February 24, 2018

Notes from Cory Doctorow lecture at UC San Diego, gallery@calit2, "Scarcity, Abundance and the Finite Planet: Nothing Exceeds Like Excess," February 9, 2018.

At a recent talk at UC San Diego, Cory Doctorow voiced a set of concerns about how computing has skewed the global distribution of power and resources. The culprits: corporate greed, it’s production of desire, over-consumption, and infrastructure which enable some people the privilege of flushing problems out of sight. The speaker described places where science fiction writers and others have imagined the pitfalls of these tendencies in various futurities and ways out. One particularly curious theme that Doctorow seemed at the very least interested in entertaining, was that of fully automated luxury communism, a speculative and highly controversial theory that automation might eventually lead to a more equitable distribution of resources and high quality of life. When you search Wikipedia for "fully automated luxury communism," you will be redirected to the article for post-scarcity economy, although fully automated luxury communism is more like one possible way of organizing government, as well as a kind of particular new cultural iteration of communism, while the post-scarcity economy is akin to a set of economic and market conditions. He explained fully automated luxury communism using the steampunk subcultural affinity for technologies with “all of the imagination of the artisan, and all of the productivity of the assembly-line.” (citing Steampunk Magazine).

The ways that activists frame issues shapes persistent discourses. I think that those motivated by Doctorow's call-to-action can learn from complex issues in representing lack/want of resources that are regularly encountered by other global, social justice and advocacy projects coming out of the Western world. Essentially, that digital activism is non-unique in its vulnerability of falling into schemes of categorizing some rights as more important than others based on Western, cultural norms. I think his critique would be stronger if it addressed how the scarcity/abundance dichotomy he uses to think about digital rights, might issue or re-inscribe representations and valuations of lack/want. It would be a shame to see work on digital inequality fall into the traps of philanthropy projects which have been enmeshed with colonial and capitalist agendas if it relies on presumptions that the privileges hoarded by greedy or powerful groups are universally desirable.

One type of power Doctorow returned to throughout the talk was the growth of legal provisions to prevent consumers from modifying the technologies they purchase, and how that puts us at risk, like the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, and the growing legal acceptance and industry use of digital rights management (DRM), modes of locking down devices (hardwares and softwares) to prevent modification and copyright infringement (interrelated).

He noted that access to source-code is also a kind of structurally-imposed imbalance of an abundance and concentration of data resources in the corporate tech industry. Paywalled source code makes consumers vulnerable to privacy infringement by the manufacturers. He also says that it makes people more vulnerable to 'hackers', used in this way to mean nefarious technologists aka 'hackers.' His use of 'hackers' in this way is actually surprising considered he is also aligned with the free software movement, in some ways, which tends to define hacking as a kind of creative problem solving rather than by necessarily disruptive, lawbreaking conduct. Anyhow, Doctorow is concerned about hackers being able to take control of internet of things (IoT) technologies embedded in our ways of life, like wrestling the power to reroute a self-driving car, or even having access to an implant in the human body.

Fully Automated Luxury Communism Science Fiction

Doctorow is known for starting Boing Boing, a blog that regularly features articles related to digital rights. The speaker also does advocacy work with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and develops ideas about the social consequences of technology in his science fiction writing. Engineers and inventors have historically drawn from science fiction for inspiration, the anecdote goes. And then, reliably, author Isaac Asimov influence of the field of robotics will be referenced next. Doctorow returned to science fiction at different points in the talk to provide examples of ways that writers have imagined a world without capitalism. Ursula K. LeGuin’s Walkaway; Paul Mason’s Postcapitalism: A Guide to Our Future, which imagines us to consider what Amazon or Walmart would be like if they weren’t profit-motivated, but still motivated to find extremely efficient ways of manufacturing and distribution; and Leigh Phillips’ Austerity Ecology & the Collapse-Porn Addicts: A Defence of Growth, Progress, Industry and Stuff, which, according to the publisher’s blurb, argues that, “We want to take over the machine and run it rationally, not turn the machine off.” IE instead of dismantling Amazon, why not make it public, so we can use it to improve the postal system, pharmaceutical delivery, access to goods... These science fiction writers share an interest in transforming the current socio-technical machine we’ve built to be more efficient, but efficient in a way that produces more equitable and ethical distributions of power and resources.

Recent technologies have enticed new kinds of pleasures and new kinds of evils. So we turn to science-fiction, to let us entertain our concepts through other worlds, and also as sources of inspiration. Doctorow embodies this close flow of ideas between tech and science fiction in his creative output. What's particularly striking to me about his fiction career is that he speaks about sci-fi as a tool to raise social consciousness in tech, in a self-conscious way that I don't see other sci-fi writers doing, even if they might share these beliefs.