Cory Doctorow on The Wondrous World of the Early Internet & How To Destroy Surveillance Capitalism

07/31/22 • 44 min

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Pioneering blogger and science fiction writer Cory Doctorow has been an activist for online freedom since the early days of the history of the internet. He has long been one of the major voices opposing restrictive copyright and corporate domination, and a visionary defending a pluralistic online world where eccentricity and individuality are allowed to flourish. In books like Content: Selected Essays on Technology, Creativity, Copyright and the Future of the Future (which, like all of his books, is available in full for free), Doctorow has shown what an internet created by the people, unconstrained by intellectual property law, Digital Rights Management, and monopolistic corporate gatekeeping, could be like.

In this conversation, Doctorow joins to discuss the importance of a democratic internet, and his recent book How To Destroy Surveillance Capitalism, which argues that many people misidentify the main problem with what is called "surveillance capitalism," assuming that the problem is that corporations are amassing to manipulate us the power through intrusive collection of Big Data. In fact, Doctorow argues, the problem is less about a particular thing these corporations can do to us and more about the fact that monopolistic tech companies are in control in the first place. This has important implications, because it means that we cannot just regulate what companies do with our data, we have to fundamentally redistribute power over the internet. In this conversation, we talk about how Wikipedia provides an alternative vision for a participatory internet where the rules are set by users and there is oversight over governance. We do not need better and more benevolent Zuckerbergs. We need what Doctorow calls the pluralistic internet.

Cory Doctorow publishes a daily link blog at Pluralistic. His books can be found at his website, Craphound.com, and his archive of posts at Boing Boing is here. His upcoming book Chokepoint Capitalism (co-authored with Rebecca Giblin) can be pre-ordered here. A Current Affairs article about "surveillance capitalism" is here and Nathan's article about the magic of Wikipedia is here.

Previous Episode

Debunking The Right's Bad History of Abortion Laws w/ Leslie Reagan

Prof. Leslie Reagan is the probably the country's leading expert on the history of abortion laws. Her award-winning book When Abortion Was a Crime: Women, Medicine, and Law in the United States, 1867-1973 is the most comprehensive available history of the era of criminalized abortion before Roe v. Wade, and Prof. Reagan is quoted regularly in the press for her knowledge of US abortion history. Her book on abortion law is distinguished by the fact that it focuses not just on the text of laws, but on the enforcement process, i.e., the lives of women who sought abortions. She exposes how criminalized abortion, even when it does not prosecute those getting abortions, is a horror for women and creates an intensive regime of the surveillance and policing of pregnancy.

In this episode, we look at some of the history that the right chooses to ignore, including:

How Samuel Alito's view that there is "no tradition" of allowing abortion is completely historically ignorant.
Why The Economist is completely wrong to say that "there is no documented case in America of a woman being prosecuted for seeking an abortion since 1922." First, there is, and the outrage over one such prosecution helped fuel the movement that brought about Roe (see newspaper headline above). Second, even when doctors are the ones prosecuted, women could be arrested and coerced into giving testimony and subjected to intrusive interrogations by the state.
The horrifying realities of what criminalized abortion meant, including sexual coercion by unlicensed abortionists
How, even in the era of criminalized abortion, abortion was widespread and there was a divergence between the "public morality" of law and the actual practices indulged in, a fact that undercuts the idea of America as a historically anti-abortion country
How legalization was a way to bring law in line with actual social practices, and how Roe was not a spontaneous departure from law, but the result of a social movement that sought to expose what women knew but had not been able to say
Why Roe v. Wade was not a radical opinion, and in fact disappointed feminists, but came out of the Court's acceptance of the fact that criminalizing abortion was incompatible with any reasonable notion of liberty (though men of the Court appeared to care more about the liberty of doctors than women)

This is the third in our series of episodes on abortion in America. Part I, in which Carole Joffe explained the "obstacle course" that (even pre-Dobbs) faced those seeking abortion, is here. Part II, in which Diana Greene Foster discusses the empirical evidence that abortion makes women's lives better off, is here.

For an explanation of why Samuel Alito's legal reasoning was garbage, see here. For a discussion of how the abortion decision delegitimizes the court, see here. For the perspective of a doctor on how the decision will force medical practitioners to act unethically by withholding necessary care, see here. For more on the case of Shirley Wheeler, see here.

Next Episode

A Neuroscientist Critiques the Dangerous "Populist" Pseudoscience of Yuval Noah Harari

Yuval Noah Harari is an Israeli historian whose books have been major bestsellers, praised by Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, and Barack Obama. Harari not only offers a sweeping chronicle of the human past, but makes confident predictions about the human future. His visions of a future in which technology creates godlike humans has turned him into a kind of prophet, especially in Silicon Valley, though Harari insists he is a mere objective chronicler.

Darshana Narayanan is a neuroscientist and journalist whose Current Affairs article "The Dangerous Populist Science of Yuval Noah Harari," available in our March-April 2022 issue, shows that Harari's claim to broad-ranging expertise is dubious and the stories he tell often lack sufficient factual foundation. Narayanan argues that belief in these unsupported prophecies is dangerous and experts need to do a better job of spreading the true findings of their academic fields so that populist pseudoscientists don't become our go-to explainers of reality.

Today, Darshana joins to discuss her article and Harari's work. We talk about:

Why deterministic visions of the human future are both wrong and harmful, because they inhibit our sense of the possible
How many of Harari's statements become meaningless upon scrutiny, such has the idea that lions are more "self-confident" than humans
The comparison between Harari and Jordan Peterson, both of whom fill a void where a true culture of public intellectualism should be (the Jordan Peterson article can be read here)
How experts are strangely resistant to critiquing and engaging with "popular" books, meaning those books don't get rigorously fact-checked or refuted

The Sapiens diagram explaining the "economic history of the world" that Nathan makes fun of during this episode looks like this: