Harvard Book Store; WGBH Forum Network; Cory Doctorow: Makers

And I'm very pleased to welcome to the store Cory Doctorow Corey is a science fiction novelist journalist blogger and technology at activist. He is a coeditor of the technology blog Boing Boing and contributes to numerous publications including Wired magazine. The New York Times Sunday magazine The Boston Globe as a science fiction magazine among others. His books include novels short story collections and nonfiction. His most recent being the bestselling novel little brother for which he was awarded the Promethea sward the Sunburst award and the John W. Campbell Memorial Award. His new novel makers takes us on an imaginary completely imaginable future where inventions like 3D printers and an economic system dubbed new work a sort of new deal for a technologically advanced era wreak unexpected and unintended consequences on society. We're reviewing BBC is Focus magazine says in a fable of all our tomorrows. Doctorow brilliantly shows us the near future that's equally wondrous inspiring and terrifying. After this evening's talk we will have time for questions followed by a signing here at the front. As always I'd

like to thank anyone who purchases a copy of the book here this evening by doing so you're supporting both the local independent bookstore as well as this author series and now join me in welcoming again Cory Doctorow. Thanks. So you've just heard the kind of basic premise of makers and I'm going to read you a little bit of it right from early on. The premise basically is is the economy is in tatters no one knows what to do with these big old rusting companies that have no sales but are sitting on substantial assets that are dwindling away through their infrastructure supporting factories that nobody that makes things that nobody wants to buy anymore and some Silicon Valley venture capitalists buy them out liquidate them turn their capital into micro-finance for garage inventors with the idea that they'll give you ten grand you invent something cool Six weeks later it will will have been cloned and you have to invent something else but you'll have me 20 grand in the interim. And so they the Silicon

Valley folks have recruited a woman named Andrea flakes who's a reporter for silicone for the San Jose Mercury News to go to Florida meet one of these teams. She's just turned up and they're giving her the tour of their factory which is in a dead mall that was never in fact fully built which has been turned into a junkyard and now lately turned into a workshop. Perry gestured with an arm deep into the center of the junk pile. All right. Check out this stuff as we go. He stuck his hand through an I'm glazed window of a never built shop and plucked out a toy and a battered box. I love these things he said handing it to her. She took it. It was a Sesame Street Elmo doll labeled boogie woogie Elmo. That's from the great Elmo crash Perry said taking back the box and expertly extracting the Elmo like he was shelling and not the last and greatest generation of Elmo and technology cast into an uncaring world that millions of little tag or washable graffiti kits and stead after Rosie gave them two thumbs up on her Christmas

shopping guide. Poor Elmo was an orphan and every junkyard in the world has mountains of mint in package B W E's getting rained on. Waiting to start their lawn half million year d composition. But check this out. He flicked a multi-tool off his belt and extracted a short sharp scalpel blade. He slipped he slipped the grinning disco suit open from chin to growing and shocked it's for your exterior and the foam tissue that overlaid its skeleton. He slid the blade under the plastic cover on its ass and revealed a little printed circuit board. There is an entire Atom processor on a chip there he said. Each limb and the head have their own sub controllers. There is a high powered digital to analog rig for letting him sing and dance to new songs and an analog to digital converter array for converting spoken advanced commands to motion. Basically you dance and sing for Elmo and he'll dance and sing for you. Suzanne nodded. She'd missed that toy which was a pity she had a five year old god daughter in Minneapolis who would have loved a book. They had come to a

giant barn set at the edge of a story and a half's worth of anchor store. This used to be where the contractors kept their heavy equipment. Lester rumbled aiming a car door remote at the door which squeaked and opened. Inside it was cool and bright. The chugging air conditioners efficiently blasting purified air over the many work surfaces. The barn was a good twenty five feet tall with a loft and a catwalk circling it halfway up. It was lined with metallic shelves stacked neatly with labeled boxes of parts. Scrounge from the junkyard. Perry said Elmo down on a workbench and worked a miniature USP cable into his chest cavity. The other end terminated with a PDA with a small rubberized photovoltaic cell on the front. This thing is running and stall party. It can recognize any hardware and build and install a Linux distro on it without human intervention. They used a ton of different suppliers for the DP W.E. So everyone is a little different depending on who is offering the cheapest part on the day it was built. Install party doesn't care though. One click and away it goes. The PDA was doing all kinds

of funny dances on its screen montages of playful photoshopping of public figures meant matted into historical fine art all done now. Have a look. This is a Linux computer with some of the most advanced robotics ever engineered. No sweat shop stuff no sweat shop stuff either. See this. That solder is too precise to have been done by hand. That's because it's from India. If it was from Cambodia you'd see all kinds of wobble in the solder. That means tiny clever hands were used to create it and that means that somewhere in the devices karmic history there's a sweatshop full of crippled children inhaling solder fumes until they keel over and are dumped in a ditch. But this is the good stuff. So we have this karmically clean robot with infinitely infinitely malleable computation and a bunch of robotic capabilities. I've turned these things into a wall climbing monkeys. I've modded them for a woman from the University of Miami Jackson Memorial. They use their capability to ape human emotions and physiotherapy programs with nerve damage cases. But the best thing I've

ever done for them with so far is the book is the distributed boogie woogie Elmo motor vehicle operations cluster. Come on he said and took off deeper into the barn's depths. They came to a dusty stripped down smart car one of those tiny two seat electric cars that you could literally buy out of a vending machine in Europe. It was barely recognisable having been reduced to its roll cage drive chain and control panel. A gang of naked robotic Elmos were piled into it. Wake up boys Time for a demo Perry shouted and they sat up and made canned tinny Elmo Oh boy noises climbing into position on the pedals around the wheel and on the gear tree. I got the idea when I was teaching an Elmo to play Mario Brothers. I thought I'd get a decent dig dogging if I could get up to speed on all of the all of the first level using an old paddle I'd found and rehabilitated and I was trying to figure out what to do next. The dead mall across the way is also a drive in theater and I was out front watching the silent movies and one of them showed all these cute little furry animal whatevers collectively

driving a car. It's a really old sight gag I mean like racial memory old. I've seen the Little Rascals do the same bit with alfalfa on the wheel and buckwheat and spankie on the brake and clutch and the doggy working the gearshift. And I thought Shit I could do that with the Elmos. They don't have any networking capability but they can talk and they can parse spoken commands so all I need to do is designate one for left and one for right and one for fast and one for slow and one to be the eyes barking orders and they should be able to do this and it works. They even adjust their balances centers of gravity when the car swerves to stay upright at their posts. Check it out. He turned to the car driving Elmos 10 and what they snapped up right and tick salutes off their naked plastic noggins in circles drive. He called the Elmo scrambled into position and fired up the car and ensured orders in short order they were doing donuts and the cars a little indoor pasture. Elmo's halt. Perry shouted in the car stop sign only rocking gently stand down. The Elmo

sat down with a series of tiny thumps. Suzanne found herself applauding. That was amazing she said. Really impressive. So that's what you're going to do for codicil that the companies they broke up the finances for Kodak and Duracell. So that's what you're going to do for COTA sell. Make these things out of recycled toys. Lester chuckled. Nope not quite. That's just for starters the Elmos are all about the universal availability of cycles and apparatus. Everywhere you look there's devices for free that have everything you need to make anything do anything but have a look at part two commuter. He lumbered off in another direction and Suzanne and Perry trailed along behind him. This is Lester's workshop Perry said as they passed through a set of swinging double doors and into a cluttered wonderland where Perry's domain had been clean and neatly organized. Lester's area was a happy shambles. His shelves were an orderly but rather crammed with looming piles of amazing junk thrift store wedding dresses plaster statues of bowling monkeys box kites knee high 10 knights and armor sea shells painted

with American flags. Presidential action figures paste jewelry and antique cough drop tins. You know how they say a sculptor starts with a block of marble and chips away everything that doesn't look like a statue. Like he can see the statue in the block. I get like that with garbage. I see the pieces on the heaps and roadside trash and I can just see how it can go together like this. He reached down below work table and hoisted up a huge triptych made of three hinged car doors stood on end. Carefully he unfolded it and stood like a screen on the cracked concrete floor. The inside of the car doors had been stripped clean and polished to a high metal gleam that glowed like sterling silver spot welded to it were all manner of soda tins pounded flat and cut into gears chutes Springs and other mechanical apparatus. It's a mechanical calculator he said proudly. About half as powerful as a unit Ach. I milled and milled all the parts using a laser cutter. What you do is you fill this hopper with G.I. Joe Heads and this

hopper with Barbie heads. Crank this way and it will drop a number of Eminem's equal to the product of the two values and this hopper here. He put three scuff GIGO heads in one hopper and four scrofulous Barbies and another and began to scrape crank slowly. A music box beside the crank played a slow irregular rendition of Pop Goes the Weasel while hundreds of little coin sized gears flipped turned flipping switches and adding and removing tension to Springs. After the weasel popped a few times 12 Brown Eminem's fell into an outstretched rubber hand. He picked them out carefully and offered them to her. It's OK they're not from the trash she said. I buy them in bulk. He turned his broad back to her and heaved a huge galvanized him tin washtub full of brown m and m's in her direction. See it's a bit bucket he said. Suzanne giggled in spite of herself. You guys are hilarious she said. This is really good exciting nerdy stuff. The gears on the mechanical computer are really

sharp and precise. They look like you could cut yourself on them when they ground over the polished surfaces of the car doors. They made a sound like a box of toothpicks falling on the floor. Click click click click click click click. She turned the crank until 12 more brown M and M's fell out. Who's the Van Halen fan. Lester beamed. Might as well jump jump. He mimed heavy metal air guitar and thrash to shore and head up and down as though he were head banging with a mighty mane of hair band locks. You're the first one to get the joke he said. Even Perry doesn't get it. Get what Perry said also grinning. Van Halen had this thing where if there were any brown AMS in their dressing room they trash it and refused to play. When I was a kid I used to dream about being so famous that I could act like that much of a prick. Ever since I've afforded a great personal significance to brown Eminem's She laughed again. Then she frowned a little. Look I hate to break this party up but I came here because Kettlewell said that you guys exemplified everything that

he wanted to do with code to sell the stuff you've done is all very interesting. It's killer art but I don't see the business angle. So can you help me out here. That's step three. Perry said C'mere he led her back to his workspace to a platform surrounded by articulated arms terminated and webcams like a grocery scale in the embrace of a metal spider. 3D scanner he said producing a Barbie head from Lester's machine and dropping it on the scales he prodded a button and a nearby screen filled with a three dimensional model of the head flattened on the side where it touched the surface. He turned the head over and scanned again and now there were two digital versions of the head on the screen. He mouse over the mouse on over the other until they lined up right clicked a dropdown menu selected an option and then they were merged rotating. Right. Thanks I didn't get into 3D printers Well you know I actually started looking at them totally metaphorically which is I think a grand tradition in

science fiction if you look at kind of the first generation of cyberpunk literature it's really clear that computers are all metaphoric right like you know I think William Gibson is a genius and a treasure to the human race but if I were designing a cyberspace deck I'd put a circuit breaker in it you know. So it's really clear that those computers were absolutely metaphorical for other things and they say as much you know if you look at the kind of early days of cyberpunk they said as much and for me 3D printers were kind of a metaphor about the panic about the replication of digital goods and specifically they were sparked by an incident. I went and saw the head of the British Phonographic Institute which like the RIAA here give a talk about like the future to some interim industry group that the British government put on. And back when I worked for the FFI I had to put in a suit a lot of these things. And. So I went and saw him speak and he said you know basically you people from all you other industries you think were such idiots in the record industry because we sued all of our customers. You just wait though. Someday 3D printers are going to come and then everything that you do that relies on

patents or trademarks you're going to be in the same position we're in because they're going to be printing this stuff at home and you're not going to have any way to stop them and you'll be suing them too and you'll be in a panic and on the way out. A friend of mine said you know it's kind of interesting to hear some from the record industry talking about 3D printing I mean that's pretty kind of futuristic and forward looking and I said Yeah but he thinks the major impact of 3D printing is going to be trademark infringement. Like. What about printing AK 47. Right or like Seran. So you know I. And you know it struck me that this was like such a parochial view of what the main impact of 3D printers and kind of general fabrication Distrito fabrication was going to be. It was kind of like I thought at the time it would be like looking at the railroad and going Man those guys who sew bags for horses are in trouble. And you know it's like absolutely true that like oat bags for horses kind of dwindled after the advent of the railroad but anyone who thought that that was like the major impact of the railroad really wasn't paying attention so

I think that was like kind of where I started and then I went off and did a lot of reading about 3D printers and when saw a bunch of 3D printers and kind of played with some 3D printers and I kind of watched that that feel but it really started with thinking about 3D printers as a metaphor for just kind of what happens when when distribution of and instantiation of physical objects starts to look more digital house for the win coming well it's done as how it's coming apparently there's advance review copy galleries waiting for me in New York tomorrow for the When's my next novel it's a young adult novel it's an expansion of my short story and is game. It's about hacker kids who form a trade union under the auspices of a newly reborn. Industrial Workers of the world are Wobblies they call themselves the industrial workers the World Wide Web or web lease. They work mostly in China and India and they form a trade union using video games that their bosses can surveil them in. They begin by unionizing gold farmers and spread out to unionize people who work in factories and they have to fight Pinkertons who both show up at their workplace with like chains and and crowbars but also who show up in game as orcs with giant swords.

And it's done. It was finished on one month late on September the 1st and everybody likes it has read it so far my mom says I'm very handsome and it will be the first book that both my British and my American editor worked on this book makers is the first one that came out both in the UK and the US simultaneously but I'd already written that when I sold it to my British publisher so it's kind of interesting getting edited by two different editors at the same time but it's going pretty good too they just sent me a set of digital galleys and they said you have nine days for any corrections to go in the first edition and like you know you've just put me on tour right. And then I tour overlaps the nine days right. And they're like yeah we got a production schedule so. Do you ever fly to reading a book where you don't have to feel terrible for all the characters probably not because my plotting my basic plotting technique as you start with a person in a place with a problem in the make things get worse. And even though that person is trying to solve her or his problem things just keep getting worse that I mean it's

basically that's dramatic tension and that's how you get to a climax so yeah the characters are always going to be in trouble I would be kind of a slow moving story if everybody was happy. BE THANKFUL I'M NOT Jonathan Carroll who I'm just looking at has ghost in love behind your head there who's a wonderful writer whose special gift is to spend two thirds of the book telling you how happy and wonderful lives the lives are of some people who are really wonderful and that you love very much. And he spends the last thirty irredeemably crushing them every one of his books follows that theme I mean he's a wonderful writer and that's a particularly good book of his but holy moly does does reading his books make me want to go into a lie down in a warm tub and open a vein. Yeah that's my that's my next book that's my short story collection. Oh yeah and so this is this book I'm going to talk about a little before the reading and I'm going to do the short story collection where it's it's a free audio book free digital book four different covers on a print on demand book that you can order through Lulu and I may do some deals with print on demand stores depending on how that works out. And then also some bespoke hard covers that are hand bound in London near my office.

And I'm going to publish all of the finances and hours and keeping a time sheet for it. As an appendix to the book that will be bound into the book every month because it's print on demand so I can change the book every month. And it's got about undoing a bunch of different things with it soliciting donations selling ads. I sold a commission. Mark Shuttleworth from the buntu project commissioned a story called The Pocket bout the decommissioning of the first AI on the grounds that no one ever found anything to do with it. On the eve of the 32 bit Unix rollover the brown Eminem's Yeah there was a good reason for the brown AMS which is basically they were like page 23 of a page of a 27 page writer almost everything on the rider was something really important like you know electrical equipment that ensured the band wasn't electrocuted on stage and what they could do is they could tell if you'd read the rider all the way through if there were any brown Eminem's in the bull. And so it was like it was like it was like you know sticking a hair to the 17th page of your term paper to see if the prof reads it all the way through or reversing one page in a manuscript or whatever is your basic.

Yeah tripwire Yeah makers does get into some of that I mean basically I think that we're kind of we're you know what really turned me on to this was not only German juncos. Feral robotic feral wireless dogs Project where she takes she takes she teaches undergraduate engineering students and every year she goes out and buys a huge bag of novelty robot dogs at Toys R Us from various countries and she brings them back. She has her students take them apart and she's the she's the one where I got this thing checking for the Sauder because she actually launched it to me logs labor conditions child labor conditions and various factory states around the world by making a note of whether the solder is robotic or hand done year on year and noting the nation manufacture. So she has pretty good charts about the actual like facts on the ground about labor conditions for children and lots of countries mostly around the Pacific Rim. And then what they do is they program they put in volatile organic compound sensors and program P Elsie's so that they'll follow concentration gradients and then put in better drive trains they can go

off road and they take them to Superfund sites that have been supposedly cleaned up and they release them. And like the EPA Superfund cleanup site. Survey is like a four meter accurate survey and these things do six centimeter accurate surveys and moreover they're legible because you know like a guy in a lab coat who shows you a sheet of numbers and says there are no toxic chemicals in this park your children can play here again. You kind of have to take his word for it. But if a whole bunch of robotic dogs converge on a spot and kind of go like this is you know this will visit you until three generations if you let your children play here. It's very legible and the thing that's cool about it is that the project involves people all over the world because these robot dogs are exported everywhere right. I mean the same factories export the same basic designs everywhere. So figuring out how to model any given model of robot dog is like a problem that you can participate in with lots of other people. The other area where I think it's really where something really interesting is happening globally is in the general trend to using. Packages from universally

available consumer packaged goods as chassis for devices starting with things like the Pringles can cantenna and the signal advantage of this is not you know the Pringles can contend as lots of things that make it a less than ideal antenna. One thing that makes it very very good is that the packaging is pretty standardized and so you can do like diagrams for like where to put the holes based on the packaging so like one goes through his left eye one goes through the cholesterol count one goes through the third digit in the UPC and you get a very standardized build everywhere you go and you can make improvements and you can. You can probably get those improvements and other people can test them out too so it's very kind of enlightenment. You know replicate a full peer review a kind of way of doing of doing engineering. And and definitely it's this very lightweight way of collaborating around the world as is as advancing this stuff very quickly. Yeah sure so it started off as a parable about the dot com collapse where you know I lived in San Francisco I moved there 99 right at the peak of the boom I mean it was crazy like there was a guy I lived in a half of an illegal sublet and there was a guy and in the

backyard that my bedroom overlooked he was living in a Sears shed for $900 a month he was like an executive. And this was the only place he could find to live and he took it because it came with a parking spot and he had no where else to like park his Jag. Basically I mean it was it was insane right so. And and he didn't even have a toilet. I don't know where he went. And and then like kind of overnight it tanked. Right it was like it was like last year right there was this huge sucking sound all the money just kind of vanished from the city. And in some ways it was kind of pleasant because all of a sudden you know you didn't have to live in a Sears shed but it was also kind of catastrophic because there were people literally you'd like walk down the street there'd be some guy in 50 air on chairs and he and he be like make an offer. And and the interesting thing was that the people who stayed behind afterwards kept doing stuff. That was the really interesting thing to me it was like How the Grinch Stole Christmas. You know you can take away all the Christmas decorations you take away the air on chairs take away the foosball tables take away the baristas take away the weekly massages and it turns out that all you need to invent kind of what we're calling Web 2.0 these days

is someone's wife in a laptop. And that's more or less what happened right and moreover they did it without the expectation of getting enormous gigantic amounts of money. And so they did really interesting things because no one was sitting there breathing down their neck going I just invested 50 million dollars in you on a valuation of 250. I'm expecting cash out a 10x in the next 18 months what are you doing to get me there right so they were really they had like a lot of creative freedom too. And and so I wrote it the first chunk was serialized on Salon under the title theme punks. And then it kind of I worked on it and I worked on some other stuff. I really had a road block and I couldn't get any further. And I wrote little brother and kind of eight weeks to take a breather from it. And then I went back to it and finished it and still didn't have a real title for it I came up with the title last November while I was on my honeymoon so. And so the title was very late bound to the text. That's what global search and replace is good for. And and in terms of the updating was pretty light kind of we did one pass through and just

updated it here and there it's you know it's a parable it's not a prediction so it doesn't need to be super oak ofay with whatever it is the we're we're all writing about this month in the business pages you know all that stuff will be forgotten in two years anyway. Rosie's already collapsed That's right. Yeah she's she's that that's one of the things that makes a counterfactual future history. Yeah in fact I did it was kind of a busy time which was the weird thing. I was traveling a lot I remember I went to the i common summit in my career in Rio and I wrote like 9000 words in coach on the plane overnight. It was it was a bit of a Aslaug that book. It was it was like or whatever the reverse it was like Quick march. It was like I say it was like passing a pineapple you know. And there were days when I had to stop typing because it just hurt too much to keep typing so it was pretty weird I wrote my wife's very very patient as I wrote the last chapter. I got up at 4:00 in the morning in her hotel room in a room on her anniversary and wrote the last chapter while she slept next to me so she's a very very

patient lady. Oh gosh I don't even know where the break was anymore. I would be able to tell you now because I do this great thing with my fiction now that Thomas Gideon who runs the command line podcast wrote for me. I archive my papers with the Merrill collection intro and great signs which reference library and they were bemoaning the fact that they used to with the writers whose manuscripts they archive they would get multiple drafts write first draft second draft third draft. But there really isn't a series of drafts anymore there's just like you finished the book and then you modify the file until it goes to press really. And they said you know now we have no history of books and because it's so hard to keep track of changes to a digital file and I went Wait a second it's not hard to keep track of changes to a digital file we solve that problem with like CBS right. So I asked my friend Thomas Gideon could you write me some perl scripts that would just look at all my active working files which are all text files anyway and check them in to get. A local get repulsed which version control repository and so he did and he actually did one

better he was like well you need some context for this so you'll know later what you were thinking of when you wrote that paragraph. So he put in the last three songs in my music player the last three Boing Boing posts with my byline. The weather where I'm at based on my geo located IP address my location based on my geo located IP address and he's got a it's a plugin architecture it's all GPL that's on get hub it's called flash bake. So now I could because now I can actually tell you like to a very fine nicety exactly what was going on I was writing and I figured like five years from now I'll look back on that corpus and I'll start doing some data mining on it and start figuring out oh this song makes me write like a demon or something you know and and maybe be able to build on that. Yeah so here's what I think is that technology favors attackers in general. If you want to if you want to defend a city with earthworks you need to build a perfect wall if you want to attack a city with earthworks you need to find one in perfection and undermine it. And so what that means is that a society characterized by rapid technological changes one in which the

status quo never holds. Which is kind of bad news for people who like the status quo and pretty good news for people who suffered under the status quo. But in general our capacity to stabilize the status quo is all about the individual and the collective has a capacity to use technology to correct the negative effects of technology so for example a few years ago as I was hanging out with a guy named Bonnie Wang who's got his degree at MIT some of you maybe went to school with the music I started chummy and Bunny's a radio engineer. And we're talking about software defined radios and particular about FCC notice of Proposed Rulemaking on software defined radios. That was seeking comment on whether or not software defined radios should be built out of Trusted Computing so that users couldn't load their own code into a trust into a software defined radio and change it from say a mobile phone into an air traffic control radio. Right because obviously there is some potential for mischief there. And we concluded a couple of things after talking about it the first one was that and that an FCC rule that says you're not allowed to turn your mobile phone

into air traffic control system and crash planes wouldn't stop people who wanted to crash planes they tend not to be intimidated by FCC rules. And second of all that really the only way that you could find you could effectively locate and shut down people whose radios were rogue either because of a bad code or because of malicious code or because of errors or because of some other factor some unforseen complication would be to how it would be for everybody to be able to detect those bad operators in the spectrum and geo locate them and collaborate to geo locate them and if if you took away everyone else's s.t. ours and just gave them to the bad guys then you'd have to kind of rely on the very limited resources of the FCC to hunt down and shut down bad emitters you know kind of if SARS are outlawed only outlaws will have s.t. ours so. I kind of think that like if we're going to stop people from building you know on an autonomous roving slow bombs out of modded robot dogs that used to bark the national anthem but now carry a payload of sarin and plastique or something

then. Then the only way we're going to do that is if we also have access to the same technology that made that possible that everything short of that kind of leaves us vulnerable and dependent on a less responsive state that's always going to be playing catch up that's always going to be trying to defend the status quo. And so I know that's not like a super great answer but it's one of those real politic things where like I said it's the it's the best of several bad answers and the good answer is good. The good news about it is that we can also do all kinds of really awesome stuff with with with widespread cheap technology. I'm not sure. I mean I think one of the things that regulation has always striven to do is make tank mines not land mines right so you want to make you want to make regulations that only go off when you drive over them with a hundred billion dollar corporation and that leave individuals alone right so you don't need to file like with the with the FCC when you take a friend out to lunch even though there's money changing hands. Right. It's just like it's kind of but it's sub regulatory and you know obviously one of the copyright crises

is that we trigger copyright which is a an industrial regulation when someone makes a copy on the grounds that copying used to require you know a Record Plant you know recording plant or a film reproduction plant. And so it made a certain amount of sense to assume that everyone who would make a copy would have had access would have access to a specialist attorney who would analyze the copying and make sure it was lawful and it no longer makes sense we kind of turned it into a landmine. And I suppose that this is this is probably a motif that will continue and other and other areas you know software defined radio being probably a pretty good example because you know the FCC says Well. You're going to make a radio. You need to and from manufacture you need to be ratified characteristics through the regulator the regulator has to look at it make sure that it doesn't do anything bad and then and then certify it before you can put it into production. But with software defined radio everyone is anyone not know what self-defined radio is. I mean it's sounds more or less like what it is right it's Radio whose characteristics are determined by Crystal they're determined by software. The technical workings of it are important here. But if if if if you can change a radio by changing changing it's code.

All of us on the FCC and is in a position of regulating which software you can upload to the Internet which is a completely different regulatory route place for it to be in and if it asserts that jurisdiction. It's kind of hard to know where that stops right I mean first of all code can take a lot of forms my friend Seth Schoen once wrote D.C.'s US code in a form of a series of haiku. So you know you're now in a position of regulating stuff that can be that can be pretty very gated and also. Where where in order to do so you're going to have to make an incursion into something that no one's ever had to make incursions into before so I don't know if it will be. That's an interesting sticky puzzle that I will look forward to watching with some interest. Do I find it hard to release a book under CC once I put all the hard work into a book No not at all I mean first of all I think that it sells more books right so I mean I'm glad to get the extra money of Assisi re release but also you know artistically I find it very satisfying to make art that's intended to be copied in the 21st century because it's the century of

copyright copying is not going to get harder this century unless we have a nuclear war. Hard drives are going to get more expensive and bulky or the general capacity of the public to operate computers will not decline. Networks are going to get more expensive and harder to access. I mean you know from here on in it just gets easier so like there is a certain romance and being a blacksmith a Pioneer Village. But you know I'm a I'm a science fiction writers must be making at least contemporary if not futuristic art. And so making making contemporary art that's not supposed to be copied to me just doesn't make any sense. So yeah like I can derive an enormous amount of satisfaction that plus the fact that you know I'm a I'm an avid copyist. Everyone I know is an avid copyist running around and telling people that they shouldn't copy things while I'm copying my head off just feels like you know corrosive hypocrisy to me. You know I always say if it wasn't for mix tapes my entire adolescence would have been celibate you know. So. There's going to be a battle over micro manufacturing 3D printers where all the well where the battle lines are drawn. I thought OK here's what I think is that its characteristics will be weirder than we can imagine right. I don't I don't actually have a prediction except to say

that all the things that I can think of are probably not weird enough to be the thing that will be the big fight in the same way that kind of in 1900 to looking at you know Yahoo's home page and predicting Facebook suicide pacts would have been extremely difficult. You know there's this there's this old aphorism that the the job of the science fiction writer is to look at the movie theater and the and the automobile and predict the drive in which seems to me to be very simple. Right. And then some people said oh no the job is to predict the sexual revolution and that seems to me to be very simple I think like if you want to be like a great predictive science fiction writer you should look at the automobile and look at the end look at the movie theater and say we will have drive ins which will incentivize children to get driving licenses which will mean that for the first time citizens of Western democracies will routinely carry photo ID and in 25 years we'll have a surveillance state like that's a really good subtle weird prediction that looks at some major social issues that will arise that without our kind of hard to predict a second order effects of major

technology I don't know what's going to be I think at least one will be over group that will certainly have a kind of I made a primate pride. I made a printer with proprietary goop you figured out how to load it literally. There's someone who's loading their printers maybe as an MIT loading printers with. Weight gain powder from protein shakes. It apparently cost one fiftieth of what the proprietary goop cost but works just as well and eventually someone's going to go you know like well I sold it to you at below cost in the expectation that you'd be buying consumables and you figured out how to make consumables more cheaply and now you know I'm going to sue you or shut you down or you know make my goup even more fiendishly proprietary or you know whatever it will be I think will certainly go get some of that. Yeah so I get both of those I get a lot of lovely mail from people and the occasional not so lovely mail but mostly it's lovely. And then yeah people do all kinds of crazy stuff with my books a lot of translations. Which is really interesting because little brother is the first book to get really widely translate the other ones I've had three or four languages but little brother is in 16 more languages apart from English now either out or pending. And some of

those languages there's already fan translations in them and so I'm like mediating with a foreign publisher who doesn't speak English. My agent's foreign right subagent to explain Creative Commons to them which is always fun so far they've been really cool about it. But it's always a little touchy at first you know sometimes like I'll get an email like in very broken English that has been run through Google Translate that says you know dear Mrs. Doctor Oh I am your I Am Your Italian publisher did you know that they've stolen your book and translated into Italian and I have to like write back and go no it's ok. And then yeah there's some fanfic and there's they're certainly short videos and all kinds of other stuff that that fans do that's always it's always great to see that stuff even when it's stuff that I like don't personally doesn't resonate for me. It's great to think that there's someone out there who found personal expression through looking at my stuff and reinterpreting it through their own filters. That's And sometimes the other thing that you sometimes see is stuff where it looks like

Boy that looks like a group of people had a lot of fun making this thing and that maybe that the outcome isn't all that cool. But like you can see in the outcome that the process of making it like a lot of fanfic I think follows this follows this arc where the actual social practice of getting together the bunch of people and rewriting a story to your own needs and and with your own jokes and so on is incredibly fun. And and you know sometimes I've heard writers dismiss some of that fanfic as trivial because that when it's done it's not all that interesting to read. And I always say That's like judging a sex act by what's like by what's left behind on the sheets. You know like that the process it's a process not a destination. Right. And so I really I'm always glad to see it yeah totally and I mean that was my one of my fondest hopes you know I don't know any way to cement your fortune with a reader more firmly than to make your creative expression part of their creative expression. I mean who wouldn't go on buying books by a writer who inspired them to write a piece of fan

fiction or. You know paint a painting or whatever you know. Where does my obsession with Disney world come from us. I mean I grew up going there to my grandparents are snowbirds that live in. But my dad call cemetery village Century Village in Deerfield Beach and and so I used to go for Christmas break every year and there's not much to do in cemetery village when you're nine years old so we used to drive to Orlando every year and go to Disney World. So I totally grew up doing and it was always a big part of my childhood in terms of why it makes an interesting piece for science fiction as a lot of reasons actually one is it's explicitly techno utopian. Right. Like Walt was like oh I know what I'll do I'll build a city for 50000 people built around advanced technology and and write a social contract built around my own view of how the world should work and force everyone to adhere to it. I mean that was the initial plan right they're going to put a dome over it. It's going to have its own reactor is going to have all electric cars. I mean so it is explicitly techno utopian in that way. It's also in some ways the opposite of the Internet so first of all it's

strongly location based. It's difficult to replicate it's difficult to copy and it requires an enormous amount of cordoning explicit hierarchical coordination. Right so like doing doing a Disney thing requires kind of the opposite of of ad hawks like I wrote in my first book. You know Disney works because there's like a Steve Jobs figure in a turtleneck at the front going the ride shall be the US right you don't get to you don't get to like fork Disney World and go. Actually I think that a better theme for this garbage can in New Orleans Square or that's Disneyland in fantasyland would be to like paint it like this right nobody gets to freelance Disney World. There is like there is a central architect who through whom all this stuff runs right it is. It is so opposite to the Internet and its appeal that it makes a great foil for an Internet driven era. Right it's like it's like a funhouse mirror. The other thing about Disney is that while building Disney World today would probably cost like one hundred twenty percent of the capital that they put into Disney World today because you'd have to do

it and then you'd have to do some more to kind of catch up with them building a thing that's like sort of 20 percent as good as Disney World would probably cost like 10 percent of the capital they put in. So getting kind of part of the way there is much cheaper than getting that then it's not linear it's not it doesn't scale in the same way. And as and I think that gap's going to air I think you know give it 15 years and you may be able to build a thing that's like 60 percent as good as Disney World for 30 percent of the money and then they're going to freak out. Right it's going to be exactly what happened to the record labels you can build a thing that's 10 percent as good as Warner for one tenth of a percent of what it cost to capitalize Warner Records. And it turns out that there's a lot of people for whom 10 percent is good enough. If you can do it for one tenth of a percent of the capitalization and so we have all these little people kind of springing up and doing interesting things that are kind of micro-finance micro audience micro records through micro record labels for micro musicians right and they're like OK this is OK by me because you know while Warner has its virtues in terms of breaking big X 97 percent of the deal with a record deal from one of the majors or in $600 a year or less from it so unless you're in that kind of

statistically insignificant far over the right hand side of the curve mega act you're not very well served by the by the system at all so like yeah give me give me that tenth of a percent capitalization 10 percent record label any day right. So I think that that's the thing that makes that makes Disney World really interesting to me that and I really like the dark rides like like seriously like I think dark rides are an underappreciated art form and nobody actually takes them seriously. With some exceptions except for Disney. And especially the kind of pre 975 dark rides especially of course the Haunted Mansion but many of them. So yeah I did get some backstage tour of Partly because it was back in those days you could buy a backstage tour you could just show up and pay for a tour and they take you through the tunnels. But I also I had a P.A. at one point who was who'd been a summer worker or a student worker there and she actually kept it up so that she could keep her staff discount she was a total Disney not and so she would. She would go and work two weeks every year so she could keep her staff discount and I at the time I'd just

gotten that Handspring with a little camera that fit in the top that didn't look like a camera and no one had really seen PBS with cameras yet. And you're not allowed to take photos backstage and I said like do you think you could take a lot of pictures with us and she was like I could totally take pictures. So so I have a really extensive backstage photos from Disney World that I that I used as reference when I was writing it too. And then I just talked to a lot of people who work there. One of the one of the not very well kept secrets of Disney World is that Thursday night back in back in Pleasure Island days Thursday night was cast member night Pleasure Island as the island of all the bars. And so people who worked there got discounts at the bars and you could go on Thursday night and look at all of the kind of that the people who come in to work not the people who are locals but people who come in to work which was a good 10 20000 of them getting pissed and trying to screw each other and and you could overhear a lot of really good gossip on a Thursday night in the Adventurers Club. Yeah it really was.

Wow that would kick ass. Wow that's a great idea so you know that it sparked an idea for me I want to someday i'll open source this idea. I want to someday open a haunted hotel on Sunset Boulevard in an L.A. 12 room boutique hotel filled with haunted effects. So like when you're you know half silvered mirror that just at random intervals when you're standing in front of it has some kind of you know proximity sensor just shines up a light on an illusion behind it that makes it look as though there's someone looking over your shoulder just for an instant So if you inadvertently aggro the monster it would attack you as you move through the hotel and what that. And as whatever room a monster was in it could trigger that effect. So if you inadvertently aggro the monster that lived in the breakfast room it would follow you up the elevator and into your bedroom it would make those whatever right. And it would have like an internal logic that would be just the idea would be that you if you paid enough attention you could in fact figure out what was going on right because those eyes are very smart. And it would have a kind of internal reasoning and it kind of mirrors the idea of the spirit world right where the spirit world can see you but

you can't sense it and you don't know that you're kind of stepping on someone's grave or you know that the monster is following you from room to room except by these these obscure signals there which can make it self-made and I really got the idea from the Adventurers Club which in turn is really kind of a lift from the Magic Castle in Los Angeles if you ever know anyone who's a member and can get you in. It's really nice to go to the Magic Castle you have to speak a password into an owl on a bookcase that slides aside to let you in. It's really cool so I'm. I really like the Adventurer's Club and I really like the idea of doing that kind of internet physically instantiated difficult to replicate firmly location based non virtual thing I think that would be incredibly fun. All right. So I think that's that's it for Q&A. They have books to set up to sell. I have I will find a writing implement and happy to say hello for much thanks.