Podcast – Cory Doctorow's craphound.com

Post-political

This week on my podcast, I read Post-political, a recent essay from my Pluralistic newsletter, about the material, irreconcilable differences between leftism and other political beliefs. But when it comes to a “post-politics that is neither right nor left,” the definition I turn to most often comes from science fiction writer Steven Brust, who once told me: “Left” and “right” have had the same meaning since the French Revolution. If you want to know if someone is on the left or the right, ask them, “What is more important: human rights or property rights?” If they say “Property rights are a human right,” then they are on the right. That’s it. That’s the crux. If you think that property rights are a tool for achieving human rights, then you’re on the left. You might support the right of farmers to block attempts to expropriate them via eminent domain in order to build a data center, or the right of people to not have their homes or devices searched by cops, or a library’s right to own and archive digital books, even if the publishers insist that ebooks are never “sold,” merely “licensed.” MP3

Hell Is Other People

This week on my podcast, I read my latest Locus Magazine column, Hell Is Other People, about the solipsistic fantasy underpinning the AI bubble. Sartre was (arguably) an optimist. It’s not that other people are unpleasant: quite the contrary! There’s nothing that makes the day (or, pointedly, the night) sweeter than agree­able human companionship. And of course, for those tasks that exceed what you – or anyone – could do alone, other people are a necessity. Without other people, your aspirations could never exceed the things you would personally make happen, and if you’re honest, you’ll have to admit that this is a short list of things. Other people, then, are a thing that you can’t live without – and yet other people stubbornly insist on organizing their lives around their needs, their preferences, their desires, without any consideration for how nice it would be (for you) if everyone would just do whatever you tell them to do. Thus it is that our species has invented all kinds of technologies, like “language” and “persuasion” and “bureaucracy” and “ethics” and “religion” and “government” and “coercion” and “slavery” and “wage labor” and “guilt” and “duty” and “conscription” and “commerce” and “meetings” and “chore wheels” and “corporations” and “teams” that can be used to get (some) other people to (sometimes) act in ways that make your life better. After all, we have neocortices; the most recently evolved structures in our brains, that seem to specialize in understanding other people’s motives to aid in this endeavor. MP3

Zuckerberg’s increasingly bizarre war on whistleblowers

This week on my podcast, I read Zuckerberg’s increasingly bizarre war on whistleblowers, about Mark Zuckerberg’s campaign of terror against the whistleblower Sarah Wynn-Williams. More than a decade ago, a group of young, internet-connected Belarusian dissidents launched a series of increasingly high-stakes, increasingly surreal confrontations with the corrupt, authoritarian government of Alexander Lukashenka, a man who is often called “the last Soviet dictator.” Lukashenka’s secret police – still called the KGB – routinely terrorize and kidnap pro-democracy activists, and all forms of protest are banned. It was against the backdrop of this unrelenting oppression that the activists launched a series of whimsical “flash mobs” that challenged the Lukashenka regime’s willingness to crack down on even the most innocuous behavior. One of these flash mobs was an ice cream social: activists converged on a public square to eat ice cream cones. Lukashenka’s thugs beat them and dragged them away. MP3

The Reverse Centaur’s Guide to Life After AI launch at Kepler’s Books with Angie Coiro

This week on my podcast, audio from Sunday’s launch in Menlo Park for The Reverse Centaur’s Guide to Life After AI at Kepler’s Books with Angie Coiro. Catch me next tonight in Toronto at Osler Records, tomorrow in NYC with Jonathan Coulton at The Strand, Thursday in Philly with David Williams and Friday in Chicago with Rick Perlstein! MP3

The world has moved on

This week on my podcast, I read a recent post from my Pluralistic newsletter, “The World Has Moved On,” which analogizes Stephen King’s Dark Tower series to the Enshittification hypothesis. In the Dark Tower novels, we crisscross a fallen world in which decay is all around us. The buildings are rotten, the machines have stopped working and no one knows how to fix them, babies and livestock alike are frequently born with deadly congenital defects. Much of the world has fallen into wasteland, cracked and barren. An army of wreckers, led by the demagogue John Farson (who styles himself “The Good Man”) are slowly but surely conquering the land, laying waste to those few remaining outposts of civilization and conscripting the young men in the conquered lands to march on their neighbors. It wasn’t always this way. There was a time when the world was defined by hope and virtue and light, when the machines were fixed and the crops were harvested. Life wasn’t golden – there were still squabbles and sorrows and even wars – but life was good. And then the world moved on. For reasons that no one truly understands, the normal push/pull of decay and renewal turned into a one-way, irreversible process in which everything that crumbled or snapped or burned up couldn’t be repaired or replaced or recovered. Our mysterious ability to beat back the Second Law of Thermodynamics – an absurdity we probably should have always treated as an aberration – has collapsed. The world has moved on. MP3