Is this the random bag check?
Yes.
Random bag check.
I'd like to have my bag searched.
Whoa.
You can't volunteer to have your bag searched.
Why not?
We pick what bag we will search at random.
Not you.
I'm random.
No, ma'am, you are not.
Not random.
I want my bag searched.
It doesn't work that way.
Very well. Don't search my bag.
What did you say?
Don't search my bag.
Hand it over.
Oh, good.
What's this?
A handgun?
I'm going on Amtrak later.
Oh, well, that's all right.
What's this?
That's my medical marijuana.
I get headaches.
That's okay.
If it's medical.
What's this?
That's my WBAI.
Your WBAI?
Yeah, listen.
All right, that's it.
You have the right to remain silent.
Anything you say will be held against you in a court of law.
Can't get arrested?
Listen to WBAI.
Support WBAI.
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Play your prayer.
And you're listening to WBAI New York, where the time is 7 o'clock.
Time once again for Off the Hook.
But if they could, they would.
But the best is back from worst.
I hope that's understood.
I hope that's understood.
And good evening to everybody.
The program is Off the Hook.
Manuel Goldstein here with you on this Wednesday evening.
Joined tonight by Mike.
Hi.
Jim.
Hello.
Rob T. Firefly.
Good evening.
Voltaire.
Hello.
Gus.
Ohayo gozaimasu.
Redhect.
Hello.
And Dan Philadelphia.
Hello.
Hi, everyone.
I'm Dan Philadelphia.
I'm here with Mike.
Hi, everyone.
I'm Dan Philadelphia.
I'm here with Mike.
I'm here with Mike.
I'm here with Mike.
Dan Philadelphia.
Bernie S.
Greetings from Philadelphia.
I'm back from Beijing.
You're back from Beijing.
So what was that like, Bernie?
I guess that country let you in, right?
Yeah, no problem at all.
The People's Republic of China was very gracious in allowing me in.
You sound different somehow.
What's changed about you?
Your voice sounds different.
Yes, my voice still thinks it's 7 a.m.
That's what it is.
That's what it is.
You really sound tired.
You really sound like you just woke up.
Actually, no.
I'm just froggy.
But China is, I don't know, the major cities I've been to, like Shanghai and Beijing, it's
like being in a science fiction novel.
It's like a very high-tech boomtown.
Things are very high-tech, and there's soldiers marching around, and it's with the best mass
transportation system I've ever seen, and it's just very strange.
I recommend people go there.
Now, why were you there exactly?
I was there with our friend Mitch Altman, the inventor of TV Begun, who's been on the
show many times.
He was taking us through some factories in Taiwan, electronics manufacturing factories,
where we saw all manner of interesting things being made, like TV Beguns, computers, telephones.
We toured a cell phone manufacturing plant, actually watched cell phones being made before
our eyes by robots.
It was really a surreal experience.
It was very amazing, and of course, seeing places like the Forbidden City.
I went to the Summer Palace and visited the Imperial Telephone Bureau.
Oh, wow.
So there, that was the first telephone exchange in China, and they had a whole little museum
set up for the Imperial Telephone Bureau.
So basically, you went on a factory tour of the Forbidden City and all kinds of other
sites in China.
Yeah, we spent about a week touring some factories, and then we spent a week exploring this amazing
country, which obviously takes a lot more than two weeks to explore, because it's humongous.
So now, the TV Beguns are made in China.
What kind of conditions are in the factories over there?
Surprisingly good.
I have been in U.S. factories that treated its people worse.
It certainly can't speak for all the factories in China, but the one that Mitch chose, which
was very selective in who makes his TV Beguns, and this company apparently treats people
very well, and the conditions were very good.
The people seemed happy.
Well, they knew you were coming, though, right?
I mean, did you surprise them, or did they know you were on your way?
We just sort of dropped in.
It clearly wasn't something that was like, we knew we were all coming kind of thing.
They were just doing their work, and honestly, in some of the places we were, people seemed
to have a higher standard of living in China than people in, say, Philadelphia or New York,
depending on who you bumped into.
I know this sounds very strange, because you can buy a beer there for $0.50, and a
one-hour cab ride costs like a few dollars.
It's very strange, but it's just a high-tech boomtown.
I guess there's just so much money pouring in from the United States making our products
that there's just money to spare, and some of it's trickling down.
I'm curious, though.
How do you select, if you have something to market or produce, how do you select a factory
over in China?
Do you go over there and just walk around until you find something you like, or is there
some online service where you can find the good ones and the bad ones?
Well, Mitch had some references, but he did a lot of research.
I wasn't part of that process, but Mitch spent a lot of time and effort finding one company
that he thought really treated its employees well.
I'm sure there's some companies that treat people very poorly there as well, but this
particular company, people were very happy.
They were just doing their job as happily as you'd think Americans would be working
in their own companies.
I've never seen happy Americans working in the factory settings.
These people actually seemed to be happy.
They were laughing, talking to each other, but focused on what they were doing at the
same time.
It's a very different culture there, and I really recommend people see this strange and
wonderful country, the People's Republic of China.
Going through Tiananmen Square was surreal, because we all know what happened there.
There are these biggest video screens you've ever seen in your life, giant pictures of
Chairman Mao everywhere.
There are dozens of light poles in Tiananmen Square with massive speakers on them, and
each light pole has about 10 remotely pointable TV cameras on it.
There's thousands of cameras pointing at people in Tiananmen Square.
It's definitely a surveillance state.
Yeah, definitely.
All right, well, I'm glad you're back safely.
Glad you had fun over there.
I guess also we might want to mention yesterday was Election Day.
Anybody have any memorable experiences at the polls?
We like to talk about this.
I know I went to my local poll and used the same mechanical machine I've been using all
my life.
They're still there, even though every year we're told that's the last time you're going
to get to use it.
No problems as usual, except the things I pushed down tended not to win.
But apart from that, it seemed to work fine.
Mike?
I did notice.
I used one of these old ancient voting machines as well, but I did notice that in the corner
of my polling place there was some kind of, they call it a ballot marking device.
That's supposedly fancier.
Who was using that?
No one.
There was no one in my polling place to use anything.
Yeah, it wasn't very high turnout.
Not very many people at all.
There wasn't even anyone to tell me, because I've moved within the past year, so I didn't
know which precinct.
They're called election districts in New York.
I was supposed to go to, and there was no one there to help me.
It was very...
What do you need help with?
Because there's three precincts, and I didn't know which one I was supposed to go to.
Oh, I see.
Okay.
Well, they have to find your name, right?
No, well, the people at the election district have to find my name, but first I have to
know which table has my name on it.
Right.
We can just go one by one until you find somebody.
These people are not very good at the alphabet.
They had the book there that gives street addresses, and I know how to use that book,
but most people, I imagine, don't know how to use that book.
That's kind of a local thing.
My neighborhood, I've got to say, everybody...
There is always somebody to be like, which precinct are you in?
It sends you to the right place and things like that.
Honestly, I'm never too concerned about using the big mechanical machines, considering what
we've heard about the digital machines at Hope.
You should be, Gus, concerned about the big mechanical machines.
They lose votes all the time.
I'm just saying not any less concerned about them than I...
Or any more or less concerned about them than I am about the digital machines.
I'd be a lot more concerned about losing thousands of votes with one keystroke than
occasional mistakes.
Well, beyond keystrokes.
I mean, the things that we heard at Hope were just kind of crazy.
Like, you know, you could do a hack that involved putting a Post-it note over something on the
glass scanner.
You could do something that involved using composite ink, but all composite ink means
is basically the same ink you use in your own printer to scan something.
And so, like, you know, the things that we've heard...
And also, having played with some of the newfangled machines, just ease of use and thinking how
senior citizens are going to figure out how to use these scanning things and...
Because they come in frightened of these things before they even touch them.
Yeah.
So, you know.
Yeah, they're big and clunky, but they're familiar, at least.
And I don't know.
Go ahead, Voltaire.
I got to use a paper ballot because our mechanical machine was broken.
So...
Well, that sounds like fun.
That was fun.
It was called an emergency ballot.
There was only one machine where you were voting?
No, there was, like, six or eight or something.
There was, like, after one of the levers was broken, so they had to decommission the entire machine.
Wow.
And, yeah, it was pretty exciting because it came in an envelope that said,
emergency ballot in big letters.
Perhaps to solve your user interface problem,
they should just put a digital computer behind something with a bunch of big levers.
Well, yeah, I guess that would be one way to fool people.
Those mechanical machines are not that easy to use either, if you don't know how.
Would that be a steampunk machine if you had a giant lever with a computer background?
I don't know.
How is it hard to, like, flip a lever down?
No, it's pulling the door.
Yeah, a lot of people turn.
There's a big, giant lever at the bottom,
and a lot of people pull it and then pull it back immediately so they vote for nothing.
Okay, that's Darwinism right there.
You know, people don't know how to even open a door.
No, it's a bad user interface.
If it was a computer designed that badly, we'd say that computer has a terrible user interface.
But it's a big machine.
It's an on-off switch.
It's just simply open and close.
If people can't figure that out, I mean, that's really simple.
You can't get more simple than that.
But how do you have to turn it on and you have to turn it off?
I mean, you know, that's, I mean, I guess.
You close the curtain and you open the curtain.
No, it's not the curtain.
It's the big red lever.
That's what opens and closes the curtain, for me, anyway.
Not in my place.
Really?
In my neighborhood, you open the curtain and then you go in and then you pull the big lever,
you flip down all your switches, then you pull the lever back again, and that's really weird.
How does the curtain open?
It's a curtain.
You just open it.
It's like a shower curtain.
You know, the curtain's attached to the red lever where I am.
It always has been, and it rings a little bell, too.
Obviously, they're a lot fancier in your neck of the woods.
It works, too.
It really does.
Anyway, okay, we don't have time to really focus on this because we do have a fundraiser.
This is the last week of our fundraiser, and we've done well so far.
We want to continue doing well.
Tonight's very important because we need to break 1,000 on every single one of the nights that we're on.
This is our fourth night.
That's a low bar.
Let's try for 2,000 tonight.
I like the way you think, and we have something really good tonight.
Not that we didn't have something good the last few nights, the last few weeks,
but we have something really cool this week, and it ties into a special feature that we have tonight,
a special guest that we have, Rob T. Firefly.
You had a really cool interview with Cory Doctorow.
You want to tell us who Cory Doctorow is?
Indeed I did.
Cory Doctorow is a popular science fiction author, writer, blogger, activist, educator.
He runs boingboing.com, the popular blog.
Dot net.
Dot net, rather.
Yes, you're right.
He's basically a heck of a guy who's into some really interesting things and into educating people about something.
It's amazing how well-known he is.
He's the co-editor of Boing Boing, but for so many other things.
He's a journalist, science fiction writer, and I guess activist as well.
He's just somebody who's really been around quite a bit.
He's also a recurring character in the comic strip XKCD.
Yes, he's been in at least two of those, I believe.
That's certainly a feather in your cap if that happens.
So you did the interview by telephone so you didn't get to see if he is in fact wearing a red cape or not?
I would just like to believe that he was.
He did the interview via Skype.
Via Skype, a form of telephone, isn't it?
For those of us who have never used Skype, for our listeners who have never actually played with this, what does that entail?
How did you do this?
Well, it's like IMs that we've all been using for ages except it's with voices.
Okay, IM being instant messaging?
Yes, which itself is like email except faster.
So instead of one of us having to read a chat log, we can actually play back what was spoken.
That's amazing.
Wow, real-time conversation.
Okay, so we're going to play part of the interview, but here's what we have for you tonight.
This is our lineup for tonight.
Now, Cory Doctorow has just published a brand new book.
He had Little Brother before.
It was a really popular book.
I believe, Voltaire, you've read Little Brother, right?
Yeah, it's a really good book.
Good book.
It's about everything they were talking about in the show, basically, like freedom.
Yeah, if you like the show, you'll like the material here.
Now, the new book is called Makers.
It just came out, and you've been reading that too?
Yes.
Okay, well, tell us a little bit about it.
It's very exciting.
It's about kind of like the magazine Makers, people that make microelectronic kits, stuff like that,
and basically revolutionize the economy.
It's kind of like speculative fiction where it's set in maybe a year or two from now,
and it talks about how really cheap electronics and everything being able to be produced so cheaply
stops the necessity for venture capitalists and stuff.
Well, it's kind of like it's talking about the dot-com era, I believe,
and the fall of the dot-com era in a fictionalized way.
It's a parable.
Yeah.
But it's set in today.
And it's told in a really fascinating style, very alluring to the reader,
and I think it's a really interesting thing to have.
So as somebody who hasn't read it, is it more like fiction,
or is it like you're reading The World is Flat, only it's just sort of hypothetical?
No, it's fiction.
It's like a novel where you have main characters and stuff.
It's not like a broader nonfiction.
Okay.
So we have an autographed copy of that book.
The brand-new book just came out, hardcover book,
Makers by Cory Doctorow for a pledge of $75.
Did you say autographed?
I said autographed.
Wow.
Yes.
We have an autographed copy of this book for a pledge of $75,
and not only that, you'll get an off-the-hook T-shirt for your pledge.
For every pledge above $25, you'll get an off-the-hook T-shirt, 25 and above, that is.
212-209-2950 is our telephone number,
and we also have one other level for a pledge of $125.
You'll get the off-the-hook T-shirt.
You'll get the Cory Doctorow autographed brand-new book,
and you'll get a full archive of Off the Hook from 1988 to the end of 2008.
Incredible deal.
I see the phones are ringing already.
212-209-2950 is the phone number.
What we're going to do now, we're going to go into the interview,
and we're going to come back and talk about this a little bit more.
This is Cory Doctorow talking about his new book
and some of the things it's about, some of what was involved in writing it.
Again, our phone number, 212-209-2950.
I'll take advantage of the autographed copy of MAKERS by Cory Doctorow.
We're on with Cory Doctorow, writer, blogger, activist.
Let's see, right now you are in the midst of a book tour.
Your new book MAKERS has just been released.
Could you tell us a little bit about the book?
Sure, of course.
MAKERS is a novel about people who find that it's so cheap to make technology,
to invent new gadgets, that they end up not needing any capital to do it.
This provokes a crisis in the capital markets
because you have all these people doing interesting stuff through networks
that just don't respond to the market the way that traditional gadgets and things have.
It becomes the center of this complete chaotic disaster
where there's lots of money coming in but nowhere for it to go.
There's big companies suing little startups
and lots of interesting stuff happening around the edges.
It's kind of a book about the present-day economic apocalypse,
but I didn't write it that way.
I actually set out to write a novel that was a parable about the dot-com crash,
which I lived through in San Francisco.
It was really amazing to watch how in San Francisco, after all the money went away,
people went on making interesting web stuff.
In fact, this whole much-valued Web 2.0 thing
really consisted mostly of people who, as far as I can tell,
they're liberal arts majors who dropped out of university
and got a free HTML and Perl education
at the expense of large pension funds via venture capitalists
and who, after the venture capitalists took all the money away,
stayed in San Francisco and went on making really interesting stuff,
realizing that you actually didn't need much money to do a web startup
and who turned into the second generation of interesting technology startups
related to the web.
Your book is fiction, obviously,
but you've lived through watching the maker and hacker scene
grow and evolve over the past years.
How much fiction is in the book?
Is it accurate to what's really going on as far as the scene?
I think science fiction is meant to reflect current technological reality
by pretending that it's the future.
All science fiction is intended to be accurate in that sense,
even though it may be somewhat speculative.
The thing that I think is pretty accurate about the current maker scene,
the current hack lab scene,
is that it's built around people
who figure out how to do a small piece of the problem
and who then put it somewhere on the Internet
and other people kind of show up
and show how to do other pieces of the problem.
And you have this very fast feedback loop
that looks a little bit like commerce
but also a whole lot like science.
There was this great flowering of science
after the advent of publication.
So before you had publication, you didn't have science,
you had alchemy.
And the way that alchemy worked is
you never told anyone what you'd learned.
And what this meant is that every alchemist had to learn for himself
that drinking mercury was a bad idea.
And when alchemists started to publish what they'd learned
so that each alchemist could verify what other alchemists thought they knew
and then build on it,
first of all, a lot of the superstition just disappeared from alchemy.
We learned actual facts
because whatever it was that your cherished illusions were
were destroyed by the crucible of peer review.
And then we also learned a lot
because people were able to do incremental knowledge acquisition
where you figured out one thing
and I figure out something that's related to it and so on and so forth
just in the same way that if you're an old web person like me,
you remember that on day one we didn't have image tags
and we didn't have italic tags
and we didn't really even have lists and so on.
And then gradually people figured out how to do stuff with the internet.
Some of it good, some of it weird, some of it bad,
some of it involving the blank tag.
And all of us used View Source to figure out what other people were doing
and built on it ourselves.
And there's this transparency into the way that web development worked
in those early years
and given that so many of the early scripts
which weren't visible necessarily to developers
were restful and used arguments that were taken off the command line,
you could kind of intuit or reverse engineer
what was going on in the back end as well.
So we had, in addition to source publication,
we also had an enormous amount of information
about what was going on behind the scenes
and that allowed for this incredibly fast innovation
where the web was just unmade and remade a dozen times
in two or three years.
And that, I think, is characteristic of the current maker movement
where you have people sharing everything from techniques
to knitting patterns to 3D meshes
to detailed advice.
And what's happening is that you have,
like as kind of an ancestor of the free software movement,
kind of the hot rodder movement
or any of the other kind of modern movements
where you had people figuring out
how to hack the material culture around them
and they were sharing tips on how to bore out your engine and so on.
And that kind of informed hacker culture
where I would publish some source
and go, but I'm having trouble with this bit
and you would help me with those bits
and we'd go back and forth.
And that's moved full circle back into the physical goods world,
into the material culture world
where now we're using those lightspeed tools developed
as a means of helping people hack atoms.
And so it's really become very exciting indeed.
And I think that I got that right,
or I hope I got that right, in many years.
I think that ties into the free content movements
in which you've also been quite active.
You're releasing novels simultaneously for free on the internet
as well as a print novel.
Like there's this whole generation now
of content producers like yourself
who can release something for free
and still successfully sell it.
How did you go about bringing this idea
to, say, mainstream publishers
and having them accept it
and not shout you out of the room?
Funnily enough, the mainstream publishers
were the easiest people to convince.
It was the small presses that were much harder,
the people who've done my short story collections
who were really very conservative.
Now, not all of them were.
The people who did my essay collection content
were much more interested in this stuff
and much more willing to consider it.
But in general, the big publisher,
which is Tor Books,
who did all of my novels
and now in the UK HarperCollins,
who do them as well,
they saw a couple of really interesting advantages
to allowing me to do this creative commons stuff.
The first was, as my editor at Tor said,
was that e-books had the worst ratio
of hours spent in meaning to dollars generated in revenue
of anything that Tor Books had ever done
in its entire career of publishing
and that they had just spent decades foundering,
trying to figure out what it was e-books were for
and how people wanted to use them.
They were really interested in doing some experimentation
where they could actually observe how people use them
instead of making a bunch of assumptions
about what people were up to.
So that was really a pretty straightforward pitch.
The small presses, I think,
were more conservative for a number of reasons,
but mostly because they stood to lose a lot more.
Tor didn't pay me a gigantic advance for my first novel.
No one gets big advances for their first novel
for some values of no one.
So it wasn't like they had a whole lot at stake.
They gave me $6,000 or $7,000
and the worst case scenario was
that if everyone in my large extended Ashkenazi family
bought one copy, they'd break even.
So they weren't all that worried about it,
so it was all upside for them,
whereas the small press, they stand to lose a lot more.
If they have one book that goes badly off the rails in a season,
it could really, really dent their overall financial health.
We're listening to an interview by Rob T. Firefly
with Corey Doctorow,
and we'll get back to that in just a moment,
but we need to get those phones ringing.
We have a really special offer here tonight,
only tonight, only this hour,
a brand-new Corey Doctorow book that has just come out
called Makers, all about the whole maker movement
in fictionalized form
and all kinds of fascinating prose there.
Voltaire, I know you're ensconced in it right now,
and it's really fascinating stuff.
We have autographed copies for pledges of $75,
212-209-2950,
and you get the off-the-hook T-shirt with that
if you want to pledge 125,
you'll get all of that plus a full archive of off-the-hook,
every show that we've ever done from 1988 to 2008,
and there's all kinds of history there.
But our phones are kind of dead right now.
We need to get those phone lines ringing
so that we can continue with the interview
and play the rest of this.
I guess we should emphasize the importance
of why people should call.
I mean, obviously, you can buy the book for less than $75.
You can probably find all kinds of deals
that would be cheaper,
but the radio station is the important thing
that you're pledging for,
keeping this place alive,
keeping voices like Cory Doctorow's on the air.
You don't really hear voices like that
in the mainstream, do you?
I don't think you do.
212-209-2950.
No calls yet, so let's get some phone lines ringing.
As you said, the number to call is 212-209-2950.
We're listening to Cory Doctorow speak
about how the mainstream culture industry
just doesn't know what's going to happen
with the future of technology.
But I can tell you one thing that is certain,
which is that WBAI will go off the air
if we don't get your pledge.
212-209-2950.
Maybe not tomorrow, maybe not next week,
but if people don't call in
and support the radio station in general,
there's no way we can sustain operations.
That's just a fact.
It's not a threat.
It really is a fact that listener contributions matter.
But the thing is,
it shouldn't be a painful type of a thing to do
because we try to provide
as many interesting conversations and topics
as we possibly can, not just this program,
but all programs, 24 hours a day,
seven days a week on this radio station.
And your call, your pledge,
not only will result in you getting something really cool,
both with the radio station
and with the things that we'll send you,
but it helps to ensure the future.
So future generations can also get something out of this
so people can go on our airwaves
and talk about all kinds of interesting topics.
And the book here, Makers,
is an example of the kind of things
that people can produce
with a little creativity and imagination.
Gus.
I'm just thinking that the radio station is critical
because it's one thing,
you can find Cory Docter on the internet.
It's pretty easy to find there.
But there's something about this show, honestly,
that I'm learning as I'm hanging out here
that it is a sort of a flashpoint
and a central focus point for a group of people
who wouldn't necessarily come together otherwise.
You guys don't see what goes on
on the mailing list that comes to us
with stories coming to us.
We get all kinds of really interesting stories
which most people wouldn't think to put together.
Stuff about, today we got something about DARPA
and DARPA's project to do stuff with red balloons
that they want people to find in the sky with geotagging,
and that was kind of cool.
And bringing that together with Cory Doctorow,
bringing together people who call us up on the phone
who otherwise might not have ever heard the show.
It's one thing to podcast and send things out online
to people who already know where you are,
but there's something about broadcast
and the way that people can just stumble across us
and go, this is really weird, maybe I'll tune in next week,
and then maybe a few years down the line I'll call,
and then maybe I'll tip off with a story,
maybe I'll come to the Hacker Conference.
And that's something that Pacifica can do,
that WBII can do, that most outlets can't do.
Yeah, it's a whole community
that basically revolves around this place
and so many different communities.
It's vital to have a broadcast station
that can reach people, like you say, by accident, at random.
You're just tuning the radio and all of a sudden
you come across something interesting.
Well, if you want something interesting to continue happening,
something that's completely non-corporate funded,
without commercials,
then please consider giving us a call,
212-209-2950,
and pledging whatever it is you can afford,
and we suggest the Cory Doctorow book
is one amazing thing you can get.
It's only available tonight, autographed by Cory Doctorow.
It's probably worth that amount on eBay alone,
if you chose that route.
Is it a first edition?
It just came out, just came out.
Autographed first editions, they do go well on eBay.
212-209-2950, join the caller on the phone.
We have a whole room full of tally people down there,
and we need to get those phones ringing.
This is the last night for us to be doing this,
and again, we need to boost those numbers a little bit,
because they've been good, but they haven't been great,
and we understand there's all kinds of economical issues.
That's why we take credit cards.
We take Visa, and MasterCard, and American Express.
I don't think we take Discover.
Don't go into debt for us,
but a lot of people out there, I'm sure,
have some money that they can afford,
whether it's $25 and just get the T-shirt,
whether it's $75 to get the book.
It's a hardcover book, I don't know if we said.
$125, you get the book, the T-shirt,
and every Off the Hook ever.
We were playing some clips from that last week.
There's just so much stuff you'll get
for your $125 pledge.
212-209-2950.
Let me point out that the archives, the full archives,
they would sell for a lot more than that normally,
a lot more than $125.
Consider, if you're looking to get a good deal,
if that's really what you're into,
just getting that for $125 would be a steal,
but not only that, you're getting that
plus the book, plus the T-shirt.
Plus the station.
The thing is, the real reason to call is for the station.
I mean, if you like the station,
even if we weren't offering anything,
I would call, I know I would,
just to keep this place going.
And I have in the past, and I probably will in the future.
Maybe even the present, if things don't go well tonight.
212-209-2950.
But again, for $125, you get the full archives.
The full archives.
20 years of Off the Hook in full broadcast quality
on a series of DVDs.
And you'll get the brand new Cory Doctorow book
called Makers, autographed by himself.
And you'll get the Off the Hook T-shirt,
which you can only get by donating to Off the Hook.
You know, we have a caller on the line,
but again, we really need to have a lot more than that.
212-209-2950.
Come on, someone in this room can get that phone ringing.
Who's gonna do it?
Go ahead, Voltaire.
Those archives you mentioned are incredibly extensive.
They were actually inspired a person
to write a series of four graphic novels about the archives.
That's right.
That's right.
WYSIWYG.
Yeah.
And we talked to the author of that collection
earlier in the year.
It's all kinds of interesting things
that people do as a result of listening to the show.
They get inspired to do all kinds of other things.
Some people have gone on and done radio themselves.
And it's just a really cool community that builds up.
All right, we have two calls on the line.
That's good.
But let's make that five, really.
We're not trying to simply turn...
Actually, we are trying to turn a small number into a big number.
But there's a reason behind that
because everybody added together creates a large number.
And we're up to, I think, something over $600,000 total.
And that came about because of people like you
pledging whatever it is you can afford.
There are a lot of people out there.
A lot of people care about this place.
And we certainly comprise those people ourselves.
But we'd like you to join us.
212-209-2950.
All right, and, of course, for $125 pledged today,
you'd get the DVDs with the entire collection of Off the Hook,
20 years of, and then also Makers by Cory Doctorow,
his new hardcover first edition autographed book.
Three calls on the line.
And I think it would be really kind of neat
to have the two of those together, personally,
because it would be one thing to sort of have the fictional account
and then compare it to what you can hear about hackers...
Four calls.
...at the same time.
Because it's one thing to have the fiction.
Yeah, anybody can speculate about this stuff.
But what has actually happened?
Compare the two.
See how it goes.
Yeah.
Sounds good.
It's incredible to see people like Cory Doctorow
rise through the ranks.
And as is going to be mentioned soon in this interview,
he actually wrote an article for 2600, 2600 Magazine,
the Hacker Quarterly, years and years ago.
And I'm not saying that's what propelled him into fame.
But despite that, he became successful and famous.
It just goes to show, though, how the community all ties together
and how we all sort of bounce off each other,
our ideas, our feedback, things like that.
And it really is like a huge, amazing family.
Off the Hook is a part of that.
2600 is a part of that.
The Hope Conferences.
And you're a part of it, too, the listeners to this radio station.
It's something that really isn't possible
if you look at it from a logical point of view.
This place should not exist.
The magazine should not exist.
The radio show should not exist.
Books like Corey's shouldn't exist
because people aren't supposed to be that intelligent
to be able to get it, to be able to appreciate it.
But you know what?
It all exists.
It all exists because of people like you.
212-209-2950.
Right now we have four calls on the line.
If we can make that five, we'll go back to the interview
and you'll hear some pretty interesting things.
Rob, you talked to him, I believe this was yesterday, right?
And in this next section, which we're going to hear,
you called him early in the morning.
Actually, you Skyped him.
Is that the right way to say it?
Yes, we Skyped.
Okay, but you Skyped him.
I Skyped him, yes.
Early in the morning, but that was afternoon or noontime.
And in the middle of this next section,
his cuckoo clock goes off and it's 12 noon.
So you can imagine it's the longest possible iteration of that.
Just an idea of the fun that we had with this.
Exclusive peek at Corey Doctorow's cuckoo clock.
Yeah.
Where was he?
He's in London.
He's in London.
Yeah, but he's coming to the United States.
And after this next break, we'll tell you when and where.
But we're waiting for that one more phone call to come in.
212-209-2950.
Mike?
You know, one thing that really struck me,
you said that we've raised about $600,000 so far, this fundraiser.
Not us.
The radio station.
The radio station.
And to raise that kind of money in increments of $75 and $125
really means that there are a lot of people out there
who really want this station to continue to stay on the air
and it's really amazing to think that we can raise this $600,000,
a lot of money, we can raise this in relatively small increments,
but we can only do it with your support.
Call us, 212-209-2950.
Waiting for that one more light to light up.
That's all it's going to take.
212-209-2950.
And, of course, stay on while we take your pledge information.
Don't just make the light light up.
We know that trick and we're not going to fall for that again.
212-209-2950.
Bernie, maybe you can get the phones to light up.
Well, I hope so, Emanuel,
because this is a very few clauses are as worthwhile as WBAI.
I was just thinking about the amazing overlap
between science fiction and the hacker community
and where else are you going to hear about this kind of overlap
but on WBAI's off the hook.
I, myself, personally, was heavily influenced
by early science fiction novels,
and that really made me think about the future
and what was possible technologically,
and I'm sure I'm not alone in the hacker community
and people who are heavily influenced by science fiction writers,
not Cory Docter because he came on later than people like Isaac Asimov
and folks like that.
But it's that kind of a mindset,
thinking about what's possible with science,
what's possible with technology.
A lot of the stuff we talk about on this show is like what if.
This is a really amazing technology,
but what if people used it this way?
It's the whole interesting social impact of technology
that this show covers and Cory Docter writes about
that really gets my creative juices flowing,
and I'm sure I'm not alone in that.
So if people call 212-209-2950,
you can support an actual radio station in New York
that broadcasts information like this.
Really, I don't know any other radio station
that's going to really cover this really interesting confluence of minds
that sort of meet together on the air, in cyberspace, wherever,
on the Internet,
that get the creative juices flowing to people.
It's kind of like a hacker conference in a way.
In fact, I think we should have Cory come talk at one of the upcoming HOOPCOMP.
Yeah, it's definitely something that we're trying to work out as well.
212-209-2950 is our phone number.
We have to go back to the interview
if we're going to actually fit it all in in this hour,
so please, if you're listening and considering calling,
take this as an example of our trust
that you will do the right thing and call while the interview is playing
because we do want to play the whole thing for you.
212-209-2950.
Let's go back to Cory Doctorow talking about various copyright issues,
Amazon, things like that.
Again, the phone number, 212-209-2950.
Get a copy of the Cory Doctorow book autographed
or a full archive of Off the Hook or an Off the Hook t-shirt,
all kinds of cool things.
212-209-2950.
Back to Cory Doctorow.
The intro to the e-book of makers starts with you saying,
I might read from this for a moment,
there's a dangerous group of anti-copyright activists out there
who pose a clear and present danger to the future of authors and publishing.
They have no respect for property or laws.
What's more, they're powerful and organized
and have the ears of lawmakers and the press.
I'm speaking, of course, of the legal departments at e-book publishers.
This, of course, involves things like digital rights management.
And usurious license agreements.
How do you see that whole aspect
of what might be called the old media industries dealing with now?
You have things like iTunes have eventually removed DRM.
Amazon is selling DRM-free things.
And it seems to be, actually, the waves of anti-DRM sentiment
have actually seemed to make a dent.
I think it's...
Let me just, before we go forward,
let me just correct a small misapprehension here.
Amazon has not removed DRM from at least one important category.
It's actually the most expensive thing that Amazon sells is audiobooks.
And Amazon only has one licensed audiobook supplier.
There's only one company that's allowed to supply audiobooks to iTunes.
That's Amazon's Audible company.
Audible doesn't do DRM-free audiobooks,
even when the publisher asks them to.
And when...
I actually had discussed with Audible
doing a DRM-free audiobook of Makers,
which is from Random House Audio.
Random House, of course, is part of Bertelsmann.
They're the largest publisher in the world.
So this is not like some random hippie small press asking them to do this.
This is the largest publisher in the world
asking them to do a book without DRM.
And at first they said no, and eventually they came around.
But Apple refused to carry it if it didn't have DRM on it.
And so not only has Apple only allowed one supplier
into the audiobook ecosystem,
and that supplier actually sells 90% of the audiobooks in the market today,
but when that supplier can be invaded into dropping DRM,
Apple won't touch it any longer.
So Apple demands mandatory DRM on all audiobooks.
Let's not let Steve's reality distortion fields go unchecked here.
The thing that I think is important to recognize here
is that if you go out and you buy a book from Amazon,
or you buy a book on CD from Amazon,
you get a whole lot of rights that are spelled out in copyright.
It's not an alternative to copyright.
It is copyright.
Copyright says that you bought it, you own it,
you can lend it out, you can give it away,
your kids can inherit it,
you can do all kinds of things to it because it's your property.
What Amazon and what iTunes say,
and what all the e-book publishers are saying,
is that because you're buying a download,
you're no longer buying it, you're only licensing it.
They claim this even though when you actually look at their publications,
they talk about e-book sales.
They don't talk about e-book licenses.
They talk about audiobook sales.
They don't talk about audiobook licenses.
But for the purposes of taking your money,
excuse me, my cuckoo clock is going off here.
It's new year, so this is the longest time of the day.
I can respect that.
And now we get my knapsack on my back.
This is my birthday present for my wife,
and it's just about my favorite thing about my office.
Anyway, so copyright law gives you all these rights,
and what they're saying is,
no, we don't care what copyright law says.
We are going to, for the purposes of taking your money,
pretend that we're not selling you anything.
We're going to pretend that this is a license,
and then we're going to put all these conditions on the license,
and those conditions make a complete mockery of copyright law,
what they do.
So if you buy an audiobook through the iTunes store using an iPhone,
you agree to something like 26,000 words of license conditions.
That's probably longer than some of the audiobooks
that you might buy through the iTunes store,
and those 26,000 words are not there for your benefit.
You could write a copyright license
that was absolutely intended to respect copyright.
It would look like this.
It would say, by buying this book,
you agree not to violate copyright law.
That's one sentence. We're done.
I've just saved e-book publishers around the world millions of legal fees.
Nevertheless, they larged on all of these restrictions.
Even the Amazon MP3 store, even the iTunes non-DRM titles
have thousands of words of restrictions
that make a complete mockery of copyright law,
and more importantly what they do
is they divorce us from the idea of owning our books.
Now, owning books is actually not only older than book selling,
not only older than publishing,
it's older than printing.
People have owned books for longer than there have been printed books,
and that deep emotional connection that we feel to books
is an asset that is owned by publishing,
that publishing never earned,
and that nevertheless returns a huge dividend to publishing every year
in the form of people who buy books for the mere pleasure of owning them,
for the idea that they can put them in their library,
that they can hand them on to their children,
that they can have them around as friends.
You know, if you're making a little movie
and you wanted to show that society had fallen into barbarism
with one quick cut scene,
you could cut to a scene of a mountain of books being burned.
Everyone would suddenly understand
that the society has now fallen into barbarism.
If you're writing a novel
and you wanted to have a character who came across as very sympathetic,
you could show him among his books
and show how much he loved his books
and what a bookish sort he was,
and everyone who was reading the book would understand
that this was a person filled with virtue
because he loves books.
This emotional response that we have to books
sells books and sells books
long beyond what a rational marketplace actor
would deliver to publishers.
Publishers are setting out to destroy this windfall game,
this evergreen source of profit,
through these mingy license agreements
that have no basis in reality.
They don't even have a basis in law.
You'll see that every single one of them has a clause that says
if any part of this agreement is found to be unenforceable,
the remainder of it remains in force.
This is a lawyer's way of saying,
this doesn't represent what we think a judge will agree is legal.
This represents everything and the kitchen sink.
And you will have to spend millions in court
to find out which parts of it we actually take seriously.
It is a really ugly joke
on the idea of publishing, book ownership, and authorship.
If they get their way,
there is this incredible danger that they will succeed
in divorcing people's emotional connection from their books.
It turns out that these emotional connections
we think of as being really important and kind of deep set
are actually pretty easy to disrupt.
You have child soldiers
who are made to feel alienated from their parents and so on.
These deep human relationships that we think of as innate
actually are not that hard to get rid of.
And they may in fact get rid of it.
And if they do, woe to them and woe to us
as people who are involved in publishing.
Amen.
Corey Doctorow, speaking to Rob T. Firefly
as part of our special tonight on Off the Hook.
Again, you can get a copy of Corey's brand new book,
Autographed, by him for a pledge of $75
along with an Off the Hook t-shirt for a pledge of $125.
You'll get the Autographed book, the t-shirt,
and a full archive of Off the Hook programs.
Redhack.
It's interesting to hear him talk about DRM
and how publishers use it,
the iTunes store and all that stuff.
And how really, if you think about it,
at least in my own experience,
whether there's DRM or not,
there's always a way to find something without DRM,
a version of that digital content.
But the things that I really value,
that I really want to own
or I want to pay the artist or author,
I buy.
Or for free software that I use all the time,
I donate to the project.
And I think that that's true in a lot of cases.
And so just putting all these restrictions
doesn't really change the playing field all that much,
except that these people can then sue individuals.
But I don't think it's going to give them any financial gain.
All right.
212-209-2950 is our telephone number.
And you can dive into that whole world
of all kinds of copyright issues
and the dot-com era and science fiction
and all kinds of really cool things like that
through Cory Doctorow's brand-new book,
MAKERS, being made available tonight and only tonight
for a pledge of $75.
Autographed, hardcover,
and along with a copy of an off-the-hook T-shirt.
And for a pledge of $125,
you'll get all of that plus a full off-the-hook archive.
Gus.
And what you also get, of course, is the radio station.
We need your pledges to stay on the air here at WBAI.
And where else are you going to hear somebody
talking about media ownership?
It's not going to happen on commercial radio ever.
Because you start talking about that,
advertisers pull their funding,
not only because, you know,
you're talking about their parent company,
but also because they think you're incredibly tedious.
But Cory Doctorow makes it really exciting.
So you want the book.
You want BAI to stay on the air.
Call us up.
Pledge $75.
You get his first edition, hardcover, autographed book.
Now, we're just about at the 700 level.
We need to go over 1,000 for this hour,
at least 1,000.
So please, 212-209-2950.
We have the conclusion of the interview,
which we want to get back to ASAP.
We're running short on time,
so it's very important that those phones start ringing.
If we see one or two calls come in right now,
212-209-2950, we can go right back to the interview,
get it all in before the end of the hour.
It's that good.
It's that important.
He's going to be talking about his article in 2600
and the whole process of education
and how it relates to activism
and getting people involved
who would not ordinarily be involved.
All the same things that we talk about week after week
here on Off The Hook.
It's all related.
It all ties together.
And we need you to help make this kind of conversation possible,
make this kind of dialogue a possibility for the future.
212-209-2950.
Join the people who have called in already.
This is our last night doing this,
so it's extremely important that we have a good showing tonight.
Voltaire.
This isn't only an issue about stuff we talk about on Off The Hook.
It's something we talk about on the entire WBAI station
and all the Pacific networks.
You don't hear about stuff like this on NPR
or certainly not on commercial radio.
You hear good things, but not like this.
It's not as down-to-earth.
It's not as localized,
and that's what the difference is, I think.
212-209-2950.
Okay, let's go back to the interview.
And again, we see two calls coming in.
That's great.
We need to make that five or six calls.
That's up to you, folks.
We want to get this whole thing in,
but we're relying on you to give us a call
while we play the interview,
and I think our listeners will come through for us.
212-209-2950.
We have three calls on the line, three levels.
$25 for the shirt, $75 for the shirt,
plus the autographed Cory Doctorow book called MAKERS.
$125 for the book and the T-shirt
and the full catalog of Off The Hook shows
from 1988 to 2008.
212-209-2950.
Let's go back to the Cory Doctorow interview.
My friends at 2600 Magazine have informed me
that you've actually written an article for 2600 in the past.
Could you tell us a little bit about what that was about?
Yeah, I figured I had to take some DRM off a piece of demo ware,
and I did it without being really much of a stellar programmer
by breaking it into a set of component pieces
that were independently testable.
I kind of took the stuff that I learned in science class
and brought it to bear on my computer.
So what this thing did was it allowed you to use it
10 times a minute locked up.
So I reasoned that somewhere on the hard drive
there was a file that it had to be incrementing or modifying
to keep track of that 10 count.
So what I did was I opened it and closed it
and then checked to see which was the most recently modified file
on the drive, and from that I located the file,
and then I kind of opened the file in a hex editor
and realized that the author had encrypted the counter
so you couldn't see what the counter was.
But I could reinstall the program on a computer
that had never had it before and look at what that file looked like
when the counter was set to zero.
And from that I was able to take an image of the file,
the hex dump for the file, that would reset the counter to zero.
So without having to know what scheme was being used
to increment the counter,
this obfuscated scheme for encrypting the counter,
I could nevertheless reset the counter to null,
which would start it over again.
And I wrote a piece of software that just took the counter
and set it to zero.
And then I wrote an article on this approach,
on a non-programmer's approach to understanding
and essentially debugging difficult computer problems
that were in some way zero knowledge.
It didn't require that I understand the workings of the cipher,
it only required that I understand how to undo its mischief.
So that was a really instructive experience for me
in terms of problem solving and so on.
And when I later became a full-time systems administrator,
it was really useful to have that approach.
That's fantastic.
And that's an example I think of,
although you wouldn't necessarily be the best programmer
or code monkey in the world,
you could still look at something,
use what you do know and figure out how it's doing what it's doing.
You've blogged a bit in the past about how,
bringing this back to the writing,
you've blogged a bit about how you never did as well
in a sort of university setting
versus just going out and writing and taking workshops
and improving your skills on your own basically.
Could you tell us a bit about this approach
and how it's worked for you?
I went to this great publicly funded alternative school
that was open to everyone in Toronto called Seed School.
And Seed encouraged a couple of things
that turned out to be vastly important to how I live my life.
The first one was that you were allowed to study
anything that interested you,
provided you could find someone in the world
who would teach it to you.
And then that person would be responsible
for writing up your progress
so that the faculty could oversee it.
In the 70s, when they had a computer science program,
what they did was they found someone
at the University of Toronto
who would get them time on a mainframe
at two in the morning.
And that person would write up what they had done
and then those write-ups would be used
in order to assign a grade by a teacher who was on faculty.
So that was incredibly useful to me
because it basically meant that
any time I was interested in something,
I took it on board as a challenge
to go figure out how to find out more about it,
who to ask, how to ask them,
and how to reward their time
in giving me some mentorship.
But this served me very poorly in university.
And the other thing was, of course,
all this freedom to just do whatever you wanted,
to sort of take a year off from math
and spend it all on writing,
if that's what floated your boat.
This served me very poorly in university,
which on the one hand has become very vocational.
Ironically, my high school was run
a lot more like a classical university
in which the object was intellectual exploration.
And the universities I attended
were run much more like high schools,
which are really an artifact of the industrial era.
And high schools,
the reason that they resemble factories so much,
down to the ringing bells
that signal when you're supposed to move,
is that they were supposed to provide workers
who were well-trained to work on assembly lines.
So I had this reverse experience.
I ended up in an academic high school
and a vocational university
instead of the other way around.
And university was just too constrained.
By the time you get to grad school, if you're lucky,
I think you end up in programs in most universities
that allow you to design your own curriculum
and kind of follow your weird
and are academic in the best sense of the term.
But the undergraduate programs tend to be built
around just moving a large number of warm bodies
through as quickly and as painlessly as possible.
And it just didn't work for me at all.
So by the end of it,
after dropping out of three universities,
I was in my last university,
the University of Waterloo's Independent Studies program,
where, ironically, I'm now a visiting lecturer
and a scholar in virtual residence
with three students there.
And I was at that program doing my thing,
and I got offered a job programming multimedia CD-ROMs
for the Voyager company in New York.
And I had just been turned down for a thesis project
that would have been hypertext and multimedia on a CD-ROM.
And so I thought, well, you know,
I can stay here and pay you guys
not to do interactive multimedia hypertext,
or I can go off and get paid, you know,
10 times what I'm making in a bookstore now
to do interactive media and hypertext.
So I just dropped out, never looked back.
And, you know, I was lucky
because what was the CD-ROM industry
quickly became the web industry,
and the web industry, as I said,
was entirely built around view sources,
entirely built around reading stuff as it was being invented
and participating in that invention.
Now, you're originally from Canada,
and you've lived all over the place,
from Canada to the United States
to where you are now in London.
And also a little in Central America.
In all these places, you've worked with organizations
like the EFF and other organizations
to protect rights and things like that.
Could you tell us a bit about how these different places,
how the atmospheres kind of compare nowadays?
Oh, well, I guess, you know,
EFF transformed itself around the time I got there,
and I think I was part of that,
from an organization that was mostly centered around lawyers
doing impact litigation,
which, of course, 2600 was involved in,
a very famous case,
where an impact litigation is all about
picking a lawsuit that, if you win it,
will change the law.
And so it's very lawyer-heavy,
and kind of the fundamental unit of communication
in an impact litigation is a PDF of a legal brief.
And it started to...
So EFF did mostly that
and had a little emphasis on activism,
and it started to reinvent itself as an organization
that kind of did both in equal measure.
And mostly that was due to the fact
that the Internet made it a lot easier
to organize people around activist causes.
So, you know, basically EFF's hard work
in trying to keep the Internet free
paid off by delivering a free Internet
where activists could come together
and make a huge difference.
I think that organizations
that are built around copyright moderation and privacy
are in some ways enjoying a golden era.
Now, on the one hand,
I think that the world is harder
than it's ever been for them
because the other side has got more power
and organization than it ever has.
But we also have more people
who understand intuitively
how important the Internet is.
It's no longer thought of as just that thing
that a few geeky people use somewhere over there.
It's become this really critical piece
of everyone's lives.
You know, I got a comment on BornBorn this morning
from someone who identified himself
as being 78 years old,
who reads BornBorn since his kids have put him onto it,
and who has discovered that the Internet
is critical to how he lives his life.
So, you know, people who historically
wouldn't have understood intuitively
why it was important to keep the Internet free
have really come on board now.
And I think that makes
the job of activist groups a lot simpler.
All right.
That was the interview with Cory Doctorow.
And again, these are the last few minutes
of our fundraiser here on Off The Hook.
212-209-2950.
Get the Cory Doctorow book autographed
for $125 and an Off The Hook T-shirt.
Or for $125, get the Cory Doctorow book,
maker's autograph, plus the shirt,
plus a full Off The Hook archive.
I want to thank our own Jim
for donating during the break.
Jim, you're going to get a copy of the book
and a full archive.
Thanks very much for your generous donation, Jim.
Okay.
All right.
And we'll be back again next week
with hopefully a non-fundraising edition
of the program.
We'll be back on November 12th
at the Merrill Collection of Science,
Fiction, Speculation, and Fantasy,
Cambridge, Massachusetts, on the 16th,
here in New York City
at the borders of Columbus Circle,
November 17th, 7 p.m.
November 20th, he'll be in Philadelphia
at the Free Library,
and the 20th through 22nd
at PhilCon, Cherry Hill, New Jersey.
You can check this out,
check out the schedule
by going to craphound,
Thanks to Corey, thanks to everybody for calling in.
Again, 212-209-2950.
Thanks again. Good night.
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