This week we’re talking with Cory Doctorow (this episode contains explicit language) about his newest book Chokepoint Capitalism, which he co-autored with Rebecca Giblin. Chokepoint Capitalism is about how big tech and big content have captured creative labor markets and the ways we can win them back. We talk about chokepoints creating chickenized reverse-centaurs, paying for your robot boss (think Uber, Doordash, Amazon Drivers), the chickenization that’s climbing the priviledge gradient from the most blue collar workers to the middle-class. There are chokepoints in open source, AI generative art, interoperability, music, film, and media. To quote Cory, “We’re all fighting the same fight.”
Cory Doctorow: Yeah… Although the next one – so the book after this (I think we’ll probably get into some of its themes) is a book from Verso called “The Internet Con”, and it’s about interoperability and the role that it plays in competition and in technological self-determination. And I am probably going to read it. I’m talking with the directors that I use right now about whether – you know, I’m a pretty good reader. Will is like a much better reader, and watching the director direct him in the studio last week - you know, I get a sense of what a director can bring, and I’m kind of thinking of it as like almost a professional development opportunity. I would like to be a better reader, and working with top-notch directors that – I should mention the director and the studio. It’s Skyboat Media. Fantastic studio. If you listen to audiobooks, you’ve heard a ton of Skyboat titles. And they’ve got Gabrielle de Cuir, who’s the co-owner of the studio, who’s an incredible director - she was directing Will, and will probably direct me, I assume. And that would be very exciting, because she’s – just listening to her do it, it’s wild.
If you go to the Kickstarter, there’s some video from the studio and audio from the studio. you can hear her directing him, which is really wild. It’s a real behind-the-scenes look at how this stuff works. Very cool.
[08:03] Yeah, so part of it is like channel your anxiety, right? Some of it is a certain mental approach. I think a lot of us start writing because it just feels good, and we do it for a while… I think that what we call talent is practicing without noticing. I don’t think there’s like a gene for writing that like our bonobo ancestors developed some kind of recessive gene for making shit up… I just think that it’s just – you know, you practice it, right? And that’s how you get better at anything, you practice it.
So you do it when it feels good, and it does feel good, and then you do it, and you do it, and it feels good, and so on. And then there comes this point where it’s your job, and you’ve gotta do it when it doesn’t feel good. And that is really hard. Because there are days when you will sit down to write and it just doesn’t feel good. There are days when you sit down to write and it feels like every word you can think of is terrible. And I feel that, too. And I had this period after my first novel came out – my first novel came out when I was doing a startup in the dotcom bubble. And then I went to work for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and became their European director.
My next two books came out when I was traveling 27 days a month, 31 countries, and I had to write everywhere. I had to write when it didn’t feel good. And what I realized was that there were days looking back on the work where I didn’t do good work, and there were days looking back on the work where the work was great. And there were days writing where it felt bad, and there were days writing when it felt good, but they were not in any way overlapping. How I felt about the work was a function of my blood sugar, my stress level, how much sleep I got. Whether I was jet-lagged. Whether my girlfriend and I were fighting. And so what I had to do was just like feel the feels, right? Like, know that I felt this way. And the analogy I have to it - I came to it at one of my rare VR experiments. I have bad astigmatism, and can’t really do VR for very long. I get a headache. But I tried the plank, plank-walking with VR, and the VR headset is telling you that you are up 200 feet, and you know for an absolute fact that you’re standing on level ground. And yet, you really feel it. And you will feel when you’re writing, on some days, like you are writing terrible work. And you will not be able to escape that feeling any more than you are able to escape the feeling that you’re standing on a plank. But in the same way that there’s like a part of you that knows that you are not standing on a plank over a 200-foot drop, there is a part of you that you can teach, that the feeling, as real as the feeling is, it is not a feeling about a real thing. You really feel the feeling, but the feeling does not correspond to the real thing. So you’ve just gotta work when you’re doing it.
And then finally, I’d say that the other piece of it is blogging, partly because blogging is a way of practicing. I co-own Boing Boing. I wrote it for 19 years. I struck out on my own about three years ago, I have a thing called Pluralistic.net now. So if you take everything that crosses your transom, everything that seems interesting, and rather than pasting it into a group chat, or keeping the tab open and then like eventually closing it, if you try to express what it is about that thing that seems significant to you, even if you don’t know for sure, right? If you try to express it for a notional stranger, even if no one ever reads your blog, you will create a note about it with a rigor that your notes for yourself are unlikely to ever attain. We all cheat when we write a note to ourselves; we’ve all picked up a note to ourselves that we’ve been like “What is this cryptic nonsense I left for myself? Dear me in the past, you’re an idiot. You should have been more considerate of me here in the future.”
[11:59] And so when you write for an audience, you have to bring a kind of completion to bear on it. And that itself is powerfully mnemonic; it helps you remember things. It also gives you a database, because blogs are searchable, right? You’ve got a CMS. It gives you annotations; if you’re lucky enough to have readers, they’ll come along and leave comments and say, “Hey, blockhead, you forgot this”, and “Hey, here’s this other cool thing”, and “Wow, I never thought about it. Did you ever think about it this way?” So you’ll get some foment, you’ll get some like fermentation of this culture you’re putting together…
And then finally, it turns your subconscious into a kind of super-saturated solution of fragments, of bigger, more synthetic ideas, and eventually, a couple of them will stick together and they’ll nucleate… And what will crystallize out of it is a story, a novel, a speech, a nonfiction book, and essay, even just another blog post…
You know, the Pluralistic posts, I used to write 5 to 10 blog posts a day, and they were really short. Now I write six blog posts a week, and they’re 3000 words each, but they’re big, synthetic, well-developed arguments that I draw very heavily on those old blog posts for.
If you search for the Memex method… I wrote this up for Medium. I write a column there once a week, and you can find a kind of full expression of how that works, and how having those personal memory expanders, as Vannevar Bush said of the Memex, is a powerful way to be a better writer.