Thread by @doctorow

The third Little Brother book, ATTACK SURFACE, came out in the UK on Oct 1 (it'll be published in the US/Canada on Oct 13 - that's TUESDAY!). In honour of the launch, I sat down for an interview with @tuckerian, @ObserverUK's science and tech editor.

theguardian.com/media/2020/oct…

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It's a really good interview: Tucker got right into the issues of technological optimism and pessimism, letting me talk about how these balance: the belief that tech can be a force for liberation, the terror of how it can be force for oppression.

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This is really the core of the Little Brother books (and my activism).

Attack Surface is about a techie who spent her career building oppressive tech and has to confront her moral legacy when the cyberweapons she built for use overseas are turned on her friends in the US.

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It tries to expose the fallacy of the moral ledger: the idea that if you do good stuff, you erase your bad deeds (and vice versa). As we look to the unvarnished records of our cultural icons, we struggle with the question of whether they are, on balance, "good" or "bad."

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I think that's wrong: the good doesn't cancel the bad, the bad doesn't cancel the good. They exist in superposition. The people you harm remained harmed, no matter what good you do. The people you helped remain helped, no matter what bad you do.

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Fiction is a really good way to explore this. One of the cool things about writing from the PoV of Masha (Attack Surface's protagonist) is it lets me train a lens on Marcus, hero of the first two books, and reveal his own flawed nature.

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And to invite the reader to ponder whether they'd rather be Marcus - blind to your own sins - or Masha - fully cognizant of them, but committing them anyway.

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SF is a particularly good vehicle for this, because it allows readers not just to inhabit hypothetical personalities, but also hypothetical technological changes, giving us an emotional fly-through of a world that doesn't exist...yet.

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That's a powerful experience. Countless people have told me that reading Little Brother and Homeland inspired them to get involved in tech and human rights: as cryptographers, programmers, activists, cyberlawyers.

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In the interview, I cite @mariafarrell and her idea of the "Prodigal Tech Bro" - the repentant techie who has turned against the system.

crookedtimber.org/2020/09/23/sto…

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Farrell argues that the Prodigal Son is redeemed through suffering, through which he finds humility, while the prodigal tech bro doesn't really suffer, and certainly doesn't learn humility.

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Instead of elevating the voices of the people harmed by their inventions, prodigal tech bros continue to occupy center stage, and their mea culpas are also humblebrags (if you confess to having been an evil genius, you're also calling yourself a genius).

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We also talk about my recent book HOW TO DESTROY SURVEILLANCE CAPITALISM, whose thesis is that tech's harms come not from using machine learning to control our behaviour, but rather from using MONOPOLY to deprive us of choice.

onezero.medium.com/how-to-destroy…

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Tech makes it easier to find people with hard to find traits, which is useful for advertising (that's why they made it), and also useful for political and social organizing, for good or ill. It's how anyone with a disfavoured belief can find others of the same ilk.

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I support some of those beliefs (antiracism, LGBTQA) and others I vehemently oppose (neofascism and eugenics). But it's wrong to attribute the existence of these beliefs to tech - rather, we should understand their surging growth as being ENABLED by tech (not caused by it).

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The mistake that technological optimists made wasn't in assuming that tech could be a force for good - rather, it was in assuming that tech would resist monopolisation - that regulators would continue the trustbusting work they did on IBM and Microsoft.

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I think we (or, at least, I) seriously missed the fact that Robert Bork, Ronald Reagon's Nixonite court sorcerer, had poisoned our economic discourse with an ideology that embraced monopoly and militated against pro-competitive regulation.

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That poison was slowly seeping through the world, killing competition enforcement by slow stages. IBM and Microsoft were its last, dying gasps. Without it, the web was doomed to become five giant sites filled with screenshots from the other four.

https://twitter.com/tveastman/status/1069674780826071040

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Today, we see a resurgence in antimonopoly activism and a resurgence in a belief that technology is a critical part of resolving our crises and rescuing our future.

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The Fully Automated Luxury Communism thought experiment of a few years back is giving way to a #GND future of clean energy, care work, and climate remediation.

pluralistic.net/2020/10/01/the…

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And people are demanding more of their technology! Waking up to the fact that the parts of technology they hate are optional - that they are the result of choices by tech execs who decided to harm their users to make money, and to protect the money by creating monopolies.

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"No one came down off a mount with two stone tablets saying thou shalt stop rotating log files and start mining for actionable market intelligence. Those are choices that people made. And you could make different choices."

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"Sergey Brin was not dragged into spying on you by the forces of history. He made a choice. We could make a different one. If we remove the spying would you find the web searches less adorable?"

eof/