Steve Thomas: Cory, thank you for joining me on the podcast.
Cory Doctorow: Hey, thank you very much. It’s a pleasure to speak to you.
Steve Thomas: We mentioned before we started recording that you were on the podcast back in 2013 at a Chicago American Library Association conference many, many years ago. And back then you told us about your library habits. It’s when you were living in London, your daughter was five years old at the time, and I was wondering how has that changed since you’ve moved from London and now you have a teenager as a daughter, how have your library habits changed?
Cory Doctorow: Well, she doesn’t go to the library as often as she used to. I think more school library now than Burbank Public Library, but I’m still a member of my local Friends and I’m still a member of the Friends of the, so I live in Burbank which is its own little city next to L. A., so I’m a member of both the Burbank Friends and the L. A. Friends. And of course, I have spent a lot more time accessing electronic materials, especially through the acute phase of the pandemic, when we were locked down and not able to access and in fact, it was really important after I had a couple of pretty significant surgeries, had a couple of hip replacements that grounded me and being able to get at ebooks from the library system was really important during that time.
Steve Thomas: Yeah. And I went back to, listen back to the earlier episode, and a lot of the same issues are with library ebooks now as they were, 11 years ago, 12 years ago of all the DRM and everything, yeah.
Cory Doctorow: Color me unsurprised. Yeah, with the big difference that being now that a rapacious private equity company owns the major ebook provider, so.
Steve Thomas: Yes.
Cory Doctorow: That definitely will make things better. Every language on Earth contains the phrase, “As great as a private equity company.”
Steve Thomas: But I do wonder, I keep up with your Pluralistic newsletter, basically a brief story, and then a bunch of links. I have trouble keeping up just with reading it so I wonder, how do you manage your information intake? What do you use to help filter information coming to you that then you push back out?
Cory Doctorow: That’s the filter.
Steve Thomas: Okay.
Cory Doctorow: The filter is, I read a lot of things. I have a couple thousand RSS feeds I subscribe to and a couple hundred tabs that I open every day, sometimes twice a day, in Firefox, and that’s what I’ve done since forever. There are a few newsletters that I get by email, but to be honest, I mostly delete email newsletters. If I’m going to read your newsletter, I’m probably going to read it by RSS. And I have a kind of philosophy of media that it’s probabilistic that the good things come around more than once and in fact this creates a role for kind of boosting, liking, scraping and reposting, blogging, because what that does is gives the work a second chance, a second bite at the apple. I always figure that the people in my network will retweet, repost, re-Mastodon, blog about, or add to their link dumps, all the things that I’ve missed. And so I don’t worry too much about missing stuff. It’s actually a very Zen, like close the tab, close the tab, close the tab.
I’m also with all these years, I get pretty good pattern recognition. So I’ll be like racing through my RSS feeds and then I’ll go, “Oh, there’s one about eight back that I should have gone back to” and I just, you know, hit the K key eight times, and right, that is a thing that I am interested in that went past really quickly. But the way that I make sense of it all is I synthesize it into a great big blog post. And so I’ve been doing that for nearly a quarter of a century now. I’ve written between 50 and 60, 000 blog posts, and I have that archive d on a private site as well as on the web that I can search with pretty good tools. WordPress has got really good command line searching, underappreciated and under-documented command line searching. You can in the URL, like hit question mark- S -equals- quote- phrase, and then you can add Boolean operators, and you can then confine the search by category, so if you’re tagging the stuff as you write it, it’s really easy to pull it back out again.
I will often have a couple of tabs hanging around in my main window that are like the things I’m going to write an essay about in the next day or two. And as I’m going along, oftentimes I will just remember other stuff related to it, pull it out of my archive, or I’ll search my archive for related keywords, and then I’ll find, oh, yeah, this is connected to that, and so I feel like the first 20 years of blogging were about accumulating a corpus, and my next 20 years will be about synthesizing what’s in it.
Steve Thomas: One of the things that I think is interesting is you can kind of see your thought process as you’re reading along, because you’ll come back to topics over and over again, but it’ll be a different tack at it every time, but you’re hitting kind of the same topics. You can almost, from reading especially these newer books, you can see your new books almost being birthed. It’s like, “Oh, I remember when he wrote about that two years ago, on the site!”
Cory Doctorow: A hundred percent. I mean, that’s always been my method is to approach this stuff by keeping notes for books that I don’t know that I’m writing and until eventually all of those notes kind of collide in my subconscious and like nucleate and crystallize into ideas for books and things.
I write as a way of coping with stress and anxiety. Something that started cause I have chronic pain and I found that when I worked, I didn’t notice the pain so much. And it’s become a general strategy of, you know, mixed benefit. Sometimes it makes sense to be paying attention to what’s going on around you, but on balance I’m pretty happy. I’d rather be energized to work from stress than paralyzed, and it did mean that during lockdown I wrote nine books. Part of it was because I just had notes for, like, 90 books already written, all sitting there in my blog corpus and so I just pulled those notes out and that was how I wrote all those books and I’ve just contracted for a tenth.
Steve Thomas: I was gonna say have you have you published all nine of those already now?
Cory Doctorow: No. There’s still a short story collection, an essay collection, a novel, and a graphic novel, so five of the books have come out and four, still to come out and then the one more that I’m writing which will come out around the same time as all those others.
Steve Thomas: Great, and so before we get into the book, The Bezzle I wanted to ask about a concept that’s come up that I think you popularized, or at least you put a name to, of enshittification, and I wonder if you could talk about what that concept is and why it’s so important.
Cory Doctorow: Yeah, sure. So, platforms are the endemic form of the internet, which is weird because a platform is an intermediary and the internet was going to be a disintermediating force. And so what they intermediate between are end users and business customers. So, like, think about Uber passengers and Uber drivers, or eBay sellers and eBay buyers, and all of these platforms have started to go bad at once and they started to go bad for both their business customers and their end users. Platforms have gone bad before, like MySpace isn’t around anymore in any meaningful way, but the difference today is that so many of them are going bad at once and despite the fact that they are really hollow, like lacking any value and often a net detriment, they’re not going anywhere and we can’t seem to stop using them.
And so enshittification is a theory about why this is all happening. And given the time that we’re living through, it takes the metaphor of a pandemic. In a disease, you have the symptoms and enshittification symptoms are very characteristic and hard to miss once you know what they are, which is you have a platform that’s good to end users, it attracts those end users, it locks in those end users, and then it is worse to those end users, but good for its business customers. It brings in those business customers who wanna sell to those end users, and it’s then it’s worse to them. Then finally, all the value is drawn down and returned to shareholders, leaving behind just enough residue that the platform judges that everyone will stay locked in, and then the thing just turns into a pile of shit.
But this raises the question, as with any pandemic, as with any illness, not just what’s going on externally, but what’s going on internally. What’s causing these symptoms? And I think the mechanism by which these symptoms are manifest has a lot to do with the flexibility of digital platforms. The digital platforms, by dint of being digital, make it very easy to change the business rules from minute to minute and second to second. The best example of this would be something like Uber, where the drivers draw a different pay for every ride based on how picky they’ve been lately. So picky drivers get paid more for rides that are offered to them than drivers who are less selective, and the result of this is that drivers eventually become less selective because they’re being offered more money, but then the wage starts to toggle down by random increments, not every time, in a way that’s very hard for the driver to notice, but eventually you end up in a position where on the upswing you got rid of all the things that you used to do that let you be so selective about your Uber driving, all the other side hustles, and then on the downswing you’re trapped into a spiral of ever worsening wages, and that’s a thing that is just hard to do without digital backends.
Tennessee Ernie Ford wrote lots of songs about blackhearted coal bosses, but those guys, as much as they would have liked to change the wages for every coal miner in the pit, just couldn’t build a boiler room full of guys in green eyeshades big enough to change everyone’s wages from second to second, and so they just couldn’t do the thing, and so this digital mechanism or digital nature of platforms allows them to cheat in this very high speed way. It’s not necessarily that the tricks are sophisticated, but they are really fast. And if you’ve ever seen the Cup and Balls, the shell game, you’ll know that it’s not a sophisticated trick; it’s just a quick trick. The quickness of the hand deceives the eye, as they say.
And then there’s this question, why is it all happening now? Why are these platforms all sickening now? What’s the contagion? What’s the blight? And I think it’s that they used to be more constrained. That platforms used to have to worry about competition and about regulation and about interoperable technology like ad blockers or alternative clients or other kinds of technological interventions that not only deprive them of the rent-seeking that they were engaged in but also severed their relationships. Once the customer starts buying third party printer ink or buys a refill kit, you just don’t get to sell to them at all. You don’t sell to them at the price that you were selling at before you inflated the prices. You sell to them never again. Once the ads get so intrusive on your website that they install an ad blocker, they will never see an ad again. No one ever goes back to the search engine and types in, how can I start seeing ads again? And so they were constrained by this as well.
And finally, they were constrained by the power of their workforce. Tech workers don’t really think of themselves as workers by and large. They don’t have a lot of solidarity, they’re not unionized, but they sure were in demand, and that meant that they could tell their bosses to go to hell when their bosses asked them to make things worse. And they often did, not least because one of the ways that their bosses motivated them, given how much bargaining power they had, was by appealing to their sense of mission and convincing them that they were sort of heroes of the tech revolution, and so they cared a lot about what they’d made, and as a result, they didn’t want to make it worse.
Well, today, all those constraints have gone away. We stopped enforcing antitrust for 40 years. We reached this period of enormous market concentration with five or fewer firms dominating every sector, including tech. They’re so inbred, they’ve got corporate Habsburg Jaws. Then when these companies get this concentrated, they capture their regulators because they can all agree on what their regulators should be doing and they have so much money left over because they’re not competing with each other. So they buy their way to regulatory glory and then that regulatory glory means not just that they get to flout the rules. Amazon can cheat you or Uber can cheat you or Google can cheat you and say, it doesn’t matter we violated your privacy, your labor and your consumer rights, because we did it with an app and the regulator goes, “Oh, it sounds plausible to me.” It’s also that, when you have regulatory capture, you can mobilize the regulator against your market entrants.
So we see the expansion of IP rights. So in the library universe, we have libraries that are not allowed to buy e books, and where we see this monotonic expansion of copyright where the hard won precedents of things like HathiTrust that let us take our collections and digitize them ourselves so that we can own those books are being eroded, and you see the shameless attack right now on the Internet Archive that could really end controlled digital lending and the ability of a library to actually own its books. If a library doesn’t own its books, it’s not a library. It’s just a Blockbuster Video for ebooks and so we see the expansion of IP taking away the threat of interoperable technology. You can’t really make a third party ink cartridge anymore the way you used to because reverse engineering the security chip is a felony under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. No one adds ad blockers to apps because reverse engineering the app is a felony. So these companies are insulated from rival technology.
And then finally, their workforce has lost its rarity value. These are companies that could collectively fire 260,000 workers last year. You know, when Google does an 80 billion stock buyback and then fires 12,000 of its technical staff, that’s a sum that would pay their wages for 27 years, and that’s not just a message to their shareholders, here’s 80 billion dollars, that’s a pretty straightforward message. There’s a nearly as straightforward message to their employees, which is, you are replaceable. And the next time you say you don’t want to enshittify the product to order, you can turn in your badge because there’s someone else will take your job, which is a little object lesson about how the bargaining power that comes from being scarce is nowhere near as durable as the bargaining power that comes from solidarity in a union.
And so all of these together, these constraints melting away, means that the same people running these companies pulling the same stunts they’ve pulled for 20 years, saying, well, why can’t we make the website worse? Why can’t we make the privacy violations more egregious? Why can’t we put more barriers between the user and the things that they’re seeking? Why can’t we pay our suppliers less? Why can’t we collect a bigger spread? Why can’t we raise prices? The answer is you can. It used to be you couldn’t, and now the answer is you can.
So this is why they’re all turning to shit all at once. The thing about the enshittification hypothesis is that it doesn’t just diagnose this disease, but it suggests some remedies that fall pretty obviously out of those constraints, which is that we have to restore competition, we have to free regulators from their capture, we have to create an IP regime that is more respectful of the rights of users, and we have to make sure that tech workers get their power from something more durable than rarity, and that means unionizing them.
Steve Thomas: Yeah, and it is most visible, I think, in the tech industry, and they’re best able to do that twiddling that you talk about but, you know, affecting libraries with the e books, it’s also publishing, publishing is only five, was almost four, now it’s still five, for now.
Cory Doctorow: They don’t have those digital back ends, although they’re trying to build them. This is one of the things about e books versus print books, is that you can change the price on an e book every time someone buys it, and you can embed very fine grained rules. In fact, this was always the argument for digital rights management in e books, is they said, “Oh, you know, not everybody wants to buy the book. Someone might just want to rent the book. Or maybe they just want to get the right to read the book in England, but not in the rest of the world. We could sell them a cheaper book. We could sell them a book that you can only read while standing on one leg while located in a 20 square foot radius around the Statue of Liberty, right? And we can make that offer. Maybe there’s someone who’s like doing a little Tai Chi while waiting for their friends to get out of the Statue of Liberty, and they’ll only pay a nickel for the book, but that’s a nickel the author wouldn’t get, the publisher wouldn’t get, and it’s a book that the guy wouldn’t read otherwise!”
And what you find is that all of this stuff is not a way of making more attractive offers. It’s a way of nickel and diming you. It’s a way of loading up digital offers with junk fee after junk fee after junk fee and saying, Oh no, no, no. We’ve made it cheaper. Your landlord says, “Well, I’m offering you a discount on the rent because the thing where I charge you $3 to pay with a check and $5 to pay with a debit card and $6 to pay with cash and $17 if you bring me bags of pennies. That’s just me giving you choices about how you want to pay and you can choose the most advantageous and convenient one!” And it’s just a pure rent extraction, a pure junk fee.
Steve Thomas: Yeah, it’s getting rid of that whole first sale doctrine, it’s just, it’s never selling you anything ever again. You’re renting everything forever.
Cory Doctorow: Yeah, and if it’s digital, they can do this. This is Mercedes selling you the accelerator pedal in your new car. They want to rent you that pedal by the month. That’s the actual deal with a Mercedes. And it’s Medtronic trying to say, “Well, if you buy an insulin pump, you are implicitly promising us that you will only use the glucose monitor that we sell and not one of our competitor’s glucose monitors,” basically turning people with diabetes into walking endocrinological inkjet printers.
This is rampant across the board. Everyone says, “No, you didn’t buy it. You entered into a contract. That contract was defined by the 30, 000 words of legalese you clicked through. It included binding arbitration. So forget asking a judge to interpret it. Oh, and by the way, if you read to the end, it says we can change its terms at any time without any penalty to us and without notice.” And it all boils down to like the contract over the gates of hell and the inferno, right? Abandon hope all ye who enter here, or by being dumb enough to use this product, you agree that we’re allowed to come over to your house and punch your grandmother or make long distance calls, wear your underwear, and eat all the food in your fridge.
Steve Thomas: Right. Well, and you can see with all this financial chicanery going on, you can see why you would want to create a forensic accountant for your hero of your story.
Cory Doctorow: Oh, nice segue!
Steve Thomas: So can you tell listeners who Marty Hench is? And what happened maybe in the first book, very basics about spoilers, and then what the setup is for this new one?
Cory Doctorow: Sure. As I say, I wrote a lot of books during lockdown, and one of those books was this book called Red Team Blues, and it had a kind of weird conceit. I thought, what if you wrote a book that was the final adventure of a beloved rapscallion private detective type. In this case, a forensic accountant who specializes in unwinding high tech finance scams and has been at it for 40 years in Silicon Valley, Martin Hench. What if you wrote the final volume after 25 volumes of this guy’s adventures? Something that the reader would have followed for decades, and it’s an event. The last Martin Hench book has come out and you read it and you did that without ever bothering to write the previous volumes. Just, like, grand finale energy, right?
So I wrote it, and I sent it to my editor, a guy named Patrick Nielsen Hayden, who’s been my editor for a million years. I love him. He’s like an older brother to me and he won’t think that I’m doing him wrong when I tell you that he’s not a very reliable email correspondent. So I definitely expected months to go by after sending him this book, but instead I got an email the next morning. It was just three lines long and it said, “That was a fucking ride. Whoa.” And he called up my agent and he bought three of them, which then presented a conundrum: the conundrum being what do you do when you’ve written the final volume, right?
Now there is some precedent for this. Arthur Conan Doyle brought Holmes back over Reichenbach Falls, but he did that because Queen Victoria offered him a knighthood. My editor is a very powerful man in New York publishing, Vice President of the Macmillan Company, but he cannot knight me, and I kind of felt like Marty had earned his retirement. So, I got to moping, and then I got to thinking, and then I realized you could write these books out of order. And that if you write them out of order, sure, you lose the bit of suspense about whether he’s going to die in this book. But honestly, in any long running series, you know the protagonist isn’t going to die, right? Because they announce it when it’s the finale. That’s the only one he could possibly die in. So apart from that, you get all these advantages, like, you don’t have to worry about continuity when you’re writing the series backward, right? Because you’re not foreshadowing, you’re backshadowing.
The more stuff you throw at the wall just, like, randomly, the more premeditated you seem, because you can make it all pay off later, right? And so I’ve now written three of these. I’ve got two more on the drafting board, and the one that’s just come out is called The Bezzle. B-E-Z-Z-L-E, not B-E-Z-E-L. B-E-Z-E-L, that’s the black rectangular on your screen. B-E-Z-Z-L-E, that’s John Kenneth Galbraith’s name for the magic interval after the con artist has your money, but before you know it’s gone, where everyone is feeling better off.
And while the first of these books, Red Team Blues, was a cryptocurrency heist set in the 2020s, this one is set in an era that I think of as a long bezzle, a time before the other shoe dropped, when we’d all been conned but didn’t know it, and that was the time after the Dot-Com Crash leading up to the Great Financial Crisis, a time when a lot of us felt a lot richer, as the housing bubble was taking off and there’s a lot of money sloshing around in the economy. The Saudi Royals had opened the spigots and given this guy, Masayoshi Son, who ran a venture capital fund called SoftBank billions of dollars, and then he, in turn, gave that to Yahoo, and then Yahoo, in turn, used it to buy every promising and exciting Web 2.0 company and just destroy it with internecine warfare among its many warring princelings in the Yahoo empire.
And that’s who Marty is involved with in this book. His best pal is a guy, Scott Warms, who sold a company to Yahoo and does not want to work for Yahoo and is waiting to vest and has figured out that if he takes all the vacation time entitled to him, even the vacation time that even the French employees won’t take, he can take, like, a long weekend every week and probably several weeks off plus some four day weekends.
So he’s spending his time on Catalina Island waiting to vest out and do something more important with his life and he and Marty fall in with this crowd. These real estate people are quite wealthy and fun to be around. Unlike tech bros, they’re not always trying to talk to you about their startup. They’re just hanging around drinking good booze and doing the odd discreet line of coke, and meanwhile Catalina Island is one of the most beautiful places in the world and they’re really enjoying it, but they discover a Ponzi scheme that’s being run by one of these guys, and that threatens to take down the entire island.
All Ponzi schemes are the same structurally, but they all have some unique thing they’re selling: essential oils or leggings or Amway. In this case, it’s frozen hamburgers because William Wrigley Jr., the guy who founded the Island of Catalina and who founded the Wrigley Chewing Gum Company and more importantly, bought all the gum trees in Australia and elsewhere so that every other chewing gum company had to pay him to make them and if any of them ever came up and started nipping at his heels, he just cut off their supply of gum and then they couldn’t make gum anymore and that’s how he became rich enough to buy an island and the Chicago Cubs, that’s why they play in Wrigley Field.
And so he didn’t like fast food. There’s no fast food burgers on the island. And, you know, islanders, there’s three or four thousand of them, they love the odd burger just because it’s exotic, and this gets exploited in this Ponzi scheme where flash frozen burgers smuggled from the mainland become a commodity that’s traded. Nobody ever really eats these things. You’re just selling the right to sell the right to sell the right to sell hamburgers. The hamburgers themselves are as unimportant as those empty safe deposit boxes in the sky that real estate speculators turn our homes into. And they decide they’re gonna detonate this Ponzi scheme before it can take down the island, and this earns them the enmity of the scammer in charge. He manages to fit up Marty’s friend for a couple of felony convictions, and that eventually lands him in prison with a life sentence because California has three strikes, three felonies, 25 years to life, and that is where the real scam gets going, that’s the real bezzle.
Primarily, this is a revenge book about prison tech. It’s about how these prison tech companies have convinced prisons up and down America to get rid of their visitation rooms, their phone calls, their postal mail, their parcel mail, the library, continuing education, TVs, radio, and replace them all with so called free tablets, but you have to pay between two and five times what someone on the outside would pay for it. Meanwhile, you’re doing forced labor for an average of 53 cents an hour in the American prison system. If you’ve read your Constitution, I had to when I became a U. S. citizen; I’m a Canadian. We’re like serial killers. We’re everywhere. We look just like everyone else. If you read your Constitution, you know the 13th Amendment permits slavery in the case of prisoners. So these people are earning 53 cents an hour or less. Six states bar paying prisoners at all. North Carolina caps their wages at a dollar a day. They’re paying five dollars to have their kids’ hand-drawn birthday cards scanned because they cannot get it delivered. They’re paying 15 or 20 dollars for an e book, sometimes books that are free in the Gutenberg Project.
And moreover, because these companies are so attractive to private equity because if there’s one thing capitalists hate, it’s capitalism, right? If you can have customers who can’t shop anywhere else, that’s the glory of private equity. They’re getting bought up and rolled together, and every time they get rolled together, they change backends, they change technology providers, and whenever that happens, that greeting card that you paid $5, which is 10 hours wages to have scanned, five years into your 25 year prison sentence, that greeting card is deleted along with everything else that you bought there.
So this is the scam that Marty and his friend, who is now locked up for the rest of his life, set out to take on and to craft a revenge plot related to it that is quite ice cold and quite high stakes and that’s the story at the crux of The Bezzle.
Steve Thomas: Yeah, and you touch on a couple of other issues like music royalties as well. There’s a little side story there of that stuff.
Cory Doctorow: Yeah, the music, the royalty theft is actually based on the story of George Clinton who had his royalty stolen from him by his manager. This is a story of a hypothetical funk artist who’s had his royalty stolen by his manager and been pauperized as a result, the mechanism by which those royalties are gotten back as is real, and it’s also how George Clinton got his money back, which is something called Termination of Transfer. 35 years after you sign a contract to transfer a copyright to a third party, so to sell your books or your music or your movies, no matter what that contract says, no matter what you promise, you can file paperwork with the U. S. Copyright Office after 35 years and get that copyright back. Stephen King’s done this for his early novels, the woman who wrote The Babysitter’s Club and the woman who wrote Sweet Valley High did this for the whole series. Dean Koontz did it. The people who started Marvel all did it to Disney, and Disney had to pay them hundreds of millions of dollars to get a reassignment of the copyright, including Stan Lee’s estate. He was like, “Yes, I sold Marvel Spider-Man 35 years ago, now I get to ask for him back. Yes, I know we sold Marvel to you, but Marvel doesn’t own Spider Man anymore!”
So it’s quite an amazing thing. I am a volunteer with a charity called the Authors Alliance. I’m on their advisory board, and we at the Authors Alliance, together with Creative Commons, have built a copyright termination tool primarily aimed at scholarly authors, although anyone can use it, but it’s scholarly authors who have sold their work to journals and then seen those journals gouge the institutions that paid them to produce it and who want to get it back and make it open access. And I think I misspoke there. I think I said they sold their work to journals. Of course, that’s not true. They give the work away to journals. Journals don’t pay for the work. They also don’t pay for the editing. That’s done by scholars. They get all the free labor and they don’t subsidize the research, of course. That’s all paid for by the institution, by the taxpayer in many cases.
Steve Thomas: They just take the money.
Cory Doctorow: But then they get to lock up that knowledge. Yeah, they just take the money. And so we have seen many scholarly authors execute Terminations of Transfer and take critical works, widely cited works, works that you might buy a subscription to a journal just to have that one work in your collection because it’s so important if you’re the right kind of academic collection, and they terminate those transfers and make those works open access forever. That’s, I think, a wonderful thing.
Steve Thomas: So, you mentioned that the books are reverse chronological order. Have you already started, is The Bezzle seeded with some things that if you read Red Team Blues you’ll catch, and then same thing with the next one?
Cory Doctorow: No. Yeah, if you read them in the order they come out in there’s one experience, but it’s not the only experience. There are multiple experiences you can get reading them in different orders, and they’re written with an eye to readers who haven’t read the whole series or haven’t read them in order.
Steve Thomas: I didn’t know if there were like little hints of little Easter eggs for people…
Cory Doctorow: There’s bits and pieces, but you know, they work in both directions, so there’s a love interest in Red Team Blues, and Marty is, in interludes in The Bezzle, breaks off, and goes to the present day, to the 2020s, and is speaking to someone who is that love interest. So, if you read Red Team Blues first, and then you read The Bezzle, you’re like, “Oh, I recognize that character. Oh, that’s nice. They’re still together.” If you read The Bezzle first, then you get to the love interest in Red Team Blues, you’re like, “Oh, that’s who he was speaking to in The Bezzle!” those are both nice effects. They’re different effects, but they work in both directions. It’s like an ambigram or palindrome.
Steve Thomas: That’s great. And then you said you know there’s at least one more, and then you have a couple more you want to be writing as well?
Cory Doctorow: Yeah, there’s a couple on the drawing board. I gotta write this nonfiction book. I’m writing an enshittification book and then I’m gonna get back to fiction. I gotta write one more Little Brother story for the Little Brother short story collection, too. And then back to novel writing. Bang out a couple of novels. You know, it’s hard to say what the future holds for me. I wrote all these books. Until they’re all out and publicized, it’s just a lot of work when they come out. You spend a lot of time on the road and doing interviews and stuff. It’s hard to think about big life choices.
My wife works for one of the movie studios and she’s a tech executive. During lockdown when the tech companies were trying to recruit, they were offering lots of money to tech executives, and the studios offered a lot of stock to people who stayed, but on long vesting schedules. So around the time all these books will have been published and publicized, she’s going to also have finished vesting and gets to decide whether she wants to take early retirement, because the company she works for would let her retire at 55, or whether she wants to stay in harness or do something else, and then my kid will be off at university by then. We’ll have a lot of flexibility and it might be, I say, “Oh, well, take a couple of years off, travel the world and then write those two books!” Or maybe I’ll lean into doing it, or maybe I’ll do both cause God knows I’ve written a lot of books while I’m on the road.
Steve Thomas: Right. And do you think this could be like a series that you’d just pop into every five, ten years from now just write another couple of them?
Cory Doctorow: Yeah, I sure do. Look, he’s been in Silicon Valley from 1982 to the mid 2020s. He has seen every single high tech scam that could possibly exist. He is the Zelig of finance crime. If you name a moment in which something really gross happened in Silicon Valley that ripped off a lot of people, I can put Marty there.
I lived through a lot of that firsthand. I got out to Silicon Valley in well for the first time in the mid-nineties for a couple of years, and then in 99 and I worked in tech for all that time, and I’m very interested in those scams, and there’s a lot of them. A lot of our golden heroes had feet of clay, and it’s fun in a cathartic way to write about all the ways that what seemed at the time like something wondrous had a pretty seamy underbelly, whether that’s Steve Jobs parceling out labor to assemble Apples to mostly Vietnamese women in apartments in Silicon Valley who are working in effectively illegal sweatshop factories as contractors for sub starvation wages, or the Enrons and other big Ponzis.
Steve Thomas: I mean, we know Microsoft’s a big thing with the Department of Justice. I’m sure Marty could get a piece of that too.
Cory Doctorow: Yeah, for sure. By the way, if you’re listening and you haven’t ever seen Bill Gates’s deposition in the Microsoft DOJ case go watch it. It is a remarkable piece of video. I think it was the first viral video. It got passed around on VHS cassettes. It is now on YouTube. You have never seen Bill Gates more raw and honest and despicable in your life.
Steve Thomas: Yeah, it’s funny. Younger people who just see him as like the philanthropist guy who’s saving the world from mosquito-borne illnesses and everything, it’s like, he’s a different person if you’re a Gen Xer.
Cory Doctorow: Yeah, and also like sexually harassing his employees and cheating on his wife and convincing the Cambridge team not to release their COVID vaccine patent-free for use in the global south and instead to license it to AstraZeneca and charge governments a fortune for it and limit access in the poorest places in the world to vaccines and cause millions of extra deaths because of a religious belief and IP rights and also as a dilettante who has funded, spent millions of dollars funding the dismantling of public education with charter schools that are experiment with the lives of the poorest children by lowering educational standards, smashing teachers unions, and turning out students who do not have the education they deserve or need to thrive in the world.
He’s quite a piece of work, Bill Gates. I might have to write that…
Steve Thomas: Jonas Salk, he is not.
Cory Doctorow: Yeah. Yeah.
Steve Thomas: So is the next Hench book, is that supposed to be sort of book one in the series?
Cory Doctorow: Yeah, it’s 1982. It’s called Picks and Shovels. It’s a book about him in Silicon Valley in the 1980s during the heyday of the weird PC, and he is involved in a company run by a Mormon bishop, a Catholic priest, and an Orthodox rabbi who make proprietary predatory computers that they sell through faith group pyramid selling. And so, they’ve re-sprocketed their printers to take special paper that takes five times as much on their fanfolds, and they’ve gimmicked their floppy drives so that you have to use a floppy that’s been damaged just so at the factory; otherwise it rejects it as not an official floppy disk. And this is just a way to lock people into an ecosystem.
Steve Thomas: And it’s always fun to read period pieces like that of when it’s in my lifetime, “Oh, I remember those kind of floppies…”
Cory Doctorow: It’s fun to write this in San Francisco in the 80s, Silicon Valley in the 80s, because there’s so much going on. Jello Biafra is running for mayor, the Dead Kennedys are playing every week, but also the AIDS crisis is ripping through the country, and this is the center of queer America and it’s the center of ACT UP and queer activism. So all of that stuff is in this book too.
Steve Thomas: And we’re going to get young Marty who maybe is not as confident as maybe as the older Marty who knows he can do everything.
Cory Doctorow: Nowhere near as confident. Yeah, a lot of lessons to learn.
Steve Thomas: Well look forward to that one. That’s going to be out early 2025, is that right?
Cory Doctorow: February 2025. Yes. As we record this, I turned this in about the final, well, maybe not the final, but the edited manuscript after my editorial note. I turned that in about three, four hours ago, so all done and filed away.
Steve Thomas: And we all look forward to that one. And I don’t want to get too much into it cause I don’t want to get in too much time, but can you talk a little bit about how your strategy for audio books these days, so you can avoid Audible?
Cory Doctorow: Yeah, so, you know, Audible is a monopolist owned by Amazon, also a monopolist. They have about 90 percent market share, and most importantly for this discussion, they require digital rights management, which I assume I don’t have to explain to librarians for all of this. Although, what librarians might not know is that Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act makes it a felony to break DRM, even if you’re not infringing copyright. So that means that every time I sell you an audiobook locked with DRM, it means that Jeff Bezos has won over on both of us because if you leave the service, you lose your audiobooks. If I leave the service, I have to ask you to lose your audiobooks to follow me somewhere else. This means that the more I sell, the worse he gets to treat me without my departure. The kind of apotheosis of this was in 2022, there was a scandal called Audiblegate. where Audible was caught stealing a hundred million dollars from independent audiobook authors in wage theft which they’ve never repaid, but they have such a lock on this market that most of those writers who were stolen from stayed on the platform.
So instead, I make my own audiobooks. The fact that you can’t sell my books with DRM means that my publishers don’t want my audiobook rights. They’re quite good about this. Macmillan is like, “Yeah, we’re with you on your crusade against DRM, so we’re just gonna let you retain those rights rather than saying, well, we’re not going to pay you as much, or we won’t buy your books at all because audio books are now so important to the commercial life of a book.”
So I go into a studio, and I pay a director. I pay actors. In the case of the Martin Hench books, they’re read by Will Wheaton. He’s a wonderful reader. I’ve read a couple of books myself this year. Those have come out really well, working with this director, Gabrielle de Cuir, is really transformative for my ability to read my work, really helped me actually think better about how I write my work, and then I pre-sell them through Kickstarter. Makes a big splash, so lots of people find out about them. And then I sell them everywhere that is not Audible, Apple, and Audiobooks.com. It turns out all the stores that start with A have mandatory DRM. Everywhere else sells them. Google Play, and Libro, and Spotify. Even Spotify will let you sell them without DRM, and I sell them on my own website. Ninety percent of the sales are in that Kickstarter. They’ve done really well. I’ve had a half dozen of them, each of them in the six figures range. Although obviously that’s not net, but still it’s a tidy little launch. And I pre-sell the hardcovers, I pre-sell paperbacks of previous books, I pre-sell the ebooks, then I deliver them all on the on sale date. So that’s been terrific. My publishers love it. My editors love it. My agent loves it. Everyone makes money on it. The audiobooks are DRM free, and I make a lot of readers happy.
Steve Thomas: And I love that you make certain chapters available on Audible that are, like, the most critical of Audible. And that’s the chapter that’s available on Audible.
Cory Doctorow: Yeah, I wrote a book with Rebecca Giblin called Chokepoint Capitalism, about creative labor markets and entertainment and tech monopolies. We have a whole chapter on how Audible steals from authors about Audiblegate, and so we made that chapter an Audible exclusive, and it’s the only part of the book that’s available on Audible. I also wrote something about how Audible stole three thousand dollars from me, which they did, and I called it, “Why None of My Books Are Available in Audible and Why Audible Owes Me Three Thousand Two Hundred and Something Dollars and Something Cents.” It was just a blog post I wrote, so I read it aloud and stuck it up on Audible as an Audible original. It’s there mostly because people search for Cory Doctorow on Audible, and they don’t find anything, and so they assume that none of my work has been adapted for audio. What that article does is directs readers to where they can actually buy the book, and I encourage them at the end of this audiobook to return it for a refund. I have no interest in selling that audio book.
Steve Thomas: A great bit of white hat trolling.
Cory Doctorow: Yeah, indeed.
Steve Thomas: So I want to wrap up with two questions that I’ve been asking all the authors who are coming on the summer reading episodes. The first one is what was your first favorite book? What early book did you like the best?
Cory Doctorow: Well, I think the most important one was Alice in Wonderland. In my second grade, I went into school and picked it up off the shelf while we were taking off our boots and getting ready for class, and I just sat down next to the cubbies and started reading it. I’d never read a chapter book to myself before. My mom taught kindergarten in that school, and my teacher had co taught with her, and she kind of looked at me and figured, you know, “I bet Cory’s mother would be fine with this,” and so she didn’t call me to class, and I just sat there all day and I read the book. That had a huge impact on my life as a reader. Also on my life more broadly, I am married to a woman called Alice, and I don’t think it’s a coincidence.
Steve Thomas: Then the other question is, we’re putting together a summer reading list from all the authors, is there a book you’d like to add to our summer reading list, either something you’re reading now or a favorite from the past, whatever you want to add?
Cory Doctorow: Yeah, I’ve got a weird one for you. It’s called The Steerswoman by Rosemary Kirstein.
Steve Thomas: Oh, you just wrote about that recently!
Cory Doctorow: Yeah, so you might know who Gretchen McCullough is, Because Internet, she’s a linguist who writes about how language has evolved on the internet. So she told Randall Munroe, who writes XKCD, “Hey, Randall, there’s this science fiction novel from the 80s, or this genre novel from the 80s, called The Steerswoman. The original edition had a giant spoiler on the cover. They only published three of the series of seven. The author got the rights back. She’s published it in the ugliest self-published edition you can imagine. Print on demand. And it’s amazing, and there’s a big secret in it, and if I told you what it was it would ruin the book, so I can’t tell you what it’s about. I think you should read it.”
So Randall then, when we were out for dinner after we did an event for The Bezzle, when I was in Cambridge, Mass, we did a thing at Harvard. Randall lives in Boston, and the building caught fire while we were doing our talk, and we had to evacuate and go to a different building and finish it, which we did, and everyone came, even though we had to cross a quad and go up five flights of stairs, and the building didn’t burn down or anything. It was a small electrical fire but boy oh boy. So then we were out having dinner afterwards and Randall tells me this story. So I’m like, “Okay, you can’t tell me what it’s about.” And he’s like, “Nope.” And I’m like, “You can’t even tell me what genre it is.” He’s like, “Nope.” ” And the book’s really ugly and looks like a terrible self-published book that someone would try and sell to you at a book fair and you may buy because you didn’t want to be rude, but you would never read.” He’s like, “Yup.” And I’m like, “Okay, I’ll give it a go!” And it’s really good. It’s really, really good. I’ve read three of them now. She’s written five, I think, and there’s seven planned in total. They’re really good, and I can’t tell you what they’re about.
I had not heard of this, but it’s on like big lists, like there’s a bibliography by a couple of important science fiction critics of the 100 most important books in the back third of the 20th century, and it’s in that list, right? Like it is a really good book, and it has lots of gigantic fans. Basically some publisher should buy it and repackage it and sell it.
Steve Thomas: Hopefully somebody will!
Cory Doctorow: It’s too good. It’s too good to be languishing the way it is now.
Steve Thomas: All right, well, Cory, thank you so much for coming on the podcast again. I really appreciate it hearing about the book and the process of putting it together and all the other financial little misdeeds that are being done. If only we had a real Martin Hench in the world.
Cory Doctorow: Yeah. If only, huh? Well, thank you. I really appreciate it.
Steve Thomas: All right. Have a great day.
Cory Doctorow: Yeah, you too.
***
Steve Thomas: I hope you all enjoyed that interview. Now let’s throw it over to The Circ Desk with our friends from Library Reads and NoveList.
Rebecca Vnuk: Welcome to The Circ Desk! I am Rebecca Vnuk, the Executive Director of Library Reads, and for those of you who are not familiar, Library Reads is a registered 501(c)(6) not-for-profit that started as a volunteer organization in 2013 when a group of 12 librarians brainstormed on how they could harness the power of library staff recommendations to create a nationwide list of recommended reads. Library Reads is different from a bestseller list or an awards list in that it’s always pre-publication books, and it’s not picking the best of anything. There are no juries or committees, but the list is voted on by the library world at large. Anyone who works in a public library in any capacity is eligible to get advanced copies of books and vote for them for the monthly top 10 list. Please check out our website, libraryreads.org, to view the current list and get more information on how you can join us in creating the list.
Yaika Sabat: And my name’s Yaika. I’m a librarian working at NoveList. If you’re not familiar with NoveList, it is a database with thousands of titles extensively tagged by book experts that you can get through your public library.
NoveList has been making recommendations easy for 30 years. It’s actually our 30th anniversary this year. As a librarian, it was my secret weapon for matching readers with the books that they’ll love. And now as someone who works at NoveList and someone who works Book Chat, which is our live recommendation service, I still use the database all the time to find the books that are the right match for each reader. And it’s one of my favorite things to do.
Rebecca Vnuk: We’re both very excited to be part of this new little segment on the Circulating Ideas podcast, known as The Circ Desk, where we are going to just sit and chat about different books that our organizations are promoting. So for this one, we’re going to tackle some cyber thrillers. I know that one of the current books that we’ve been looking at is The Bezzle by Cory Doctorow. Yaika and I, we looked at NoveList for some read-alikes, we looked at Library Reads, and we first of all decided, okay, what are the appeal things about this particular kind of cyber thriller? We know it’s a financial thriller. I really loved, we were chatting about this off microphone, the theme that they have in NoveList is “Vacation Interrupted.” It’s just like, that is such an awesome appeal, like how very specific, and yet how wonderfully broad, right?
Yaika Sabat: Well, you don’t think about “Vacation Interrupted” for thrillers necessarily, but in this case, you know, the lead character, Martin, he’s just trying to have a little vacation on Catalina Island, and as often happens in a thriller, he sort of stumbles upon something greater. So yeah, his vacation’s a little bit ruined because he suddenly has to stop a scheme which, you know, I think is just a fun idea.
Rebecca Vnuk: It is, and it adds a little, it’s kind of a different element to the thriller, right? It’s like one more layer of stress. So Yaika, when you were looking at the awesome resources in NoveList, did you come up with some read-alikes that matched and what are some of the terms maybe that people could be looking for?
Yaika Sabat: Yeah. So when you’re looking at cyber thrillers or techno thrillers, it can be called one or the other. There are some like descriptors or we call them appeals that you’re going to see a lot. So you’ll want to look for words like fast-paced, suspenseful, dramatic, compelling. And then you’ll also see some themes that are pretty common, like having a shadow organization be involved, or someone being on the run. Those are similar elements you’re going to want to look for if you enjoy a book like The Bezzle.
And while I was searching, I actually noticed that there are a few other techno thrillers that you might want to check out that came out this year. The first is Sentinel by Mark Greaney. The next is Deep Freeze by Michael Grumley. And while this one’s not a techno thriller, if you want an intricately plotted thriller with that “Vacation Interrupted” theme specifically, then you might want to look at the Ellen Warner novels by Sarah Pearse. The first one in that series is The Sanatorium. Very different environment for a vacation, but it carries on that theme of someone trying to relax and then everything’s thrown in upheaval.
Rebecca Vnuk: They thought they could get out and they get sucked back in!
Yaika Sabat: Every time.
Rebecca Vnuk: Every time, every time. Well, when I was looking at the Library Reads archive to see what we might have in there that would be a good sort of read-alike for this, I wanted to point out to folks, we now have 1600 titles in our archive. We’re very excited and proud about that. We do as, as most folks know, we’ve been at this for 10 years now and we do. Top 10 every month, and then we’ve added the Hall of Fame, which is authors who have made the list multiple times. So in any given month, we say it’s our Top 10, but honestly, it always ends up more because we have the wonderful Hall of Fame and we’ve got some Bonus Picks as well.
June of this year, June 2024, as a matter of fact, we ended up with 27 recommendations because we had our Top 10, we had our two Bonus Picks, and then we had 13 titles on the Hall of Fame. So that was very exciting. I actually go in myself to enter those into our archive, which can be easily found on our website. It’s a Google Sheet. So when I entered them in this month, I realized, “Oh my gosh, we’ve hit 1600.” So 1600! Now, we of course do not have the fantastic metadata that NoveList has, so you can’t sort by these great appeal factors and things like that, but our list can be sorted by a number of different things, including the genre that it’s in. It also can be sorted by the publisher, which is usually helpful if it’s an imprint, and then you can of course do your control-F and just do a search for keywords.
So I started thinking about the keywords that I found in the NoveList reviews and I was like, “Oh, okay, great. I’m going to just do cyber thrillers and see what comes up. And I’m going to do techno and see what comes up.” And the one title that I think I’d like to bring up because it was a recent one is from our November 2023 list, and it’s called The Future by Naomi Alderman, and this one is not really an exact match because it’s not really financial or anything espionage or anything like that. But I thought, oh, the techno theme, the cyber theme would appeal to people.
So I’ll just read off the little annotation really quickly. This comes from one of our users, Linda Quinn, who is one of our Library Reads Ambassadors, in fact, and she wrote, “What would happen if three companies, think Amazon, Facebook, and Twitter, were removed from the world and their money put towards saving the planet and all of the people on it? Alderman once again places the reader in a world that is falling apart, run by greedy billionaires who don’t care what damage they do as long as they keep making more money. Look to The Future and get an idea of how that might go for us.” So I thought that would be a good match off of the Library Reads list.
Yaika Sabat: And I think sometimes it’s okay not to have an exact match. I think we all know that because we’re all readers ourselves and we’ve worked with readers that sometimes you want something that’s similar, but just has a little bit different to keep it interesting. And I personally love looking at the library selections and then putting them into NoveList and seeing the read-alikes that you can get that way. It’s a wonderful way to play around and I think that Library Reads and NoveList work very well together that way. It gives me a lot of reading inspiration.
Rebecca Vnuk: Don’t we though? I think we’re a nice, like a dovetail joint, fit together very nicely, and hopefully people are our users, and if you have any questions for me about Library Reads, you can reach me at rebecca@libraryreads.org and I know Yaika is happy to talk to people about NoveList too, I bet.
Yaika Sabat: Yes, happy to talk about NoveList, happy to talk about books. If you want to reach me, you can get me at ysabatat@ebsco.com and that is Y-S-A-B-A-T at E-B-S-C-O-dot-com.
Rebecca Vnuk: Alright, so I think that’s our first episode of The Circ Desk!
Circulating Ideas 