There are few people who can expose the playbooks of power quite like NYT bestselling author Cory Doctorow—unraveling how tech monopolies, political elites, and radicalization can converge at a singular point. As a science fiction writer, activist, and former European Director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, he’s always been at the forefront of where society’s rules intersect with our modern future. In his latest novel, Picks and Shovels, he explores the early days of the tech industry in San Francisco, where the foundations of today’s economic and political complexities really started to come into focus.
In-town to promote his new novel at Fountain Bookstore last Wednesday, I caught up with Cory for a conversation on political uncertainty, if activism is meeting the moment, and how tech’s influence on labor and power continues to shape our current reality (cheerful topics that made for a relaxing evening).
This interview has been edited for clarity and length.
Welcome to Richmond and congratulations on your new novel, Picks and Shovels. How’s the book tour going and what are you seeing out there? People have a lot on their minds these days.
Everyone is very anxious. These are unsettled times. Even Trump supporters sense uncertainty about the future. Some feel quite triumphant, but none feel secure. There’s just a broad sense of insecurity. This is the motif of being in a country where Trump is president, everything feels anxious.
My book is set during the Reagan revolution, which was the lineal ancestor of this moment we’re in now. That era was the foundation for today’s upheaval and shares similarities with how technology was evolving—from military contractors to personal computing. Back then, it wasn’t clear what someone would use a computer for. Today we have a similar view, only I think less substantive. Without meaning to, I’ve written a book that reflects this moment—a useful lens to examine the upheaval, the changes, and the tech industry’s response.
A lot of people who come out [for the book tour] are technical, they understand what technology can and can’t do— they understand the potential was squandered, but not gone. We can bring it back.
As a science fiction writer, you have a unique ability to imagine different futures and connect them with insights that are impacting us today— what’s your diagnostic on where we’re at? Are you hopeful, cynical? Or are you just existing in the moment like everyone else?
I don’t think science fiction writers predict the future. Prediction is not a useful enterprise. In fact, I think it’s quite demoralizing to imagine a future that can be predicted, because in a predictable future there’s no space for human agency.
If the future were predetermined, our actions don’t matter. So whether that’s hopeful or pessimistic, I think it’s quite fatalistic. As both a writer and activist, I am more interested in hope; the idea that you can materially improve your circumstances, even in a small way. Every step opens new vistas that have new possibilities for action. When you’re a writer, you can write a smooth ascending curve of rising tension. But when you’re a person, it’s messy.
I was the Europe Director for the Electronic Frontier Foundation. I was a UN delegate. I have lobbied many different parliaments around the world. I have colleagues and comrades who are in activist groups around the world, and I’m doing a lot of agitating. This keeps me busy and focused on improving things rather than giving into anxiety and despair—which is quite productive for the people who want to dismantle things and paralyze you.
Do you think the activism template we have right now is ready to meet this moment? It does feel like we are coming to an inflection point, whether that’s in politics or technology or the intersection of these two things. Are we activating the right way?
Back in 2016-2017, there was a lot of talk about the peaceful transfer of power. When you talk to political scientists about why those words are important — if people don’t see themselves represented—or they believe their interests aren’t being advanced— they won’t believe in a peaceful transfer of power and the only option they have is a violent transfer of power.
The research is indicating that — especially among young people — that there is less belief in the peaceful transfer of power. There is a greater belief that there will be a violent confrontation in our immediate future. I’m not trying to say we’re in for political violence, but I’m saying the chances of political violence are much higher than they’ve ever been in my life.
That’s a worrying insight.
And it’s become more bipartisan. This has been a shibboleth of the reactionary right for a long time. But black block politics are also becoming more mainstream in progressive circles and I think it’s because of our political class. The Democratic Party has been so ineffectual, there was just a report from the DCCC, basically saying our path to victory is sucking up to more people from the George Bush orbit, suppressing leftist thought and activism in the party—throwing trans people under the bus.
That was always going to be their conclusion, even without any data.
They’re clearly working reason backwards from where they wanted to end up. But if you are someone who gets 50 text messages a day from Democrats begging for $5 and were hoping to see a reprise of what happened in South Korea, where MPs live-streamed themselves climbing the fences and rushing the capitol, then I think you lose faith and confidence in a political answer to the crisis.
You just did an interview on Democracy Now where you were talking about tech worker’s fight for a living wage, and how tech bosses are attempting to replace them with AI.
Or at least trying to discipline them by threatening to replace them with AI. Even if the AI can’t do their job, it can make them accept a lower wage.
Right, it’s leverage against workers. In some ways this parallels the fight that most working people will face. Knowing this, are tech workers emerging as a new working class?
I wouldn’t call them the new working class, but they’ve been proletarianized. They went from being princes of labor, where the demand gave them a lot of leverage over their bosses. But also gave their bosses leverage over them because it created the story that unions are for people not good enough to be in high-demand. Union density in tech is very low and wages were rather high, as were work perks—unlimited time off, massages, kombucha, buses with WIFI that would take you from San Francisco to Menlo Park.
All of this was available to [tech] workers. It was also a means for tech bosses to get workers to put in longer hours, even though they could quit their jobs and move across the street. Workers like bargaining for wages and benefits, but rarely for shorter hours. That was the third rail of individual bargaining. What happened was the scarcity of tech workers was caught up by supply. During the pandemic, I do think there was an oversupply of tech workers, allowing the tech firms to do layoffs that dropped them below the workforce levels they needed.
Now they’re demanding the remaining workforce to work longer hours after convincing them jobs are scarce. Google fired 12,000 workers after doing a stock buyback that would pay their wages for 27 years and then last week Sergey Brin says the sweet spot for workers is 60 hours a week—at the office. It doesn’t take a genius to draw a line between those two things. Maybe you wouldn’t need a 60 hour work week if you hadn’t fired 12,000 people to do an $80 billion stock buyback. Tech workers can’t say screw you, ‘I’m going to get a job at Facebook’ because Facebook just announced a 5 percent layoff across the board, while doubling executive bonuses.
Is there an inevitable backlash coming against tech ? I’ll use this term loosely because I’m not convinced it’s the right one, but there seems to be an emerging oligarchy from tech CEOs. In a way that we’ve not really seen with other industries typically driving the economy. Is this backlash about the role tech is playing in our lives or about the personalities driving the technology?
You do have more privately held large tech firms that have become synonymous with personalities. Someone once told me Musk is basically an extroverted Howard Hughes, so we got lucky with Hughes. You have these sui generis ownership structures for publicly listed firms like Google and Facebook, where there are dual class shares. So Mark Zuckerberg is fully insulated from his board, which they modeled on News Corp—because he controls the majority of founding shares. It’s not quite as true of Sergey Brin and Larry Page. This is the reason they’re synonymous with their firms in the public eye and therefore the individual target of anger.
Maybe it goes back to the scale of integration into our lives? Taking the defense industry as an example, the role it plays in our lives isn’t necessarily tangible day-to-day.
This is a problem of a non-competitive market. It lets people rationalize their way into overstepping. This was Google’s promise, let us have 90 percent of the search market and every time you search you’ll find what you’re looking for. One of the reasons people are pissed at Google is because of enshittification [platform decline]. The fact when you search Google, it sucks.
They also personified their companies around themselves. Part of the marketing pitch was—each one of those companies was run by a singular genius. That was always the story. Both Zuck and Gates, Harvard dropouts who were visionary geniuses that could uniquely lead the company. That’s the reason we look to them when we’re angry at the firm, since they told us the outcomes were directly dictated by them.
Last question, since I know we’re running up on time. What are you following nowadays—art, music, culture, what can you recommend to our readers?
What have I read lately that I’ve enjoyed? Margaret Killjoy has had quite a good run of writing really good political fantasy stories—she’s got another short story collection that’s about to come out. I also just read the Slow Horses novels, after watching the series. The novels are really good.
I’m not much of a gamer, but I live with a gamer. My wife was the first woman to play Quake internationally. She’s got a friend who’s got a game called Playable Worlds. I’ve seen lots of demos and it’s super cool, like a thousands procedurally generated worlds with real geology, tectonics, and weather—also biology. They’re all open worlds.
For me, the big musical event of the past ten-years was the reissue of Stop Making Sense [Talking Heads]. I flew to Toronto to see the premier at the Toronto International Film Festival with the band present, doing a Q and A. That album is incredible. So that’s what I’m watching, reading, and listening to.
That’s amazing. Cory thank you for taking the time to chat with us, good luck on the rest of the book tour.
Thanks for doing this. It was my pleasure.
Main photo by Jonathan Worth
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