So tonight, of course, we have cory and brian merchant here to talk about bryans new book, which is out yesterday called blood in the machine. And coreys new book is out just a couple of weeks ago called the internet con. Its very exciting stuff. People. So theyre going have a conversation and then well open at the end for some questions. So of something penetrating, hard hitting, but also a question not a long story. And then well have book signing to finish out the night. So i think everybody is familiar, these two gents up here. But for sake of, you know, the ritual cory doctorow, a Science Fiction author, activist and journalist, hes on the stage, left side here. Up here. The internet con is the most recent book. It is called a big tech disassemble manual, which is the coolest subtitle ever. Hes also a prolific writer of fiction as well. His latest novel is red team blues, a techno thriller finance crime. Hes also the author of the International Young adult a little brother series. And i think a very cool note in 2020, he was inducted into the canadian science and fantasy hall of fame. Yeah. Yes. Well, i like to blame him when you cant. We also have brian merchant here of he is the Technology Columnist for, the l. A. Times, and hes the author of the national the one device the secret history of the iphone. Hes the cofounder of terra forum vices Science Fiction outlet, founder of gizmodos automaton examining a. I. And the future of work which is not relevant these days his writing has appeared in the new york wired, the atlantic, all of the good places. Hes also a of l. A. And of course, in l. A. Tier two. So locals. Nate, thank you so much for being here. You handed over to these guys. Thank yeah. Thank. So the order of service. This is this is bryans first event for this book. Ive done a couple of these, but the Order Service tonight is bryans going to introduce and talk about his book. Im going to introduce and talk about my book. Were going to entertain questions, as youve heard a question is a single sentence that has one pertinent to it goes on the end. It has never more of a comment than a and then were going to make your books non returnable with sharpies. And so im going to im going to hand it over to bryan now and but before i do i beg your pardon, i want to thank the folks here at chevalier as it is an odd privilege to have great independent bookstore in your neighborhood. This something a lot of people in this country and all around the world no longer have. As a recovering bookseller, i hope you support them tonight. Whether thats by getting our books, which you should do. But also they have many other books written by many other people, some of whom are even better than us. So you should you should really shop around. Yeah, ill second that. Cheers. Thanks for having us. Okay. Well, thanks everyone for coming out. I am pretty thrilled to be doing this first talk with with corey putting this book in dialog with with his book. I as will become clear a lot of these themes do some pretty heavy overlapping and we will be talking about tech titans and exploitative tech lot of people regimes and how. Resist and smash both so a few words about blood in the machine which is as of 24 hours ago or so this book has been about five years in the works. I have been researching and writing about the luddites and the modern day luddites for for for about that time, the research me to england to the Industrial Districts where a lot of this took place. I stayed a with with luddites scholar who lives in an weavers cottage that was only partially electrified so. That was fun for a week i got the true luddite experience experience and what became clearer and clearer to me, and i think lot of people over that period of time as we saw the election of donald trump and facebook misinformation and utter consolidation of. Big tech which corey is going to speak to much more eloquently than i. And then the results of all of that, which is punitive technological regimes that control and exploit labor. The rise of the algorithmic work platform. And now this year the introduction of generative ai which is being used often as a tool by employers and and managers to as leverage workers. Right. As a, as a way to automate work or to threaten automate work. Its been a major Sticking Point in the just resolved strike. If anyones here cheers to that. The wga. So without belaboring the point too long, i just want to say it just could not be more. Im so thrilled. Of course im so thrilled for the writers who stuck it out in this protracted battle. But what they were doing and well get into it more, is essentially letting them it letting them in way that it was meant to be in the way that it was actually carried out, practiced not as the terminology of today has led us to believe. It is a refusal to be exploited by a technical object. And the writers and now and the actors and, everyone else whos followed suit have done a Great Service by drawing a red line and saying, part of our contract will be that the studios will not use ai to produce our work or to or to be used as a tool that they will then take the output and then offer us less less fees, less have less control over the product less and less economic benefits. As a tool, as technology so often is, to again to disrupt a work regime and to suppress wages. So they done us all a great debt of we owe them all great debt of gratitude for standing up and kind of pointing the way because will enter our all of our workplaces its weaseling its way into mine as a journalist and the l. A. Times its i can i can hear, you know, the rumblings at the gate. So all of that put together this the book is the story narrative story of the luddites the people whose lives were affected by this first disruption and the lessons we can draw from from from that story. Sorry if i went long, but no, that was great. Yeah. So i brian and i have known each other for many years. And in fact, he bought a book from me when he was at medium. He bought a little book called how to destroy surveillance. That started as a review of Shoshana Zuboff book about surveillance capitalism and turned into a book all on its own. Because it turned out i had thought and and i needed to write them down and i that the book ive just published, the internet con kind of continues on those themes. So for more than two decades ive worked in digital human rights with, the Electronic Frontier foundation. And thank you very much. And if youre not an f member, i hope your consider joining and my work at tff has been hampered by a couple of different factors. One is that a lot of the issues that we care about are quite abstract until theyre not. And like a lot of technical questions like how much carbon can we released into the atmosphere they can seem like boring and abstract until everythings on fire and then it might be too late. So a lot of my work is has involved trying to get people to care about stuff but another part of my work and this is where how to destroy surveillance capitalism comes in and this book too is when do start to care about it. They sometimes care about it in ways that are counterproductive. And so, for example, i think we should be very worried that our bosses have like rock persistent for firing us and replacing us with shell scripts. But i dont think we need to worry that ai is going be better at us, better than us at writing. I think that just like the bosses who fired all those people who are good at answering phones and directing your call and replace with Interactive Voice Response systems, you say no. 17 now, 17, 17 no. One seven. Operator. Operator. Operator. I think that that they are perfectly willing to fire all our and make something defective and then try and get you to buy it. And i think that that is a reason we should worry. And i think thats thats really coherent. The story of the luddites. So for me, the book that i wrote now ties in with brians book and with both our interest in Science Fiction. So there is a great villain of history, a woman called margaret thatcher, whose favorite motto was there is no alternative. And the point of there is no alternative to dress up a demand as an observation and to really say stop trying to think of alternatives. And my job as a Science Fiction writer is try and think of alternatives, right . To say what if we had the same machine, but who would did things for and who things to were different. And a lot of the people who are critical of technology in ways that i think are counterproductive are unable to imagine that. So the foundation there are a bunch of people who are the internet has been reduced to five giant websites filled with of text from the other four. As tommy spence says. And the real problem there is the wrong people are running those websites right. Mark zuckerberg is the wrong person to be the unelected social media czar for life for 4 billion people. We need someone better or we need to make him better at that job. And theres another current in technology criticism that i think is the luddite current that like maybe that job shouldnt exist, maybe we should dismantle. Maybe no one came down off a mount with two stone tablets and said, zuck, stop rotating your files and start mining them for actionable market intelligence. Right . Maybe theres a way that we can talk to each other without being spied on. And so that the trick that the mill owners who prosecuted their vicious war against the textile workers played, its the same trick that the tech barons today play is to insist that the menu they presented to us cannot possibly be to be decomposed into an ala carte menu, that if want to search the internet, youve got to get spied on. If you want to have a computer thats safe, youve got to let a giant company in cupertino decide which software you can install on and take 30 out of every dollar if you want a taxi. The person driving has to be on food stamps and there is no other way. There is no alternative. And the cool thing about Digital Technology, the exceptional thing about Digital Technology that my book really tries get into in some technical detail is that we really only know how to make one computer. And its the universal turing complete von document machine, which has a lot of fancy words that mean the only you know how to make is the computer that can run every program we can write. And so you can always write a program that will do the thing the shareholders it wouldnt do. And the third party ink or let you install Third Party Software or block the ads or let you talk to your friends without being spied on or leave twitter, but continue to send messages to the people who arent ready to go and thats the thing that stands in our way is policy. And the luddite book that that brian wrote blood in the machine talks a lot about. Policy is very contingent. And fragile, right. That the luddites when they rose up they were angry the law said that the mill owners allowed to put in these machines without talking to them first and Parliament Said we dont care. We passed the law. We dont care. In fact, were going to make a new law that says that if you take an oath to support the luddites, were going to hang you. Right. And i think the lesson here is that when industry is so large that its too big to fail and too big to jail the law ceases to protect us. But the corollary is that if we can cut the firms down to size, if we can bleed off the users that are their sources of profit, if we can rein them in on a technical level, then we can make them weak enough to rein on a legal level. And so most of my book is about establishing a shovel ready technical program, doing just that, describing policies that we can use to do it. And ill finish in a minute. Maybe we can go back and forth. But i want to explain the theory of change that comes from one of margaret thatchers favorite, a guy called milton friedman. He is my archenemy. He was architect of neo liberalism and he was a freak. And he wanted to rollback all postwar gains and get people to start tugging their four locks for their social betters again. And people would say, milton, people like sending their kids to university and like having retired in weekends and overtime and health. How are you going to convince them to like go back to the victorian age . And he said, you know, in times of crisis things that are on the periphery can move to the center very quickly. Our job is to have good ideas lying around so that when the next crisis strikes, the impossible can become the inevitable and i like to quote friedman because i like to imagine that he looks up from that spit hes been roasting on since satan took him to hell in 22 and gurgles a curse around the red hot iron bar protruding his jaws while the demons laugh and more molten on his skin. But more to the point, there is no stable configuration or technology in one mediocre doofus. Mark zuckerberg is in charge of 4 billion peoples lives, which means that we are lurching crisis to crisis and because we lack any good ideas, lying around with each one of these crises, we do the same thing we did last time, but harder and hope for a different outcome. And i think there really is a version of the future that comes about because we start to talk about and think about how things could be different, what the alternative could look like. So when the moment opens, the alternative we can demand it. And i think thats a maybe a kind of wishy washy to do. I think a lot of us would like to be able buy something, makes the world better or like our recycling better and save planet. And i think ultimately like you cant shop your way out of the monopoly like. Ultimately, these are problems that we solve as a polity because their structural problems and we solve them socially. Yeah. So bryan yeah. No, absolutely. And i think that is such an important point because if you, you know think about the luddites, if you knew who the luddites were, you know, what, what was our baseline understanding of the luddites, right . Its theyre theyre dummies who didnt understand the technology that was being developed all around them, the awesome technology. And they hated it. And they smashed it because they didnt understand it because they knew not they did. Right. And this is this is a fiction as sort of carefully constructed as any of coreys fictions are, because it really behooves the the the the elites, the the folks that we like to think of as, you know, as sort of the tech titans of our day. I like coreys book opens with a brief look this this idea of of tech exceptionalism, right. As as these prime movers who, you know, are handing down technological and we should just thankful for them and if you were able to question part and parcel what they were doing or ask that maybe we the system so theyre not you know handed hundreds of millions dollars in Venture Capital to do as see fit or to pull levers and change the configuration as they see fit then they might run into some problems they might have to contend with ideas like the that that are central to terrorism book which i think we should touch on specifically which is which this idea of of interoperability because so of the digital problems we have have today you whether its on a social Media Network or its a you know, or on the web writ large on on amazon, on or on uber or lyft. So many of these these these these services, as courageous pointed out, have consolidated into unassailable monopolies that we just, you know, feel like if want what theyre whats on offer, we have no choice but to kind of play by the increasingly, increasingly punitive rules that are on offer. So especially on the social media and some of the digital platform front, interoperability is, such an idea that that is one of those ideas. You know could that could very well count as leftism that why people might want to you not have the true idea of on offer which is questioning or protesting the machinery thats hurtful to commonality thats they would say and the machinery that we have right now running our lives is pretty hurtful. The commonality and interoperability is a really interesting way to just sort of fix that can yeah yeah so you know interoperability on the one hand can be a very kind of mystical like anything can work with anything else you can sit in anyones chair and read a book. Someone else under a light bulb from a yet a third party. And no one gets to tell you what you can wear anyones socks with, anyones shoes and so on. But, you know, when it comes to digital, theres this like and profound interoperability that cant escape from try as we might. I mean, you know, as as a pretend computer scientist, i like to imagine that someday it would be great if we could make a printer that couldnt run viruses, because it would be great if we could make a printer that was a computer that could just spray ink on paper and not also infected with malware crawl your network and compromise all the computers on it and we dont know how to make that computer. We can only make the universal computer that can run all the programs. But if you think about a world in which we are broadly permitted, write those programs and run those programs, especially on the systems that we use and we own or that are part of our lives. You imagine how this might impose a third discipline on companies, so companies are disciplined by two forces. Normally, one is competition open and the other one is regulation. And really you cant have one without the other. If firms dont compete, they take the regulators right. When an industry is like five giant companies or three giant companies, no can regulate them. Any time you ask them a question. Is Net Neutrality good or can we use this concrete in our buildings and will they fall down in england . Knows what im talking about because other concrete buildings are falling down this year or you know, are these medical safe . We have amy ziering, who who made a wonderful documentary about how medical implants are. And i thought about it with every moment as both of my hip replacements being installed last year. All of those questions are questions that regulators want to know the answer to. But when ask it of an industry with only three companies and they all show and they go, no, its fine, its fine and everyone who disagrees is like a muckraking documentary filmmaker or an activist working for a nonprofit or an academic or someone running a micro company with seven customers and the regulator who, when the sector is down like three companies, is probably a veteran of at least two of them are the regulator goes yeah, its probably going to be fine. And then we all end up in a world of pain and