Cory Doctorow Explains Why Big Tech Is Making the Internet Terrible
https://jacobin.com/2023/05/cory-doctorow-big-tech-internet-monopoly-capitalism-artificial-intelligence-crypto/David Moscrop
I want to start with your new book, Red Team Blues. First of all, fantastic title. The catalog copy describes it as “a grabby next-Tuesday thriller about cryptocurrency shenanigans that will awaken you to how the world really works.” You’ve written fiction about proprietary technology, 3D printing, uploading consciousness, surveillance, and lots more. Why cryptocurrency this time?
Cory Doctorow
Well, I think that there’s a mode of what you might call service journalism that can carry over into fiction — and science fiction is really good at it — which takes ideas that are complicated and extremely salient, and that are treated as a black box by readers, and unpacks them, sometimes around a narrative. I think of Margot Robbie doing this in The Big Short when she’s in a bathtub full of bubble bath, explaining how credit default swaps work and collateralized debt obligations.
There’s this kind of performative complexity in a lot of the wickedness in our world — things are made complex so they’ll be hard to understand. The pretense is they’re hard to understand because they’re intrinsically complex. And there’s a term in the finance sector for this, which is “MEGO:” My Eyes Glaze Over. It’s a trick.
You give someone a prospectus so thick that they assume it must be important and good in the same way that when you give someone a pile of shit that’s big enough, they assume there must be a pony under it. And so I wanted to take that complex technical stuff going on with crypto, an arena in which I think there is mostly no “there” there, and do exactly that: show how there’s no “there” there in a story about someone who’s trying to figure out whether there’s a “there” there.
This is not in the catalog copy, but it is super important to me: one of the plot elements in this book, and it’s not a spoiler, it’s in the first chapter, is about how secure enclaves and remote attestation work. And this is super nerdy stuff that I’ve been obsessed with for twenty years. It’s basically a way of designing computers so that I can send you a computational job that your computer then performs and then you send the output back to me and I can know for sure that the job was performed on your computer to my specifications and not tampered with by you.
And there are lots of really interesting applications for this, but it’s also incredibly dystopian, right? Because it means that I can send you a keystroke monitor because I’m your boss and know that you’re not interfering with it. It’s basically a way for the computer to treat its owner or user as an adversary and allow a third party to control them with it. That’s the explicit architectural design. And there are some cryptocurrencies that are based on that. They’re kind of peripheral, but cryptocurrency is the first application for these that isn’t entirely sinister.
It may sound esoteric, but the way your iPhone stops you from installing third-party software is the same model. It’s this kind of remote attestation digital signing, secure enclave business. And as you can tell from just hearing me describe it to you, this is incredibly eye-watering, technical, deep, weird, complicated stuff. I happen to think it’s unbelievably important for the future of technological self-determination. And one of my major projects since 2002 — when the first Microsoft white paper about this came out — has been to try and get people to go like, “Oh wait, this is a big deal.” This is in some ways my latest bite at that apple."
(lots more on capitalism follows)
