weak level no more than six days into the future exactly a little further into the future than next headroom very quick question where do we go to after twitter I think it's mastodon I think mastodon works well but fails really well mastodon like has I think the most important feature mastodon is very poorly appreciated which is that if you leave a mastodon server with one click you can export all the people who follow you and everyone you follow and then you can go to another mastodon server and upload it and all of those relationships just move over which means that it's much less important that the person who runs your server is good all that matters is that they are either regulatory obliged or morally sound enough to let you export your data when they kick you off or when you leave yeah you're not hostage you're just following the wrong people you are I'm having a blast on mastodon I think you need to find the right server because it's a good place people used to say this about twitter in the early days it's like I don't know why people like twitter it's like well you're following the wrong people follow different people and you'll have a better time on twitter on mastodon so I remember back in the late 90s there were a lot of shitty books about the internet how it was going to revolutionize it and then finally there was information ruled by Hal Varian yeah and so the question I have from reading that is the idea of like network effects being translated into economic advantage so how do you avoid the tendency towards tech especially social media to go towards monopolization because of network effects well thank you for letting me talk about another book I've got coming out in September Versa will publish my book the internet con how to seize the means of computation and it tries to build on what I think is an omission in Varian's work so Varian talks about how network effects drive these win or take all networks once your friends are on twitter you're going to join twitter once you join twitter other people are going to join twitter just win or take all the thing that Varian doesn't talk about is that we only know how to make one kind of computer that universal tour incomplete computer that can run all the software we know how to write which means that escaping the network effect the kind of ground state of switching costs if you want to leave twitter and go somewhere else all of the things being equal is pretty close to zero because you could leave twitter and go to a mass phone server that scrapes and uses bots to let you continue to post to and read twitter without being a twitter user the only thing is that if you did that you would reduce you to radioactive rubble citing the digital learning copyright act the computer fraud and abuse act tortuous interference with contract and what I call the thicket of rules that what IP has come to mean is any rule or policy that allows me to reach beyond the walls of my firm and control the conduct of my customers my critics and my competitors and I think that the network effects cut two ways they start to leave a service the service collapses really quickly Dana Boyd has written very well about this in the context of MySpace she was an embedded anthropologist at MySpace she watched those social networks fall apart because a few people left and then everybody left right it's the ability to usurp the power of the state to prevent people from availing themselves of tools that allow them to reconfigure the service so that they can leave the service there is no way to use the service that actually keeps those advantages durable otherwise you would get what we got with the explosion of UNIX where it's like oh you've got I worked for an SGI integrator that would go in and we would like plug something into a bunch of Macs on one side a bunch of IBM UNIX servers on another side we'd maybe throw a Solaris box in There's no way to lock people in, right, because even though everybody had the stack they wanted you to buy into, you could just outmaneuver them, and what we've done since then is we've basically made all that stuff illegal. So now we're getting into my work on adversarial interoperability and all that stuff. So that's, I've got this book in September, it's called The Internet Con, comes out from Verso. I wanted to call it Seize the Means of Computation, they didn't like that. Now it's in the subtitle, say what you will about it. All right, so I think we're gonna finish up now, but we will be, thank you Corey, that was awesome. We're gonna be, ask after, we're still gonna be out there, Corey and I will be signing books out there, you can buy books from Wonderful Folio Bookstore. And you can buy Wonderful Annelie's wonderful books, Annelie is a stunningly good writer who writes incredible things, so you need to buy their books. Buy all of the books, and you're also supporting an independent bookstore when you do that. So thanks very much for coming out. And we'll make them non-returnable, so come on up. Thank you both, thank you.