Thread by @doctorow

On my podcast, I read my @Medium column, "Ideas Lying Around," describing a #TheoryOfChange for unrigging markets, addressing the climate emergency, building worker power and saving news publishers from #BigTech:

doctorow.medium.com/ideas-lying-ar…

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If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

pluralistic.net/2023/06/12/onl…

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What is this amazing theory of change, that can do so much to right the world's wrongs? Fittingly, it's the same theory of change that got us into this mess. It's #MiltonFriedman's theory of change.

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Friedman was the archduke of #neoliberal economics, the man who led the counter-reformation that destroyed the gains of the New Deal and the Great Society.

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Friedman restored corporate monopolies to primacy over democratically accountable government, gutted labor power, and put the world in the hands of mediocre, narcissistic billionaires who are determined to set it on fire.

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We live in Friedman's world, but it wasn't always thus. When Friedman set out to restore America's deposed oligarchs to their Gilded Age thrones, his ideas were *incredibly* unpopular.

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Post-war reforms - #trustbusting, #unions, environmental and labor protections, #SocialSecurity, etc - were wildly popular. Year after year, these reforms grew.

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Groups who had been excluded from them - women, racialized people, queer people, colonized people - launched liberation movements demanding (and winning) inclusion in this broad prosperity.

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Friedman's financiers and acolytes - plutocrats and the temporarily embarrassed millionaires who aspired to join them in despotic rule - loved Friedman's vision, but they were naturally skeptical that he could make it into reality.

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They had been painfully disabused of the notion that their social inferiors were comforted by a life of forelock-tugging servitude:

doctorow.medium.com/the-end-of-the…

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How would Friedman convince these sharp-elbowed proles to go back belowstairs and stay there? Friedman had an answer:

> Only a crisis — actual or perceived — produces real change. When that crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around.
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> That, I believe, is our basic function: to develop alternatives to existing policies, to keep them alive and available until the politically impossible becomes the politically inevitable.

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Even the best-run society is subject to exogenous shocks - pandemic, invasion, natural disaster, meteor strike - and in the reeling dislocation of the crisis, people will turn to the loudest, most persistent critics of the failed status quo, desperate for alternatives.

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Friedman got his crisis. In 1973, #OPEC cut off the global supply of oil, and plunged the world into recession. The source of the recession was obvious: OPEC didn't keep it a secret.

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But Friedman and his pals were able to convince the people shivering in the dark that their pain was caused by women's lib, labor unions, civil rights and the EPA. In the crisis, his ideas moved from the periphery to the center.

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#JimmyCarter got the ball rolling, adopting Friedman's proposals for coddling monopolies and forcing workers out of safe pensions and into the market's rigged casino, where they would bet their 401(k)s against shrewd stock brokers for the chance of a dignified retirement:

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Next came #RonaldReagan, who incinerated whole libraries' worth of regulations that protected the American people from corporate predators.

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Reagan gutted unions and ripped out society's steering wheel and brakes and set it rolling towards extinction's cliff, whose brink we can see growing closer daily:

locusmag.com/2022/07/cory-d…

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Friedman's been in hell since 2006, but we live in Friedman's world. His ideas are firmly rooted in the center, and the ideas that delivered environmental regulation, decent jobs, and progress on gender and racial equality have been banished to the periphery.

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But there will be crises. As #SteinsLaw goes, "anything that can't go on forever will eventually stop." In every domain of human endeavor, we lurch from crisis to crisis: labor, climate, discrimination, corruption.

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Each of these crises is terrible, and each one is an opportunity for ideas lying around to rush into the center currently occupied by Friedman's intellectual descendants.

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80 years on, #WoodyGuthrie's 1943 New Year's Resolutions are a hell of a read, and not a day goes by that I don't think of number 19: "Keep hoping machine running."

townandcountrymag.com/society/news/a…

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My hoping machine runs on the creation and spreading of ideas lying around. Last year, @rgibli and I published *#ChokepointCapitalism: How Big Tech and Big Content Captured Creative Labor Markets and How We'll Win Them Back*:

chokepointcapitalism.com

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The first half of the book consists of detailed explanations of the scams that the highly concentrated tech and entertainment sectors use to reduce the income of creative workers, even as their own profits rise to never-seen heights.

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Readers tell us that by the time they're reached the book's midpoint, they hear the dangerous, high-pitched keening that signals an incipient rage aneurysm.

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But the *second* half of the book consists entirely of detailed, shovel-ready, systemic reforms that would make immediate, significant shifts in the pay creative workers get for their labor.

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None of these are individual solutions: we don't tell you how to shop better or other consumerist theater. You're not going to shop your way out of monopoly capitalism - no more than you're going to recycle your way out of the climate emergency.

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These are meant to be ideas lying around - ideas that are more than "let's just make copyright last longer or cover more works," which is all we've done for 40 years, to disastrous effect.

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After all, giving an artist more copyright to bargain with five publishers, four studios, three labels, two ad-tech companies or the one ebook/audiobook company is like giving your bullied kid extra lunch money.

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There isn't an amount of lunch money that will get that kid lunch. You've gotta do something about the bullies. Hence the back half of *Chokepoint Capitalism* - ideas lying around for unrigging labor markets, to be deployed in a crisis.

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On those lines: for the past month, @EFF and I have been publishing a series called "Saving the News From Big Tech":

eff.org/deeplinks/2023…

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This series lays out four "ideas lying around" for fixing the *real* problem with Big Tech's relationship to the news: stealing *money* by rigging ads, payments and social media, so that 51% of every ad dollar and 30% of every app-based subscription goes to a tech giant.

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On top of that, news companies have to spend whatever they have left to "boost" their social media posts to reach the subscribers who *asked* to see their stuff.

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News is in (perpetual) crisis, and, as with creative labor markets, the "solution" of first resort is to force tech companies to share their profits with news companies.

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This makes the news and tech into partners, just at the moment where we're relying on news to investigate tech and expose its rot.

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It also favors the largest news companies, which are overwhelmingly either billionaires' playthings or skeleton-crewed ghost ships owned by private equity looters.

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The ideas (lying around) I develop with EFF are designed to prevent tech from reaping its illegitimate profits, making it *weaker* and making the press *stronger*.

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That includes indie news outlets, from nonprofits to spunky outlets run by laid-off reporters who are determined to bring their readers *real* news.

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Fiction is also a great way to create ideas lying around. My next novel, *The Lost Cause*, is a science fiction thriller set in a world where the #GreenNewDeal is underway and people are confronting, rather than denying, the scale and urgency of the climate emergency.

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It's a novel full of joy, an emotional flythrough of what it would feel like to formulate and execute a plan to save ourselves, rather than hoping that the threat just goes away on its own:

us.macmillan.com/books/97812508…

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#KimStanleyRobinson describes *The Lost Cause* thus:

> This book looks like our future and feels like our present—it’s an unforgettable vision of what could be.

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> Even a partly good future will require wicked political battles and steadfast solidarity among those fighting for a better world, and here I lived it along with Brooks, Ana Lucía, Phuong, and their comrades in the struggle.

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> Along with the rush of adrenaline I felt a solid surge of hope. May it go like this.

I am a firm believer in the power of ideas lying around. I admit to feeling a guilty pleasure every time I cite Friedman's own words.

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I like to think that whenever he hears his words in my mouth, he looks up from the spit he's turning on in Hell, and amuses the demons turning the crank by gargling a curse around the red-hot bar protruding from his jaws.

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Here's the podcast episode:

craphound.com/news/2023/06/1…

And here's a link to the MP3 (hosting courtest of the @internetarchive, they'll host your stuff for free, forever):

ia802608.us.archive.org/28/items/Cory_…

And here's a link to my podcast's #RSS feed:

feeds.feedburner.com/doctorow_podca…

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Image:
btwashburn (modified)
commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Gara…

CC BY 2.0
creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.…

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