The Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow

by Cory Doctorow

  The artistic business has always had this element of social contract; it’s never been merely an economic contract. The artist asks the audience to integrate her art into their lives, to listen to her arguments, to adopt her aesthetic, to hum her tunes to their children, to ruminate on her stories and tell them to themselves—to make her art part of their lives. In return, audiences don’t just acquire art, they purchase a part in an artist’s career. They feel a stake in it; they promote the art that they love; they do things that run contrary to their theoretical economic interest but that are in favor of their social interest and the interest of the artist that they love. They buy premium items, they buy spare copies, they buy copies just to keep on their shelves; they come out to see authors at festivals. They treat the artist’s material as though it were infused with the artist herself or himself.

  This isn’t the kind of contract that corporations are very good at, which isn’t to say don’t try. That’s why any sentence that contains the word “brand” is almost certainly bullshit. Because “brand” as it’s used in corporate board rooms is a way of fooling the customer into feeling as if she’s entered into a social contract, while carefully ensuring that there is no reciprocal contract on the part of the corporation. The customer is meant to tirelessly promote and support the brand, but the brand has no duties to the customer; it can even sue the customer for promoting the brand in a way that runs contrary to the brand identity endorsed by the brand’s owner.

  A world of open networks and social systems is one in which artists get more leverage; in which they can take on some of those very difficult tasks of publishing and building an audience, face fewer bottlenecks, pay less to do more, and get better deals from their publishers. This isn’t any guarantee that an artist will earn a living—I’ll say it again: most artists will never earn a living—but rather this is a way that ensures when art is bought and sold more of the money that results from those transactions goes to the artist.

  And now we’re on to the final piece of the puzzle, which is that information doesn’t want to be free, people do. In 1985 at the first Hackers’ Conference in Silicon Valley, Stewart Brand uttered his famous aphorism, “Information wants to be free; information [also] wants to be expensive.” And this was a lovely Zen summation of what was about to happen in the next fifteen years, when information technology would make it easier to copy stuff, but also raised the value of the stuff that was getting easier to copy. And these two trends were to rub up against each other in very interesting and at times catastrophic ways.

  This was a very prescient thing for him to have said, but not a moral statement about whether copying is good or bad, and certainly not the ideological basis for people who support copyright reform it has become. “Information wants to be free” has about the same relationship to the copyright fight that “Kill Whitey” has to the civil rights movement or bra burning has to feminism—which is to say that it’s a kind of intellectually dishonest cartoon that allow you to duck the real questions and just address the straw man.

  And “information wants to be expensive” means that artists and creators often end up taking the stance that either government or corporations have a duty to figure out how to make computers worse at copying. This is a fool’s errand that will have no measurable effect on “piracy,” because copying is as hard now as it is ever going to get, which is not very hard. It’s not like next year hard drives are going to become more expensive, or fewer folks will know how to sit down at a computer and type in “Batman Returns bittorrent.” From here on in, copying just gets easier.

  It’s also a fool’s errand because it has very negative external effects on society as a whole. In addition to increasing the power of intermediaries over artists (as we see with DRM), it also rewrites the operating system of the information age to build in censorship, surveillance, and control. So, for example, we are creating these national firewalls—as here in Australia, with the aim of ending child pornography, even though the people who make the firewalls say that they won’t work for that!

  You all know Chekhov’s first law of narrative, which is that if you put a gun onstage in act one, someone is going to use it by act three. So once you build a national firewall, everyone who knows of something on the Internet they’d prefer their fellow citizens not see, starts showing up in the halls of government saying we should add this and that to the firewall. In the UK there is a proposal to add trademark and copyright infringement to the national firewall. The same proposal has been floated in the United States and in Ireland and Scandinavia as well.

  The problem is, the sites that contain “infringing” material also contain an astounding amount of noninfringing material placed there by artists as part of their legitimate distribution schemes. Take a site like YouTube, with something like a billion files (and about 5 percent of them infringe copyright), which assembles and makes public a body of creative work that is larger than ever dreamt of before. Shut it down? It’s as if we’ve discovered a town that houses the largest library ever built, surrounded by a shantytown of pirated DVDs, and so we propose to bulldoze the whole city.

  Everybody gets in on this act, even people who are theoretically progressive and involved in social-justice causes. Last year, Bono from U2 wrote an op-ed in the New York Times saying we must end copyright infringement on the Internet. Build a Great Firewall like the one in China, he says. First of all, he’s wrong. China, which has the power to arrest you and harvest your organs for high-ranking party members, hasn’t managed to build an effective firewall. But even if they could, the idea that Bono is aligning himself with the Chinese government and their tactics in order to control information flow is astounding. I mean, we know you love freedom, we just wish you’d share, Bono!

  What happens when you start to control how these networks work is that you need to preemptively examine all the work that goes there. What you end up doing is raising the cost of hosting material altogether. When I spoke at Google Zurich in last year, I said there’s about ten hours of video uploaded to YouTube every minute. (I’d gotten that stat about a month before.) A person who worked at YouTube put her hand up and said, “No, it’s twenty-nine hours.” That was then: now, it’s probably like a quintillion hours uploaded every minute.

  So if you say to Google, you have an affirmative duty to ensure that none of this stuff infringes copyright before the public is allowed to see it, you fundamentally say to them we expect you to hire an army of copyright lawyers booking more lawyer hours than exist between now and the heat death of the universe. Which is to say, it’s impossible.

  If you expect Google to watch everything that goes on YouTube before it goes live, something has to give. My guess is, they would solve that problem by restructuring YouTube so that it looks like cable TV. Nothing goes on cable TV until a lawyer and an insurer have signed off on it. In some very lucky places, there are a whopping five hundred cable channels. Imagine if the Internet only had five hundred websites! And of course if the principle of a duty to review for infringement applies to YouTube, there’s no reason it shouldn’t apply to a blogger or to Twitter or any other place people are making information available.

  This is not just bad for indie artists. You end up blocking efforts to organize political movements or form little league teams or bind together far-flung families, as well as to build free and open serve software and to create encyclopedias and do all manner of amazing things. Once you impose the duty to police what gets posted on user-generated content cites, you have to retain ever-larger amounts of information in case someone is found retrospectively to infringe copyright.

  It gets worse. YouTube allows users to set some videos as visible only to family and friends, but Viacom in a recent lawsuit argued that you and I and everyone else should be shut off from that privacy option just in case we were using it not to share pictures of our toddlers but old Mork & Mindy episodes. And some digital rights management technology includes spyware that records your Internet doings and secret
ly smuggles them up to some mother ship that’s trying to do behavioral marketing. And worst of all, there’s the “three-strikes” law being proposed as part of ACTA, an international treaty that Australia participates in. If you are found guilty of three acts of copyright infringement (with a very lightweight standard of proof before something like a traffic court), they cut off your Internet access; and since most of us share a household, it’s collective punishment.

  If you swipe a DVD from a shop you get a small fine, or if you’ve done it hundreds of times maybe you get some community service—but we don’t come to your house and say, OK, we’re going to cut you off from all the services that deliver freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, freedom of the press, access to tools, communities, and ideas, access to education, and civic engagement.

  This not a principle we think of as belonging in the justice systems of enlightened countries. People like me fight for copyright reform not because we’re cheap and we want DVDs for free but because, in the name of preventing piracy, corporations and governments are attacking fundamentals like the right to assemble, the right to free speech, the right to operate a free press and the right to organize and work together. Information doesn’t want to be free, people do! Artists need to transcend the self-serving, terrorized, crappy narrative that’s been fed to us by the copyright industries and recognize that the collateral damage from this doomed effort to reduce copying includes the free society that we all cherish.

  And there are organizations that will help us. In Australia there’s Electronic Frontiers Australia; worldwide there’s Electronic Frontiers Foundation, Creative Commons, and many other organizations that work for a balanced copyright regime that respects all the civil liberties that are part of a free society and also tries to insure that artists can go on earning their livings as well.

  So thank you and good night.

  “LOOK FOR THE LAKE”

  CORY DOCTOROW INTERVIEWED BY TERRY BISSON

  Let’s see if I can make this work. Across a sea and a continent. Oakland to London via Skype. Seems appropriate.

  Hey, Cory. I’ve met you in several of your incarnations: coeditor ofBoing Boing, the hottest site on the web; award winning SF writer; New York Times bestselling YA author. Which one am I talking to?

  Any or all of the above. I’ve been lucky, it’s true. But it’s complicated. It reminds me of when my grandmother called me up from Florida and said, “My friends want to know what you do for a living. They don’t really understand it.” I have that problem every time I fly into the UK and have to fill in a landing card and get it all in eleven letters. Writer, blogger, editor, professor, speaker, hacker, journalist, and so on.

  So let’s start with Boing Boing. The first time I checked out that amazing site, I thought, this is all new! And yet (I’m an old-school ‘60s guy, as you know) it was strangely familiar. Then it came to me: It’s the Whole Earth Catalog.

  Absolutely. Access to tools and ideas. I opened up one of my old Whole Earth Catalogs a few years ago and I was like: These are the layouts we use. And here’s something else that blew my mind: I was yard-saleing in Burbank and I found a replica of a nineteenth-century Sears Catalog and it reads like Boing Boing.

  So the Whole Earth Catalog was the Sears Catalog for the ‘60s?

  Yeah, and Boing Boing is the electronic version that can change to keep up with shit as it happens. I kind of had a watershed experience in my professional and intellectual life when a friend of mine slipped me a copy of Whole Earth Review, which grew out of the original catalog. “The body is obsolete” was the theme of that issue, with articles by a bunch of early transhumanists, and it completely revolutionized my outlook.

  I went from there to Co-evolution Quarterly to Mondo2000 to the first issues of Wired to downloading Bruce Sterling’s article on the best software developers being not well-rounded but being thoroughly spiked. And it’s like a straight line, like an arrow, from the day I got that issue of the Whole Earth Review to the day I dropped out of university to program for Voyager in New York.

  It looks to me like that’s what you might call the agenda of your fiction, the project. You’re trying to give readers that same kick.

  And of my nonfiction as well.

  I write fiction because I find it aesthetically pleasing and because I find it artistically satisfying. I like the way the sentences sound and the way the people come to life in my head and on the page. I like to tell stories.

  Blogging has a whole different aesthetic. One thing that blogging does for me that nothing else ever did—it creates those synthetic moments when a bunch of things that are seemingly disparate snap together. When you write up material for public consumption, you have to clarify it in your own head, and doing that often makes it connect in new ways. I have a lot of those aha moments. Maybe I have five disparate things to write about, and I find this sixth one, and I’m like, “Aha, so this is how they’re all related!” And then I rush off and write a book or a short story or an essay about it.

  So in a sense Boing Boing is the Whole Earth Catalog, arming folks for action and understanding. But it’s also a cognitive prosthesis for me, without which I wouldn’t be able to write the stuff that I write.

  So you’re saying Boing Boing serves as a writer’s notebook?

  Even better. You can’t cheat a blog the way you can cheat a writer’s notebook. I have notebooks that are filled with notes to myself that I wrote in such haste that I can’t remember what I meant anymore. You can’t do that with a blog.

  You were pretty well established as a SF writer when you sort of veered into YA (young adult). How did that come about?

  I wouldn’t call it veered. It started with Kathe Koja. I’m a big fan of her books, and she was like “country before country was cool.” She started doing YA before there was a boom and before it was profitable. I ran into her at a con and she told me about the level of engagement she got from her readers, about how she was meeting up with kids who explicitly read to find out how the world worked. To me, that struck a chord. It reminded me of why I read, not just SF but everything. I was one of those reader kids, as you probably were too. And reading was a lot about figuring out about how the world worked. I remember having these aha moments, especially reading older SF. “Oh, so that’s who Woodrow Wilson was. Oh, so that’s what the Great Depression was all about!”

  I was also hanging out with Scott Westerfeld and Justine Larbalestier and Charlie Stross at that same con. You know how you meet people that you just click with, and you form a little rat-packy group and end up going to all your meals together? Scott talked about this too, this level of engagement with younger readers. Someone else (I thought it was Garth Nix, but he tells me it wasn’t) told me that a YA story had all this dramatic potential because when you’re young you do a bunch of stuff for the first time. It’s like you’re jumping off a cliff, over and over. Cliff after cliff. That all resonated with me in a big way.

  So you wrote Little Brother.

  It cohered in my head, like, overnight. And then literally from that night to the day I finished the first draft was eight weeks.

  That velocity certainly carried over. I heard you read from Little Brother at SFinSF and was jealous as hell. What I liked best was the way you defined the character through the information he carried. You never say what he looks like, but you know all about him because of what he knows and what he wants to tell you. Through info dumps!

  Well Little Brother is deliberately expository in that Heinleinian way, and in that sense it’s a rule-breaking book. I’m sure you’ve heard Stan Robinson complain about the Turkey City Lexicon—”no info dumps,” “show and don’t tell,” and so forth. Useful rules for writers, but fun to break as well. Sometimes the most efficient way to get something into the head of your reader is “tell and don’t show.”

  There is an admirable fleetness in taking info that might drag out an otherwise dramatic scene, and just dumping it on the reader; saying, “Got it? Good. Let’s go
!” Heinlein did that so well in his juvies!

  These days a lot of SF writers (and others!) are moving into YA because it’s more profitable. But it seems to me that you also have a political agenda. Can say anything about that?

  That goes back to what you said earlier, about having a project. I don’t have a name for it, but it’s about technology and liberation. Those are the words I’d use. My work is all in service to it—the blog, the YA fiction, the technological advocacy, the standards work, the lobbying. All of that stuff is part of a bigger project.

  Where YA comes in, I guess, is that kids are never part of the status quo. They are outlaws by hereditary design. Plus they are tuned into technology. And technology always favors the attacker, not the defender.

  Cool. So you’re arming a constituency that’s interested in changing things. You’re passing out weapons to the kids.

  That’s a lovely way to put it. I’m sure that’ll read great on my indictment sheet. But it does seem a little like that. The weapons of course are ideas and information. I’ve thought a lot about what it’s like to be an activist in the era of Google. I think it’s less important to know facts than it is to know keywords. Keywords are capabilities: if you know something can be done, you can figure out how to do it.

  What do you think ofWikiLeaks?

  That’s funny, because the novella I just finished is kind of a WikiLeaks story and I didn’t mean for it to be. So that tells me that I have a strong opinion about it.

  I think it’s important to disambiguate whatever you think about Julian Assange from WikiLeaks. I don’t know Julian, I know him only peripherally through some friends. But the story of Julian has taken on a life of its own.

  The real story of WikiLeaks is what it is—the total open release of former state secrets. That part is really interesting. I believe that it’s meaningful and substantial and game-changing for us to know for a fact, with citable information, some of the nastiness, arm-twisting, and corruption—and there’s no word for it except corporatism—that takes place behind (formerly) closed doors.