How to unfuck the internet, with Cory Doctorow
How to unfuck the internet, with Cory Doctorow
Glitch, the "Ocho"
The Milady defendants countersue. Central bankers dabble in DeFi. And Cory Doctorow has a plan to fix the internet. Bold strategies, Cotton. Let’s see if they pay off for ‘em. This is Glitch #8 (the “Ocho”).
In this issue:
Stuff that has us like 👀
a. Milady Maker’s legal drama levels up
b. Central bankers test decentralized exchanges
Cory Doctorow on how to “seize the means of computation”
1. Two things that have us like 👀
The other Milady shoe
🍿🍿🍿 We can’t look away from the unfolding legal drama starring “Charlotte Fang” (whose real name is Krishna Okhandiar) and several others who were apparently instrumental in creating the controversial Milady Maker NFT project. The shitposting hit the fan last month when Okhandiar sued three of his collaborators, accusing them of illegally scheming to take over the company and its millions of dollars in assets. Now the three defendants in that suit, along with a fourth band member, are countersuing Okhandiar. Naturally, they weave a very different tale.
Okhandiar was the one who tried to illegally seize the company, they say, in part by secretly creating shell companies in which he was the sole member. According to the lawsuit, he also schemed to gain control of the project’s multi-signature wallet by creating new keys for himself while claiming they were for other people. On top of that, Okhandiar has allegedly withheld hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of compensation the plaintiffs—one of whom claims to be the original creator of the iconic anime-inspired art—say they are legally owed. Perhaps we should not be surprised that what’s going on behind the Milady scenes is nearly as wild as the project’s notorious social media performance art. Either way, there’s a pile of money at stake: according to the suit, the project’s treasury holds an estimated $5.5 million in crypto assets. —Mike Orcutt
Central bankers are testing DeFi technology
It’s a popular notion that “crypto’s” main contribution to the world so far has been building a bunch of tools for speculators. Researchers at the Bank of International Settlements, the influential institution known as the “central bank for central banks,” would probably disagree. They have spent the past several years testing blockchains, smart contracts, and other technologies drawn straight from the cryptocurrency scene—and now they are getting into DeFi.
As part of an experiment called Project Mariana, which included the central banks of France, Singapore, and Switzerland, BIS researchers tested whether an automated market maker—the same class of technology underlying Uniswap and other popular decentralized exchanges—could make foreign exchange trading more efficient and less risky. There are a few kinds of AMMs, but they all use pools of tokens and a pricing algorithm to automatically mediate buying and selling. In DeFi, so-called liquidity providers earn token rewards for their contributions to the pool. In this case, the central banks were the liquidity providers.
The researchers say the AMM in the test provided several benefits, including the elimination of settlement risk: that is, the danger that one of the counterparties might not be able to pay up after a deal is struck. Cool! Let’s not get carried away, though. Crucial pieces of the puzzle were out of scope for Project Mariana—including all of the “legal aspects.” —Mike Orcutt
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2. A conversation with Cory Doctorow about what broke the internet—and how to fix it.
By Sam Venis
It’s no big shock anymore to hear that the FAANG companies—Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix, Google—have “hijacked” the internet, or to explain how, despite the wishes of the internet’s original designers, we now live with an internet structured for surveillance, user addiction, and political polarization, among other social ills.
But what do we do about it? In his new book, The Internet Con: How to Seize the Means of Computation, veteran tech blogger, sci-fi writer, and internet activist Cory Doctorow makes the case that to claw back Big Tech’s power—to “seize the means of computation”—we need to focus less on “big-R regulation” and more on the lesser-known laws that tech companies have used to cement their power over the last thirty years. Most of these, he explains, have to do with blocking interoperability—the ability for one kind of software or device to work easily with others. By making it simple for users to jump ship from one service to another—say, by allowing people to access their messages from various social media platforms in one place—the “switching costs” of using a particular service can be lowered, which will create the conditions for an internet that’s much more dynamic, competitive, and less monopolistic.
Doctorow is an astonishingly prolific writer—you can find his musings on a wide range of tech-centric topics at his tracking-free, ad-free blog Pluralistic, as well as on Twitter.
We caught up with him right before his book launch event in Burbank, California. The interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
SV: So, what’s The Internet Con?
CD: Well, I have to admit that it wasn't my title and I'm not very fond of it. I don't think there is an internet con. It was originally called: “Seize the Means of Computation: A Big Tech Disassembly Manual. “The Internet Con” is a thing that I don't know what it is. I don't know why my book is called that.
SV: Got it. In that case, what does it mean to “seize the means of computation”?
CD: Well, the idea is that to the extent that tech can deny you of your digital self-determination—the right to decide how the tools that you use work—they can harm you with those tools and you can't do anything about it. Once tech companies get the ability to define how you use technology—and can lock your access to things you need to be in touch with—like your family life, your employment, your education, your political and civic life and so on—then they can abuse you to a great degree, and you'll still stick with the service.
SV: Right. And so that's where interoperability comes in. Can you talk a little bit about what you mean by interoperability?
CD: Interoperability is this almost mystical trait of the things that we use. At its most basic level, it's just the ability to use anything with anything else. You can wear anyone's socks with your shoes. You can put anyone's laces in those shoes. You can use a piece of string if the lace breaks. I mean, it's interoperable.
There are formal standards to make interoperability easier. Like, you never have to worry when you buy a light bulb whether its screw thread is going to fit in your light socket because that's all standardized. Same with a plug you put into your wall socket, and so on. But there's a whole range of interoperability that is done not only without permission, but against the wishes of the companies that made the original gadget. That’s called adversarial interoperability.
That interoperability is something that is latent in all digital technology, much more so than putting strings in your shoe instead of a shoelace. Because the only digital computer that we know how to make is this thing called a “Turing Complete Universal von Neumann Machine,” which is a lot of jargon that just means that the only computer we know how to make can run every program we know how to write.
And so, with digitization, you would expect that interoperability would go up and up and up; that we would have more and more flexibility, more and more choice—that if your printer wouldn't accept third-party ink, you could just install new software that overrode that choice. But in fact, because of laws that block us from engaging in this kind of reverse engineering, that kind of interoperability is largely a thing of the past. And that’s what lets companies really define from beginning to end how you use the tools that are in your life.
SV: So the argument is that in the last thirty years or so, something else—something political and legal—has changed. Can you talk a little bit about the DMCA, the law that shows up as a kind of villain in the book?
CD: In 1998, Bill Clinton signed this law, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. It's a kind of gnarly hairball of law, but the section we're talking about now is Section 1201. And this is a provision of the DMCA that makes it a felony to “weaken or bypass an effective means of access control for a copyrighted work.” Which basically means that when there's a digital lock that stops you from accessing a copyrighted work, anything that anyone does to weaken that digital lock is a felony punishable by a five-year prison sentence and a $500,000 fine. This is what Jay Freeman calls “felony contempt of business model.”
Although this was something that lawmakers were warned of when the bill was under consideration, their argument was: well, the range of goods that this would cover are very limited because in order for this to work you need a device with enough computing power to put a digital lock in without slowing down the device altogether. At the time, this was a pretty limited range of gadgets. It was basically video game consoles and DVD players. But today, you can get a whole computer on one little chip—all the subcomponents, the networking interface, the video interface, whatever, for about a quarter. And we have started just gratuitously sprinkling these on gadgets in order to create a one-molecule-thick layer of digital rights management. All of a sudden, farmers fixing their own tractors, or medical technicians during the lockdown fixing the ventilators in their hospitals, becomes a crime. And that's a pretty significant sea change.
SV: And there are a bunch of other laws that do something similar.
Yeah—like the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, and some exotic contract theories like “tortious interference,” that criminalize or potentially criminalize violating Terms of Service or scraping. For example, when Facebook was getting off the ground, the way that it lured in MySpace users was by offering them a little bot that would log into MySpace several times a day and scrape any waiting messages. And then it would just upload them to Facebook so they'd be in your inbox and you could reply to them. Which is, in fact, how many people got from MySpace to Facebook and why I think people can't go from Facebook to anywhere else. Because when another company tried to do this to Facebook—a company called Power Ventures—Facebook sued them into radioactive rubble by citing the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act and saying that that violated their Terms of Service, which is a new legal theory Facebook pioneered. And that, I think, is a much less exotic explanation for why people are still using Facebook, even though they don't like it much.
SV: You argue that everything that policymakers have done to rein in Big Tech has only cemented their dominance. Why have policymakers been so useless?
CD: Well, it's not that everything they [policymakers] have done has increased their [Big Tech] dominance. There's probably something that hasn't done that. But, in the main, they have. In part, it's because these are hard, technical questions to answer. But I don't think that's sufficient, because there are lots of hard technical questions that regulators answer all the time. I'm sitting now talking to you under a roof that has a reinforced steel joist running through it, and someone sat down and decided what the correct mix of alloys and installation characteristics of that joint should be. And so far, it hasn't fallen down on my head and killed me. And, as far as I know, there's no one in Congress who's a structural engineer.
It is possible for legislators to make sound regulation by deferring to expert agencies, and having a set of rules for how those agencies comport themselves. But as monopoly has grown in every sector, it's become progressively harder for those technical questions to have good answers. And so, instead of having a robust policy regime, we have this completely weaksauce, backwards one where these companies say “you mustn't do this, and if you do, you're gonna kill the goose that laid the golden egg.” And lawmakers are either bamboozled because they don't hear from rivals, or because they are themselves complicit. Because in a sector with only five giant companies in it, everybody who's qualified to regulate it is a veteran of those firms.
SV: When it comes to solutions in the book, a lot of the focus is on legal mechanisms like the DMA in Europe and the Access Act in America. But when it comes to tools that are attempting to address some of these same problems—like OG App, for example, which scrapes a user's messages from Instagram—you seem skeptical of whether they could work. Why don’t you think the problem can be solved on the technological level?
CD: The problem with solving these things on a technological level is that the reason people don't use the alternatives is not merely because they don't know about them but because a better solution doesn't exist. It's because switching is too expensive. If we say to people, “I built a better alternative than Facebook but none of your friends are there,” they won't come. That's the problem with attracting users to rivals to Twitter. Because the reason we like Twitter is not the software, it's because of the people. And the barriers to leaving Twitter but remaining in touch with the people who stay behind are legal, not technical. It wouldn't be hard to engineer a solution that Twitter would have to embrace, nor would it be hard to reverse engineer a solution if Twitter was unable to. But merely having a superior alternative is insufficient. It's necessary, but it's insufficient.
I do think our world is regulated by the four forces that Lawrence Lessig identified in his book, “Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace.” What we do is the result of what's technologically possible, (what he calls code), what's profitable (markets), what is socially acceptable (norms), and what's lawful (laws). And so long as it's illegal to make a viable alternative—an alternative that people can jump ship to without having to sacrifice so much—then either the existing services are gonna have to get a lot worse or the new ones are gonna have to get a lot better and probably both.
SV: But if one of those four criteria is tools themselves, should we not celebrate tools that are designed to facilitate interoperability? Like, for example, some tools built in the crypto space are designed explicitly to “seize the means of computation.” How about Bluesky, for example?
CD: Bluesky is a pretend federated service. It's a service that claims it will be federated someday. Money talks and bullshit walks. The reality is that it's run by a nonprofit whose board includes the guy that sold Twitter to Elon Musk. As Humpty Dumpty told Alice: jam yesterday, jam tomorrow, but never jam today. If it's actually interoperable then that sounds great. If it's just “someday we might decide to interoperate, but the promise is nonbinding, and if we violate it, you're screwed…then, like George Bush said: “Fool me once, we don't get fooled again.”
SV: What about tools that have the potential to be useful towards those ends, like zero-knowledge proofs? Do you see blockchain, cryptocurrency, and cryptography as the same thing? Do you think that there are tools that are being built by groups that think of themselves as crypto that also are useful beyond just that space?
CD: I think that encryption is real. I think zero-knowledge proofs are real. And I think they're all useful in building good services. But I think everything based on cryptocurrency is a dumb scam and probably not even worth discussing. There's a whole chapter that explains why and if you'd like I can rehash it.
I'm not all that interested in Ethereum. Ethereum was like, “we'll stop setting the planet on fire with proof of stake,” and now three companies control all the staking. That's not a decentralized platform—that's more centralized than finance. It's a system that only works if Layer One is filled with speculators who are bringing in new suckers to get fleeced. It's not a thing worthy of serious consideration.
A lot of those people have their hearts in the right place, but the idea that the thing that will fix the internet is turning it into a tollbooth where you have to buy imaginary money with real money to do the things that matter to you on the internet is just a profound misunderstanding of what's wrong. Like, I think that we need better technologies. I just think that if it's illegal to make it easy for people to use them, it doesn't matter how much better they are. And I also think cryptocurrencies don't qualify as better technologies. But I don't think you get permissionless blockchains without cryptocurrency.
SV: Do you think there's a general war on encryption? Do you see the recent decline of crypto as reminiscent of the crypto(graphy) wars in the 90s?
CD: Not in the slightest. The reason that cryptocurrency is blowing up is because it was a scam that was unsustainable. And to the extent that you have regulators stepping in, it's because people have had all their money stolen by scammers whose names are known. With the exception of a single case against a remixer, where I think the state action was in the wrong, no one has said that you can't make code. They're saying that you can't operate an unlicensed bank.
SV: Are you talking about Tornado Cash?
CD: Yeah. I mean, look: I think you should be able to make any code you want. I think using it in ways that hurt people can be illegal. I think you should be able to make code that affects surveillance. I think you should be able to write stalker-ware. I think that if you sell or use that stalker-ware, we should arrest you and fine you and maybe even put you in jail (although I'm mostly a prison abolitionist). But I don't think you should be prohibited from making that code.
The crypto wars were about making code, right? The Bernstein case turned on whether or not Daniel J. Bernstein, a grad student at UC Berkeley, could publish source code that describes certain mathematics. That's what the crypto wars were about. This is different. It’s like saying, “You can have any e-commerce storefront you want, but if you sell people plutonium and tell them it's an essential oil, we're still going to come and arrest you.”
SV: And so, what does the internet look like in a world where interoperability becomes the standard?
CD: It looks like something that changes a lot. In which, when companies yield to their worst impulses, which happens all the time, people can vote with their feet. Or they can rearrange the things that they use if they don't want to go elsewhere. It means that if you’re a Unity developer (Unity is a development platform for gaming programmers) and Unity decides to pull the rug, like they just did, someone just shows up with a tool that recompiles all your stuff, or uses a runtime that's compatible with Unity.
You know, you can get angry with Unity and shout at them all you want, but your actual remedy isn't shouting at Unity until they think better. It's just pressing a button. And now you're not a Unity user anymore. And you don't have to pay them a dime. That's the end. So now there's a new platform that everyone uses. Maybe it's a free and open-source package, and maybe it's a commercial package. But either way, you're in a much better place. And so, that is what “seizing the means of computation” looks like. It means that, as the circumstances change, your response can be as dynamic as the exogenous factors that bring harm to you, or do things that are adverse to your interests.