 Oh please, I just wanted to say hi Chris. No, bye Chris and hi Kori. We just had a little chat before and yes as I know you will be reading from your new book in a minute as I just stopped talking and afterwards there will be a lot of time for all your questions and we're really curious already. Great yeah and I do have these questions from the from the talk earlier and I'm going to try and get to those two. I'm going to do a shorter reading so we can do more interactive stuff. You can watch videos of me on YouTube if you want to. It's more fun to interact. So the the passage I'm going to read comes from Attack Service. Attack Service is a standalone little brother novel and it's intended for adults and it stars Masha who's the young woman who's at the beginning and the end of the other two books working as a surveillance contractor and by this third book she's she's like a full-on cyber mercenary working for a company a lot like say the NSO group or hacking team or any of those other kind of hack for higher companies helping post-soviet dictators crush rebellions and the way that she goes to sleep at night and still manages to like square her conscience is by helping the people that she spies on. So during the day she installs surveillance appliances in the national data centers and at night she meets with the protesters who are being spied on using this technology and tells them what countermeasures work for it. And so this is said very early in the novel and Masha and Christina who's one of these local protesters are walking through the square in the fictional post-soviet republic of Slovastokia during the beginnings of a protest that is shaping up to be a very serious one. The square buzzed with good energy. There was a line of grannies who brought out pots and whining away at them chanting something in Boris that made everyone understand. Christina tried to translate it but it was all tangled up with some Baba Yaga story that every Slovastokian learned with their mother's borscht recipes. We stopped at a barrel fire and distributed the last couple of kebabs to the people there. A girl I'd seen around emerged from the crowd and stole Christina away to hold a muttered conference that I followed by watching the body language out of the corner of my eye. I decided that some of Christina's contacts had someone on the inside of the neo-nazi camp and judging from her reaction the news was very bad. What? I asked. She shook her head. What? 10 p.m. she said. They charged. Supposedly some of the cops will go over to their side. There's been money changing hands. That was one of the problems with putting your cops on half pay. Someone might pay the other half. The Slovastokian police had developed a keen instinct for staying one jump ahead of purges and turnovers. The ones that didn't develop that instinct ended up in their own cells or dead at their own colleagues' hands. How many? Boruses are world-class shruggers, even adorable pixies like Christina. If the English have 200 words for passive aggressive and the Inuit have 200 words for snow, then Boruses can convey 200 gradations of emotions with their shoulders. And I read this one as some enough too many. We are fucked. No martyrs, Christina. If it's that bad, we can come back another night. If it's that bad, there might not be another night. Oh, that fatalism. Fine, I said. Then we do something about it. Like what? Like you get me a place to sit and keep everyone else away from me for an hour. The crash barricades around the square had been long colonized by tarps and turned into shelters where protesters could get away from the lines when they needed a break. Christina returned after a few minutes to lead me to an empty corner of the Warren. It smelled of BO and cabbage farts, but it was in the lee of the wind and private enough. Doubling my long coat's tails under my butt for insulation, I sat down cross-legged and tethered my laptop. A few minutes later, I was staring at Commander Litvin Chuck's email spool. I had a remote desktop on his computer and it could have used his own webmail interface, but it was faster to just slither into the mail server itself. Thankfully, one of his first edicts after taking over the ministry had been to migrate everyone off Gmail, which was secured by 24-7 ninja hackers who'd eat me for breakfast, and onto a hosted mail server in the same data center that I'd spent 16 hours in, which was secured by wishful thinking, bubble gum, and spit. That meant that if the U.S. State Department wanted to pwn the slow stocking government, it would have to engage in a trivial hack against that machine rather than facing Google's notoriously vicious lawyers. The guiding light of Boris politics was trust no one, which meant they had to do it all for themselves. Litvin Chuck's self-sight simulators all fed into a big analytic system that mapped social graphs and compiled dossiers. He demanded that the chiefs of police and military gather the identifiers of all their personnel so they could be whitelisted in the system. It wouldn't do to have every riot cop placed under suspicion because they were present at every riot. The file was in his saved email. I tabbed over to a different interface, tunneled into the Zauth appliance. It quickly digested the file and spattered all the SMS messages sent to or from any cop since I'd switched it on. I called Christina over. She hunkered down next to me, passed me a thermos of coffee she'd acquired somewhere. It was terrible, and it reminded me of Marcus. Marcus and his precious coffee. He wouldn't last 10 minutes in a real radical uprising because he wouldn't be able to find artisanal coffee roasters in the melee. Christina, help me search these texts about letting the Nazis get past the lines. She looked at my screen, the long scrolling list of texts from cops' phones. What is that? It's what it looks like. Every message sent to or from a cops' phone in the last 10 hours or so. I can't read it though, which is why I need your help. She boggled all cheekbones and tilted eyes and sensuous lips. Then she started mousing the scroll up and down to read through them. Holy shit, she said in Slowstalkian, which was one of the few phrases I knew. Then, to her credit, she seemed to get past her surprise and dug into the messages themselves. How do I search? Here, I open the search dialogue. Let me know if you need help with wildcards. Christina wasn't a hacker, but I taught her a little regular expression food to help her with an earlier project. Regex are one of the secret weapons of hackerdom, compact search strings that parse through huge files for incredibly specific patterns. If you didn't fuck them up, which most people did. She tried a few tentative searches. Am I looking for names, passwords? Something that would freak out the interior ministry. We're going to forward a bunch of these. She stopped and stared at me, all eyelashes. It's a joke. It won't look like it came from us. It'll look like it came from a source inside the ministry. She stared some more, the hamsters running around on their wheels behind her eyes. Masha, how do you do this? We had a deal. I'd help you and you wouldn't ask me questions. I'd struck that deal with her after our first night on the barricades together, when I'd shown her how to flash her phone with paranoid android, and we'd watch the stingrays bounce off of it as she moved around the square. She knew I did something for an American security contractor and had googled my connection with Mikey, whom she worshipped naturally. I'd read the messages she'd sent to her cell's chat channels sticking up for me as a trusty sidekick, trustworthy sidekick to their americansky hero. A couple of the others had wisely and almost correctly assumed that I was a police informant. It looked like maybe she was regretting not listening to them. I waited, talking first would surrender the initiative. Make me look weak. If we can't trust you, we're already dead, she said, finally. That's true. Luckily you can trust me. Search. We worked through some queries together, and I showed her how to use wildcards to expand her searches without having them spill over the whole mountain of short messages. It would have gone faster if I could have read the Cyrillic characters, but I had to rely on Christina for that. When we had a good representative sample, around 100, enough to be convincing, not so many that Litvin Chuk wouldn't be able to digest them, I composed an email to him in English. This wasn't as weird as it might seem. He had recruited senior staff from all over Europe and a couple of South African mercs, and they all used to kind of pigeon English among themselves with generous pastings from Google Translate, because Opsac, right? Fractured English was a lot easier to fake than native speech. Even so, I wasn't going to leave this to chance. I grabbed a couple thousand emails from the mid-level bureaucrat I was planning on impersonating, and threw them in a cloud machine where I kept a fork of anonymous, a plagiarism detector that used stylometry to profile the grammar, syntax, and vocabulary from a training set, then evaluated new texts to see if they seemed by the same author. I trained my anonymous on several thousand individual profiles from journalists and bloggers to every one of my bosses, which was sometimes handy in figuring out when someone was using a ghost writer or a delegated to a subordinate. Mainly though, I used it for my own impersonations. I'm sure that other people have thought about using stylometry to fine-tune impersonations, but no one's talking about it than I can find. It didn't take much work for me to tweak anonymous to give me a ranked order list of suggestions to make my forgery less detectable to anonymous. Shorten this sentence, find a synonym for that word, add a couple of commas. After a few passes through, my forgeries could fool humans and robots every time. I had a guy in mind for my whistleblower, one of the South Africans, Nicholas Van Dyke. I'd seen him in action in a bunch of flame wars with his slow-stocking counterparts, friction that would make him a believable rat. I played it up, giving Nicholas some thinly veiled grievances about how much dough his enemies were raking in for their treachery and fishing for a little finder's fee for his being such a straight arrow. Very similitude. Liff and Chuck would go predictably apeshit when he learned that his corpse was riddled with traitors, but even he'd notice something was off of a dickhead like Van Dyke where to narc out his teammates without trying to get something for himself in the deal. A couple of passes through an anonymous and I had a candidate text along with a URL for a pay spin that I put the SMS's into. No one at the Interior Ministry used PGP for email because no human, normal human being does. And so it was simplicity itself to manufacture an email in Liff and Chuck's inbox that was indistinguishable from the real thing. I even forged the headers for the same reason that a dollhouse builder paints tiny titles on the spines of the books in the living room. Even though no one will ever see them, there's a professional pride in getting the details right. Also, I had a script that did it for me. Well, there we go. Wahoo. I think you should, yeah, we all think the big applause right now. I just realized that I found out about anonymous at 25C3. Completely like when I chose the reading, I wasn't thinking about that. And as I was reading, I was like, didn't I learn about this at a CCC? And I did. Now you're writing about it. Yeah. Yeah. That's why I write off my trips to hacker cons. So do you actually use all those things for your research? Many of them. I can't say that I use anonymous because I don't have to forge many things nor do I have to puncture forgeries. But the thing that immediately struck me during the anonymous presentation was if you were a fanfic writer who wanted to find all the ways that your Harry Potter story was not quite like a JK Rowling Harry Potter story, you could then tweak your story to Rowling a Fiat using anonymous, right, using this plagiarism detector, adversarial stylometry tool. Of course today, if you just wanted to make it seem like JK Rowling you'd throw in some transphobic stuff. So that would be the clincher. Probably, yes. But there's a pretty interesting discussion after that because lots of authors and actually publishers are so freaking out about text AIs that can generate a text that are pretty good already. Not like human yet, but pretty good. I think there's something behind that already. I used a GPT3 composition tool that some people I know built. I played around with it and it is really far from doing the kind of work I do. I don't know, I won't say that it's really far from automating some tasks. Obviously it automates some tasks, but I think that the state of GPT3 is such that if you are worried about losing your job to GPT3, you probably have a really boring, terrible job because it's not producing anything apart from text art. It's fun text art. I think maybe you could replace internet trolls with it. Every now and again, I'll write about criticism of Modi and these huge like Hindu nationalist troll armies will come after me. The messages are so self-similar that they're really easy to identify and block. You don't even like a second word. It's just like a block report and away you go. If they had a good GPT3 package, they could probably make a whole series of harassing messages that would be harder to detect. Again, I'm not worried about those people losing their jobs. I am worried about the possibility of vast disinformation campaigns that are harder to block or detect, but not about the technology-driven automation unemployment as a result of all of the internet trolls being replaced. Yeah, I'm totally with you at that point because there will always be the love for human-generated text for the art or behind it. A lot of the most remarkable GPT3 blocks that have appeared where people have used GPT3 to make something turn out to be straight-up copy pastes of actual text written by humans because GPT3 sometimes will just regurgitate half paragraphs, whole paragraphs that are part of its training data. Again, that is a very impressive task, finding the best paragraph from a bunch of pre-written paragraphs by humans. That is impressive and it amounts to something, but it's not the same as composing it. Yeah, that's totally right. And it was pretty depressing, other thing, but pretty depressing when we put some legal text into a Markov chain and made a game which is the real legal text, which is the Markov chain, and we made three or four rounds and people always failed. Yeah, I'm not surprised. It's an open secret that it was several months after Twitter's launch that someone noticed that Twitter's Terms of Service repeatedly mentioned Flickr because they had copied and pasted Flickr's Terms of Service to make them Twitter's Terms of Service and no one, not even Twitter's lawyers, had read the Terms of Service to notice that I didn't mention Twitter. So, you know, I'm not surprised. Like literally nobody reads those, right? Those are like self-reproducing text viruses. Yeah, actually they are. Shall we have a look into the questions we still have? Yeah. So we do have two parts, I think. Right, I only have one of them. I think you have the one from your previous talk. So I can, why don't I answer one or two of these and then you can think about the rest of these. Right. So where's the one that I liked here? Oh, we can't use anti-monopoly. It's not like you can dissolve Facebook overnight realistically. What's the road map to a more sustainable environment? So I think that misunderstands the benefits of a protracted antitrust action that, you know, if we were to say to Facebook, all right, we're going to break out WhatsApp and Insta, which I think we could do even without invoking anti-monopoly law. I think you could say that, especially in the EU, their merger was contingent on them not merging the backends of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp. And then they later merged the backends of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp. And I think if you are given regulatory forbearance, if you're given an exemption to a regulation on promise of certain conduct, then if you engage in that conduct, then we should just revoke it. We should just revoke the forbearance. I think that's a pretty straightforward lift. But even if it were to take a long time, even if we spent a decade trying to make Google spin out its ad tech stack, which I think we should do, that 10 years would really like dramatically alter the way that investors and corporate executives thought about anti-competitive conduct, right? It would get all of the people who are currently, when they balance out the upside of monopoly and the downside of monopoly, it would weight the downside much more heavily. And you would get the kind of forbearance you got, say from IBM, when they didn't go after Tom Jennings when he was making the Phoenix ROM, and you would then see things like investment. So the thing that market believers say about markets is that they respond very quickly and regulators respond slowly. And that's true, that markets are very quick. You can see that in the growth of technologies over the crisis, right? Think of how quickly markets turn Zoom into the thing that we all use, right? If you tried to regulate a video conferencing system, by the time the consultations were done and so on, it would have been years later. And markets are actually pretty good at fighting monopolies if they're well-regulated, right? The reason that venture capitalists don't fund Facebook competitors is not because they love Facebook and they wouldn't want to see Facebook in trouble. It's because they think that if they tried to fight Facebook, Facebook would destroy them. And so if we were to put Facebook on notice that everything it did from now on was going to be part of this ongoing antitrust action, which I think just happened just before Christmas with the new slate of antitrust suits against them, then if you can make an investor understand that, you could get capital to start a competitor to Facebook. Now in terms of what we can do that fits between antitrust action and nothing, what we can do to get jammed today instead of jam tomorrow, there's two courses involving interoperability. So one of them is already in the Digital Services Act. It was in the Access Act that was proposed in the U.S. last year. And the DSA and the Access Act both have these mandatory interoperability components where they say Facebook must produce an interface that third parties can log into. And they have different ways of trying to make sure that that third party is in Cambridge Analytica. And it's going to be, it's hard, but it will open some regulatory space in concert with these antitrust enforcement actions. But even more exciting would be an interoperator's defense, a law or a regulation that said if you devise a way to interface a new product with an existing product for a legitimate purpose, including increased consumer freedom, security auditing, accessibility for people with disabilities and, you know, independent repair and so on, that notwithstanding any law, software patents, copyrights, terms of service, trade secrecy, non-compete, you have an absolute defense. And obviously passing that law would be really hard, but it wouldn't have to come legislatively. Like you could imagine bits and pieces of it emerging. Like maybe we say to Facebook that the remedy for its unlawful and deceptive merger with Instagram and WhatsApp is that they have to sign a consent decree saying they won't punish people who build interoperable services on this basis. And so they have to act as though that were the law, even if it wasn't the law. Or we might see things like a procurement guideline where, you know, we might have educational authorities who say to Google, yeah, we're going to buy Google Classroom site licenses for all of our lockdown kids. But as a condition of that, you have to promise that you will not seek any kind of vengeance against people who do the following things. Or we might say to Apple, as a procurement matter, if we're going to buy 50,000 iPads for our school district, you have to promise not to sue people who produce side loading tools because we have apps that our district depends on. And we can't, you know, we can't be dependent on you guys deciding that you don't want to lock that app out. And so you get this kind of like multi-layered stack where you have antitrust enforcement that is like poor and courage a lazotra, you know, sometimes you have to execute an admiral to encourage the rest of them. And that just ripples out through the whole sector. And then you have interoperability mandates through regulation that are slow moving, but not as slow moving as lawsuits. You have new market opportunities that are much faster moving that will depend on both the lawsuits and the regulation. And then you have unilateral actions that governments can take with very little consultation without having to get things through parliament, where they can just bind over technology companies to behave in certain ways so that, you know, they must do it. Like imagine if the remedy for diesel gate was that the German state said to Volkswagen and other giant German automakers, you are no longer allowed to block any independent auditing service repair or manufacturer parts for any of your vehicles. It's a natural remedy, right? Like it directly addresses the bad conduct, but it also creates right to repair, interoperability, independent security, auditing, all of that stuff out of the gate. And like you could get it just, you know, as part of a consent decree, you could get it just with the German regulator talking to the lawyers for Audi and saying, if you don't want your CEO to go to jail, you have to sign this paper, right? And then you get actual like fast moving action. And so I think it's that kind of holistic thinking about how technology, markets, law, and norms all work together that gets us to a solution. And then as against this backdrop, remember that there are people who are worried about monopolies in beer who are going to be fighting your corner. And there's people who are going to be upset that all glasses are made by one company, Luxautica in Italy, who've raised prices 1000% over the last decade, who are also going to be fighting your corner on this. And so, you know, as opposed to being a war on 1000 fronts, this is going to be a battle with 1000 allies. And that's going to make that antitrust stuff move a lot faster than it did with Microsoft. And because this won't be just a one-off assault on Microsoft or on Google or on Facebook, this is going to be like a global movement to attack monopolism itself. As I just said, markets and ecosystems. There was another pretty interesting question about, by the way, interoperability and free and open source ecosystems. And things like probably the Fediverse or so that just rise and come up as, yeah, as a real alternative to the solutions we had over the last 10 or 15 years. What do you see in those? So I think the thing that's missing, I mean, I like them, I use them, I have a mastodon account. I'm actually trying to stand up a mastodon server right now. But the problem with diaspora and mastodon and other federated answers to Facebook is not centralization versus decentralization or features versus non-features. It's interoperability. And specifically, it's both the lack of a standardized interoperable means of connecting to these services, which, you know, to its credit, Twitter is actually like trying to do something about Twitter's Project Blue Sky. I think they have like, they've sat down and they've gone like, well, having absolute control over our users is worth this much. Not being responsible for moderating content is worth this much. The only way we get out from not moderating content is by not owning the content, not having the capacity to moderate the content and just being like a federator, you know, a central node and a federator. And so they're kind of moving towards it. And they want to provide like a managed interface, right? They want to have like, you know, a standardized API that everyone accesses. The problem with those standardized APIs is that Twitter used to have them and then they took them away. So, you know, the thing that produces an equilibrium where those standardized APIs are both good and durable is competitive compatibility. If you know that the day you withdraw the standardized API, hackers all over the world are going to write bots that just replace the API with scrapers that you're going to have to fight like this. It's like marching on Stalingrad, right? Like you're just going to have like this kind of endless grinding trench warfare with hackers who will be legally immunized from your, from any legal tool you have to shut them down. And all you'll be able to do is just tweak intrusion detection system rules and try, you know, in a system with hundreds of millions of users to distinguish users who are just weird from bots, right? Because like when you have, like think about Facebook, right? Facebook's got 2.6 billion users. It has 2.6 million, one in a million use cases or 2.6,000, one in a million use cases every single day, right? So distinguishing the dolphins from the tuna in your tuna net is going to be really hard when you're operating at that scale. And so, you know, when you're like in the meeting with the head of, you know, with the CTO and the CSO and the chief marketing officer and the CFO and the, you know, the shareholders and the board and they're like, we need more revenue. We're going to shut down the API. We're going to nerf the API. The technologists in the room can say, this is what the bill for that is going to look like. And it's going to exceed the excess capital we get from blocking the API. And so, you know, this idea that like, we can just like all of us decide that next Wednesday, we're going to shut down our Twitter accounts and reopen them on Mastodon. It's crazy. It's not how technology has ever worked, right? The way that we got keynote as like a standard for a lot of people's PowerPoint presentations or, you know, conference presentations was not by everyone saying like, on Thursday, the 21st, we stop using PowerPoint, we start using keynote. It was by iWorks Suite being able to read and write PowerPoint files. And by having this kind of, this kind of protracted period where it was not binary, right? Like you could have one foot in one camp and one foot in the other. You know, I analogize it sometimes to, you know, my family's migration history or my grandmother was a Soviet refugee. She came to Canada and she lost touch with her family for 15 years, right? She couldn't phone them. She couldn't write to them like they exchange messages. Sometimes if someone got a visa to go to Leningrad, they would, she would tell them what to tell her mother if they could find her mother. And, you know, obviously like leaving the Soviet Union was really hard for my family. It was a really hard choice, even though Canada was a better place to be for them because of the very high costs that came with it. And they had family members. I have family members in St. Petersburg who never came because the cost was too high. So five years ago, I left London and moved to Los Angeles. And here I am in my office in Los Angeles. Not only did all of my books come with me, but let me see if I can get it in the frame. Over there is my theremin. Okay, that's the theremin that I bought that runs on British voltage that has a little mains adapter. We just got off a Zoom call with my relatives in London and we talked to my family in Canada every week. So for us, the switching costs were really low because if we changed our mind, we could go back. And in fact, this is the third time I've moved to Los Angeles, right? So I could I could try Los Angeles, see how work go back to London, come back. It was expensive, right? But it wasn't leaving the Soviet Union in the 40s expensive. And so, you know, by all means, build the place that people who want to escape Mark Zuckerberg's Iron Curtain will find as a happy home, but give them the ability to have one foot in one, one foot in the other. And you know, the other piece of this is every time Zuckerberg says, oh, I'm blocking interop tools to keep my users safe. Remember that in the DDR, they said the Berlin Wall isn't to keep East Germans in. It's to keep West Germans out of the workers' paradise. And it's the same fucking excuse. It always is. I just got a message here and probably an interesting question, by the way, or actually two linking together. Coming back to the monopolies, you did not say much about Amazon on your talk before. And we have another question for the fireside chat here with your book that the person asked. You actually went away from publishing under CC licenses and went to bigger publishing houses. Would you like to explain probably buying also the Amazon part then? I didn't work Amazon in just because of time pressure, but all of this stuff applies to Amazon. I mean, I think the most interesting thing about Amazon is in terms of its worker uprising where there's been an explicit, so remember that all tech companies are split into some of the highest paid workers on earth and some of the lowest paid workers on earth. So in Amazon's case, that's like the warehouse workers who have some of the worst working conditions and so on. And explicitly, the tech worker uprising in Amazon was in solidarity with the warehouse workers. That's really interesting because it's crossing these class boundaries and it's crossing these divisions that the firms themselves deliberately created to prevent solidarity. In the same way that in the early days of the trade union movement in the U.S., if the Italian auto workers were on strike, they'd bring in German auto workers to break the strike. And they would try to make it about Germans and Italians, not workers. In the same way, you divide up the workplace into contractors and non-contractors, green badges and blue badges. And it works to drive a fracture line between different people who actually have shared interests. In terms of publishing, well, it's about monopolies. There's five publishers left. And in fact, there's about to be four because Bertelsman is buying Simon and Schuster assuming the DOJ lets them do it, which this is kind of like the first litmus test of whether Biden's DOJ has got any real serious commitment to blocking monopolistic mergers because the idea that we should go from five companies to four in publishing is outrageous. There's just no reason for it. So with five publishers, there's exactly one that lets me go DRM-free. And that's Tor. And Tor was also the only one that would let me go Creative Commons, and they changed their mind. And so the choice was try and self-publish, which frankly, like I've done it, it's hard work. I would get one tenth as many books written and I would go to my deathbed with dozens of unwritten books, but a better Creative Commons track record, or suck it up. And I sucked it up. I don't like it. And they know I don't like it. I like Tor. They're the smallest, most, they're owned by Macmillan, which is owned by von Holtsprank. And they're the smallest. They're the most ethical. They're the ones that I like the best, but they didn't like the Creative Commons licenses in the end. And so that was where I ended up. It sucks. Now, I can still CC license the other stuff that I do. And if anything, I've become more permissive in that. I left Boing-Boing almost a year ago, a year minus a week and a half ago. And when I left, I started this new thing called Pluralistic. And Boing-Boing was licensed under a very restrictive CC license. This is CC Buy. It's as close as you get to public domain without going CC0, which just requires attribution. And so Pluralistic is a pretty significant piece of writing. I've taken a break from it this week, but I write three or four substantial articles every day that are CC0 or CC Buy. And that, I think, if you're interested in my work, there's a lot of it out there under extremely generous, far more generous than my novels, CC licenses. I wish I could do the CC licenses too. I mean, if nothing else, this is a little inside baseball, but given that it's a German audience and it's relevant to Germany. So the Germans that I meet who've read Little Brother and my other books inevitably found them through Creative Commons licenses. In part, I think, because English works in Germany are still pretty expensive relative to the German translations. And Germans have a high enough literacy in English that they like to read original English texts. And so before there were e-book markets that served Germany with English language texts, the only way to get an English language e-book was to pirate it or get a CC1, and mine was the only CC1. So what's interesting about that is now, thanks to Tor Books, I'm able to run my own e-book store. If you go to crapphound.com slash shop, I have an e-book store. It's DRM-free, ULA-free books. And the way that publishing contracts work is my British publisher has rights in British territories except Canada, like former British Empire territories except Canada, India, Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the UK and so on. And my American publisher has rights in the US and Canada, and then nobody has the exclusive right to non-English speaking territories like Germany. And about 10 to 15% of my e-book sales come from Germany, and I get all the money from those. When I sell an e-book in the UK, I give 70% of the money to my publisher, and then they give me 25% back as my royalty. When I sell a book in the US, I give 70% to my US publisher, and they give me back 25% as my royalty. When I sell a book in Germany, I keep all of it. I get twice as much money. And so 10 to 15% of my readership are in Germany, and they account for 30% of my gross receipts from the website. And so that is super cool. And I understand that my publisher is not neither here nor there on that one because they don't get a dime from it. But for me, my German audience is super important. My German English speaking audience is super important. And I would have self-publishing ever been a way for you in the larger scale, so like Joanna Penn is doing in the UK. It's just a lot of work. I work up 16 to 18 hour a day most days. So writing pluralistic, doing EFF and working on novels during the crisis, the first day I took off between March 19th after March 19th was December the 17th. So I didn't have a weekend off. I didn't have a day off. And I wrote a book. I wrote a book during the crisis, and I self-published an audio book, and I had four books come out. And if I were doing the stuff that my publisher does, I wouldn't have written that book. I would have written maybe half that book. And so it's just a matter of how much time I have. And I have done an experiment. I did a self-published short story collection. It made a bunch of money, like relative to how short story collections don't make a lot of money usually. So it made about three times as much, four times as much. But the actual gross dollars that it made was significantly less than I would get for going through a publisher. And the amount of extra work was a novel's worth of work. And so back to what I want to be worried about on my deathbed, and I would much rather have published all of these books without ULAs, without DRM, and argued for a more robust set of fair dealing and fair use rules that would allow people to use them widely than having written half as many books, but gotten them all out under CC to a much smaller audience. I'm not thrilled about it. And maybe it's the wrong call. I don't know. But it's like, it's the call I've made for now. If we see massive dean monopolization, maybe it'll get easier. I see in the chat, we do have a question. So do we want to try to have someone free their microphone and ask the question here in the room? I think I'm now unmuted. Yes, you're. Hi, Corey. Just a quick question. So as readers, is there anything we can do about this? It seems like the business of publishing is pretty in, let's say, a bit of a difficult situation. Is there anything we can do? Yeah, I mean, I think this is the problem with consumerism more broadly is that, you know, consumerism, the value of consumer rights movements. And there are some very, you know, EFF has its origins in consumer rights groups like Buick and Edry or fundamentally consumer rights groups. The value of them is they work fast, right? Like consumer power is fast power, but it's limited power. And, you know, citizen power is slow. But consumers can't, by definition, can't shop their way out of a monopoly. Right? Like the making better consumer choices, making better individual choices will not solve monopolism because the whole point of monopolism is that the meaningful choices have been taken off the table. That's the real problem of monopolism is the way that it distorts our public policy. And so for that, you need to be involved in democracy. And so to be involved into democracy is to not think of yourself primarily as an actor whose voice is felt through purchase decisions, but rather through someone who's part of a movement. And, you know, the good news is that there's a wide political spectrum of mainstream political movements that are concerned with monopoly right now. And it's not, you know, the exclusive purview of the left. I mean, the right for a long time were universally cheerleaders for monopoly. But increasingly, you know, they're like, they were like, well, I was fine when Facebook was de-platforming anti-pipeline activists and trans rights activists. But now that Alex Jones is gone, I'm, you know, where will AFD meet if not on Facebook? And so now suddenly they're all worried about monopoly. And, you know, the risk is that they will structure their anti-monopoly remedies in ways that actually just make the monopoly stronger. The big one of those is arguing for more intense, more fine grained accountability for moderation decisions. And the thing about that is the reason that Facebook makes bad moderation decisions is not merely because Mark Zuckerberg is not well suited to being in charge of the lives of 2.6 billion people. It's because, like, no one on earth should have that job. And if we say, all right, you've got to moderate all the bad stuff or moderate better or not have more false positives or whatever, stop harassment or anything else, all we do is we create this, like, floor underneath which no one can afford to participate as an alternative to Facebook. And that just makes Facebook the endless monopoly. And I fear that both the right and the left, for their own reasons, are in their anti-monopoly energy going down the wrong path here. And so this is where we need people in movements who are technologists and understand the technology and can say in the same way that we've said now for decades, whenever, you know, someone says, oh, well, we need to get rid of cryptography and replace it with cryptography with lawful access backdoors, and that will only let the bad guys, that will only let the good guys in and won't let the bad guys in. And we say to them, look, you know, I am here as your constituent, as a technologist, as someone who works in the field and I'm going to explain to you what's at risk and why that doesn't work, you know, in words that you can understand. We need to go in and have those same conversations about moderation and about this idea that, like, it's not too late for a dynamic internet that we can aspire to something better than a slightly more responsible Facebook, that we can aspire to a more self-determining, more pluralistic internet where you don't have to hope that Facebook cleans up its act. You can just go somewhere else whose policies you like better and still talk to your Facebook friends. And as you just said, activists and all the bad stuff, we have some more questions here. You also said something about that dividing and fracture line before where workers were divided. And I have a question. Why do all those most many left-wing communities split up about fundamental discussions while right-wing people just stick together and, yeah, trying to work together for benefits? Well, I think that it's multifaceted and that characterization is not entirely true, right? Right-wing movements do have really serious fracture lines. In Canada, our conservative party was, like many conservative parties, one of these chimeras where you have wealthy people and social conservatives. And the wealthy people say, you know, vote for our tax breaks and we'll punish women who have abortions. And they fused this coalition. And in Canada, after the Mulroney years, he was our helmet coal equivalent, the conservatives were in such bad odor that they polled less than 12% in the election, didn't qualify for free office space on Parliament Hill, and the party broke up and became two parties, the conservative party and the reform party. And hilariously, later on, they reformed. And there was at this party, all-party conference, and the naming committee went into a closed room to figure out what they were going to call the new party. And they came up with the Canadian Conservative Reform Alliance Party, which is crap. And no one noticed until after the press release. But conservative parties fracture all the time. They have really serious grotesque fracture lines. So the Republican Party is in major disarray at the moment and will probably be in worst disarray after the election. The run-off in Georgia in January, if they lose control of the Senate, because money talks and bullshit walks. If your program doesn't deliver the majority that allows you to enact the wider program, then you are discredited and you lose your seat. I mean, the British Tories have undergone the same thing. That's what Brexit was. It was a split in the British Tories. In terms of the left, there are lots of reasons the left splinters. Some of it is what Freud called the narcissism of small differences. You call it free software. I call it open source. We can't be friends anymore. Some of it is legitimate differences, which there are real meaningful differences between, say, liberals on the left. And there are lots of places where they agree, but there are irreconcilable differences. And when it comes to those breaking points, the alliance is going to fall apart. Personal friendships may endure, but the wider questions are going to drive it apart. And then I just watched a video with Boots Riley, the guy who made Sorry to Disturb You. He's a revolutionary rapper. And he talked about the history of the protest movement in the U.S. and the trade union movement. And one thing that is really underreported, including to my shame by me in the last nine months, is that the U.S. had more wildcat strikes than at any time since the 1940s, strikes where there wasn't a union that was unsanctioned. And they were in support of the same issues as the protests that got all the coverage, Black Lives Matter and so on, but they didn't draw the coverage. And Riley was on the show talking about the way that the left, including the radical left in the U.S., moved from strikes to protests, where the primary mechanism for enacting a program of change was protest and not strikes. And he said that it came from the anti-communist witch hunts of the 1950s and 60s and that the trade union movement to avoid the penalty of being tarred as communists by the witch hunters, by the McCarthy hearings, they backed away from radical political agendas. And they became effectively part of the establishment. And that the radical left split off and they declared that student movements were the future of radical political change. And student movements, they can have symbolic strikes, but a student strike is not a strike in the way that a worker strike is, right? A worker strike is really fundamental. Like at its core, a worker strike is the argument that who gets to decide how things get made and who gets to own those things should be in a different set of hands, should be differently organized. It is a foundationally different project than a protest. A protest is about what the people in charge should do and a strike is about who should be in charge. And he says that the legacy of that today is that we focus our energies on the outcomes of our political arrangements, which are structural racism, sexism, inequality and so on, but we don't talk about the underlying structure anymore. We don't address the underlying structure. We may talk about it in our protest, but we don't address it with the most tried and true direct action tool we have for changing those structural arrangements, which is striking. And I just listened to that yesterday and I've been thinking about it ever since. And I think that it does reveal a really like non-trivial distinction between different ways of looking at theories of change, and it's not that kind of cartoony like Marxists care about class and everyone else, and they're all white dudes, and then everyone else cares about gender and race. It's about understanding how anti-communist witch hunts and how like a deliberate like normative and political project to discredit a certain ideology change the way that we talk about what our political aspirations might be. And it's a really important distinction. It really matters. I'm still trying to digest it, but you know, I'm thinking about it ever since. We have, as we said just before, we went online with the fireside chat here by the way, and I'm really happy that we're exploring this, yeah, probably for us a new format of a talk for chat. I'm really happy to have people here in the room with us. So this will be for all the other fireside chat, another invitation to pop in and ask your questions directly, and be here with us in the room. And we have people in the audience who have a really big question that probably all of us have. It's 2020 for all of us, and 2020 is somewhat demanding. And how do you manage to not get depressive over activism? So how can you stay positive with all the stuff happening and all the opponents we face in activism? Yeah, you know, I would lie if I said I hadn't felt a lot of despair this year. I mean, you know, lucky for me, the way that I cope with stress is by working. So, you know, it's not entirely great because when I work without balance, you know, when all you do is stick your face in your computer and work, then your emotional health suffers and your physical health. I have a chronic pain problem and I hurt myself so badly a couple of weeks ago that I was actually walking around in a cane, literally just from sitting too much and neglecting my physical welfare, not doing the self-care that I need to manage my disability. So, you know, it's not been great for anyone. You know, I'm working on this utopian novel right now, The Lost Cause, which is a novel set after a Green New Deal in which people have oriented themselves to the long project of dealing with climate change. And so that includes things like a 300 year project to relocate all the world's cities 20 kilometers inland and really big structural changes to cope with hundreds of millions of refugees that we know will come and orienting our work around contingency plans for months at a time when you can't leave your house because of wildfires. And it is indistinguishable from an environmental dystopian novel, except for the fact that the people in the book don't feel helpless. They know what's coming. They know they can't stop it, but they know that they can prepare for it. They can do stuff that will manage it. And so for me, that's like, you know, back to the theme of my the talk I just gave, self-determination, right? The ability to have like a say in how this stuff works out, to know which parts are parameterized and which parts are set in stone. That is, I think, the thing that that keeps at least some people sane and dedicated and acting. And so this is, you know, the upside of activism, right, is like doing something to try and make a difference may feel hopeless and exhausting, but try doing nothing to make a difference and to just be like, you know, tempest tossed, smashed around by the by the breaking down system. That's for me anyway, much, much harder and more stressful. And, you know, ultimately, like my view of the world is that we cannot operate a theory of change like a novelist. We have to operate a theory change like a programmer. So novelists, you know, posit this like reductionist, simplified way of getting from A to Z, where you have an ending, you have a beginning, and you work out the steps to take you up a dramatic curve and then down and through your day-to-mall, right? And programmers, when they work with like non-trivial data sets, they know that the terrain is unknowably complex, that if you try to enumerate the whole terrain and find an optimal path through it, that you would, the terrain would have like altered by the time you'd finished. And also the moment during what you want to do the job would have passed. So you can't figure out how to get from A to Z, if you're writing code, that you can't find the optimal way, the one true way, the best way. Instead, what you have to do is hill climb, right? You have to like ascend a gradient towards a better future, like the victory condition you're looking for. You might end up stuck in a local maximum, you might have to do some like hill descent in order to do more hill climbing. But in order to get from A to Z in software, you assume that if you can ascend the gradient to a new area of the terrain, that from that new area, new terrain will be revealed, that you can't see from where you are now. And that the best way to map the territory is to traverse it. And that even if you have some reversals, even if you have to double back on yourself to get all the way through it, you will still have done a better job than if you had tried to do it perfectly all at once the way a novelist does. And so whenever things look shitty and scary, I just say like, if I can think of one thing that I can do that improves my situation, that I will find myself in a new zone from which I might have new courses of action that I can't even imagine now. And that's what keeps me going. It may not make me happy, but it's a reason to put one foot in front of the other. Yeah, I think we all need that. We do have two more questions in the chat or two and a half. And we have like three minutes left. So can we get two short ones probably? Ion, you're first of them. Hi. Hi, Corey. Hi, Corey. Thanks for your work. Amazing. I love it so much. And I read all of it whenever you publish something new. I want to ask about the book for the win. And I love that much and it showed the world that games are actually a market, a big financial market, and the environment, the setting of the scene feels a bit like there could be more stuff happening and the end of the book felt a bit open. I don't want to spoil it to anyone, but it felt a bit like there could be more. What would it take for you to write a sequel to For the Win? Well, you know, I wrote For the Win when I was as part of my reckoning with Great Financial Crisis and also as part of my marriage because I married to a former professional quake player. And so she was at GDC when the first Gold Farmer came forward. And so Gold Farming was like a thing that I was really interested in. I was really interested in the burgeoning, you know, games economics world, Yanisvar Fakas working for that Icelandic game company and so on. But today I'm far more interested in heterodox economics and particularly in modern monetary theory. And I think that if I were ever to revisit this, I don't know that I would, but it would be what would be a really interesting way to revisit this would be to do an MMT lens Gold Farming novel. Yes, please. It sounds great. Please. Okay. So we see a next novel coming up there. And we have one last question from Cage, please. Hi, Corey. Thank you for the talk. Really, really great to have you here. So given everything that you've said about monopolies, massive unchecked corporate power and so forth, what is one realistic thing that we could all do to combat this that would actually have a significant impact? And I actually have a second quick follow up on that. What's the one thing that truly brings you hope in all of this? Well, so the one realistic thing is you can't do anything individually. You have to do it collectively, right? So you have to find a political movement. And this is my point about the right and the left and different kinds of parties and so on. You have to find a political movement that is orienting itself towards monopoly and towards dealing with monopoly. You know, our policymakers are even the ones that perceive a problem with monopoly don't perceive the political will to do anything about it yet. You know, I debated Vestager from the audience last year at Reboot and in, or not Reboot, Republica in Berlin. And she was like, we can't do breakups. They take 15 years and cost too much money. She needs to have political and social movements who have her back who say 15 years to break up Facebook sounds good to me. Let's spend the money, right? And to get there, it's not an individual thing. It's a social thing. It's being involved in a political party in a political movement that is engaged with this. Larry Lessig talks about the world being regulated by code, norms, markets and law. So you can have this normative discussion with your friends. You can bring them along to the idea that all of their problems have a common origin that it's monopolism. You know, if you have a British friend whose local government collapsed last year because of Carillion, you can say, oh, yeah, the big four accounting firms, which were allowed to buy all of their competitors and merge with a bunch of consulting services, they audit the books of all these companies, including, you know, Wirecard, and they forge the books for their customers and allow them to steal from us, right? So that's not a problem of corruption in the accounting industry. That's a problem of monopoly. And then you can get involved with your party, with your social movement, if you're involved with, you know, with NetsPolitik or if you're involved with EFF or if you're involved with Quadrature, you can say, look, this is my priority too. At EFF, we have an anti-monopoly group now that's been working for the last year. And now that anti-monopoly has come to tech, EFF's job is going to be for the next years to come is going to be making sure that anti-monopolists understand the technical dimension, that they don't inadvertently create more durable monopolies by fighting it. We need those technical experts. So, you know, like in the same way that the one thing that you can do about climate change is to find a political party that cares about climate change and then demand that they take meaningful action, the one thing you can do about monopoly is to get involved with anti-monopoly movements because your individual action isn't going to do enough there. It's too little. As to what gives me hope, I mean, the thing that gives me hope is we have gone from anti-monopolism being like a fringe thing that nobody cared about and that was just laughable to it being central in like literally less than a year, like a year ago, a year and a half ago, right? March 2019, I stood on a stage in Berlin and argued with Europe's top antitrust enforcer about whether we would ever break up Facebook and she said we wouldn't, right? And she's the most powerful, most active, most techno-prisoners antitrust enforcer in the world. Today, we're ready to break up Facebook. It might take a decade, but we went from this is impossible to let's get doing it in less than a year or just over a year, right? That is remarkable progress. It might seem slow, but like it's a doubling curve. You know, it's got momentum, like get behind it and push with whatever group, with whatever organization you're involved with, push and push and push. What gives me hope? That's what gives me hope. And this is a wonderful ending. We are unfortunately out of time. People saying they like this format and I think we'll see a bit more of that over the RC3 and I'm really, really happy, Kari, that you were the first of our authors doing a fireside chat and probably we'll have some progress on turning over publishing industry at some point. Well, for sure. And I have to say, it is an honor and a privilege as always to speak at CCC and I'm really indebted to you volunteers and the people who make it happen every year. It's a remarkable event and I'm looking forward to actually seeing you folks in person again soon. I hope I can come to Leipzig for an in-person one next year. Yes, please. That would be really great. Thank you very much, Kari.