I’m heading to Berlin! On January 29, I’ll be delivering Transmediale’s Marshall McLuhan Lecture, and on January 30, I’ll be at Otherland Books (tickets are limited! They’ll have exclusive early access to the English edition of The Bezzle and the German edition of Red Team Blues!).
I’m kickstarting the audiobook for The Bezzle, the sequel to last year’s Red Team Blues, featuring Marty Hench, a hard-charging, two-fisted forensic accountant who spent 40 years in Silicon Valley, busting every finance scam hatched by tech bros’ feverish imaginations:
Marty Hench is a great character to write. His career in high-tech scambusting starts in the early 1980s with the first PCs and stretches all the way to the cryptocurrency era, the most target-rich environment for scamhunting tech has ever seen. Hench is the Zelig of tech scams, and I’m having so much fun using him to probe the seamy underbelly of the tech economy.
Enter The Bezzle, which will be published by Tor Books and Head of Zeus on Feb 20: this adventure finds Marty in the company of Scott Warms, one of the many bright technologists whose great startup was bought and destroyed by Yahoo! (yes, they really used that asinine exclamation mark). Scott is shackled to the Punctuation Factory by golden handcuffs, and he’s determined to get fired without cause, so he can collect his shares and move onto the next thing.
That’s how Scott and Marty find themselves on Catalina island, the redoubt of the Wrigley family, where bison roam the hills, yachts bob in the habor and fast food is banned. Scott invites Marty on a series of luxury vacations on Catalina, which end abruptly when they discover – and implode – a hamburger-related Ponzi scheme run by a real-estate millionaire who is destroying the personal finances of the Island’s working-class townies out of sheer sadism.
Scott’s victory is bittersweet: sure, he blew up the Ponzi scheme, but he’s also made powerful enemies – the kinds of enemies who can pull strings with the notoriously corrupt LA County Sheriff’s Deputies who are the only law on Catalina, and after taking a pair of felony plea deals, Scott gets the message and never visits Catalina Island again.
That could have been the end of it, but California’s three-strikes law – since rescinded – means that when Scott picks up one more felony conviction for some drugs discovered during a traffic stop, he’s facing life in prison.
That’s where The Bezzle really gets into gear.
At its core, The Bezzle is a novel about the “shitty technology adoption curve”: the idea that our worst technological schemes are sanded smooth on the bodies of prisoners, mental patients, kids and refugees before they work their way up the privilege gradient and are inflicted on all of us:
America’s prisons are vicious, brutal places, and technology has only made them worse. When Scott’s prison swaps out in-person visits, the prison library, and phone calls for a “free” tablet that offers all these services as janky apps that cost ten times more than they would on the outside, the cruelty finds a business model.
For the past week, I’ve been serializing the prologue of The Lost Cause, my solarpunk novel of a post-Green New Deal backlash that comes out on November 14:
The occasion is a crowdfunding campaign for the audiobook – because Amazon won’t carry my audiobooks on Audible, I self-produce them and pre-sell them on Kickstarter. The campaign is going brilliantly, and there’s still time to back it:
Usually I hire voice actors like Wil Wheaton to read my audiobooks, but this time, at the urging of director Gabrielle de Cuir, I read it myself. It came out great:
Today is the final day of the serial. I hope you enjoyed it!
In my upcoming solarpunk novel The Lost Cause (Nov 14), we get an epic struggle between the people doing the repair and care work needed to save our planet and species, and the reactionary wreckers who want to kill the Green New Deal and watch the world burn:
Amazon refuses to carry my audiobooks, which means that I make my own indie editions and pre-sell them on Kickstarter, along with ebooks and hardcovers. I narrated this one! It came out great! You can back it here:
This week, I’ve been serializing the prologue to give you a taste of what you can expect from the book, which Bill McKibben calls “politically perceptive, scientifically sound, and extraordinarily hopeful.”
My next novel is The Lost Cause, a rollicking solarpunk adventure about defending the Green New Deal from seagoing anarcho-capitalist wreckers and white nationalist militias; Bill McKibben called it “a chronicle of mutual aid that is politically perceptive, scientifically sound, and extraordinarily hopeful”:
The book comes out on Nov 14 from Tor Books and Head of Zeus, and I’m running a Kickstarter campaign to pre-sell the ebook, hardcover and (especially) the audiobook (Amazon refuses to carry my audiobooks, so this is the only way to get them into readers’ hands); you can back it now:
My next novel is The Lost Cause, a hopeful tale of the climate emergency, which comes out on November 14. Kim Stanley Robinson called it “an unforgettable vision of what could be”:
I’m currently running a Kickstarter campaign to pre-sell the audiobook, which I produced and narrated myself (for complex and awful reasons, Amazon won’t carry my audiobooks, see the Kickstarter campaign page for details). You can also pre-order the ebook and hardcovers, including signed and personalized copies:
For the next week or so, I’m going to be serializing the prologue of the book, which gets it off to quite a spicy start. Here’s part one!
I thought that I was being so smart I signed up for the over nightwhen pager duty for the solar array at Burroughs High. Solar arrays don’t do anything at night. Because it’s dark. They’re not lunar arrays.
Turns out I outsmarted myself.
My pager app went off at 1:58 a.m., making a sound that I hadn’t heard since the training session, GNAAP GNAAP GNAAP, with those low notes that loosened your bowels offset by high notes that tightened your sphincter. I slapped around my bed for my screen and found the lights and found my underwear and a tee and then the cargo pants I wore on work duty and blinked hard and rubbed my eyes until I could think clearly enough to confirm that I was dressed, had everything that I needed, and then double-checked the pager app to make sure that I really, actually needed to go do something about the school’s solar array at, I checked, 2:07 a.m.
2:07 a.m.! Brooks, you really outsmarted yourself.
Gramps’s house had started out as a two bed/one bath, like most of the houses in Burbank, but it had been expanded with a weird addition at the back—again, like most of the houses in Burbank—giving it a third bedroom and a second bath. That was my room, and it had its own sliding door to the backyard, so I let myself out without waking Gramps.
It was warm enough that I didn’t need a jacket, which was good because I’d forgotten to put one on. Still, there was just enough of a nip in the air that I jogged a little to get my blood going. Burbank was quiet, just the sound of the wind in the big, mature trees that lined Fairview Street, a distant freight train whistle, a car zooming down Verdugo. My breath was louder than any of them. A dog barked at me and startled me as I turned onto Verdugo, streetlit and wide and empty, too.
Two minutes later, I was at Burroughs, using my student app to buzz myself into the school’s gate, then the side entrance, then the utility stairs, and then I jogged up the stairs. I was only supposed to get paged if the solar array had an error it couldn’t diagnose for itself, and that the manufacturer’s techs couldn’t diagnose from its camera feeds and other telemetry. Basically, never. Not at 2:00 a.m. 2:17 a.m. now. I wondered what the hell it could be. I opened the roof access door just in time to hear a glassy crashing sound, like a window breaking, and I froze.
Someone was on the roof with me. A person, glimpsed in the corner of my eye and then lost in the darkness. Too big to be a raccoon. A person. On the roof.
“Hello?” Gramps’s friends sometimes made fun of my voice. I’d hated how high-pitched it was when I was a freshman and had dreamed of it getting deeper someday, but now I was a senior, weeks away from graduation, and I still got mistaken for a girl on gamer voice-chats. I’d made my peace with it, except that I hadn’t entirely because I was not happy at all with how it squeaked out over that roof. “Hello?” I tried for deeper. “Someone there?” No one answered, so I took a step out onto the roof. Glass crunched under my feet. It was dark and it stayed dark when I slapped at the work-lights switch next to the door—they should have been tripped by the motion anyway. I found my flashlight and twisted it to wide beam and checked my feet. Smashed glass, all right, and when I swung the light around to the nearest solar bank, I saw that each panel had been methodically shattered. I took a step back toward the door, and the light beam swung up and caught the man.
The Lost Cause is my next novel. It’s about the climate emergency. It’s hopeful. Library Journal called it “a message hope in a near-future that looks increasingly bleak.” As with every other one of my books Amazon refuses to sell the audiobook, so I made my own, and I’m pre-selling it on Kickstarter:
That’s a lot to unpack, I know. So many questions! Including this one: “How is it that I have another book out in 2023?” Because this is my third book this year. Short answer: I write when I’m anxious, so I came out of lockdown with nine books. Nine!
Hope and writing are closely related activities. Hope (the belief that you can make things better) is nothing so cheap and fatalistic as optimism (the belief that things will improve no matter what you do). The Lost Cause is full of people who are full of hope.
ALT
The action begins a full generation after the Hail Mary passage of the Green New Deal, and the people who grew up fighting the climate emergency (rather than sitting hopelessly by while the powers that be insisted that nothing could or should be done) have a name for themselves: they call themselves “the first generation in a century that doesn’t fear the future.”
I fear the future. Unchecked corporate power has us barreling over a cliff’s edge and all the one-percent has to say is, “Well, it’s too late to swerve now, what if the bus rolls and someone breaks a leg? Don’t worry, we’ll just keep speeding up and leap the gorge”:
That unchecked corporate power has no better avatar than Amazon, one of the tech monopolies that has converted the old, good internet into “five giant websites, each filled with screenshots of the other four”:
Amazon maintains a near-total grip over print and ebooks, but when it comes to audiobooks, that control is total. The company’s Audible division has captured more than 90% of the market, and it abuses that dominance to cram Digital Rights Management onto every book it sells, even if the author doesn’t want it:
My next book is The Internet Con: How to Seize the Means of Computation: it’s a Big Tech disassembly manual that explains how to disenshittify the web and bring back the old good internet. The hardcover comes from Verso on Sept 5, but the audiobook comes from me — because Amazon refuses to sell my audio:
Amazon owns Audible, the monopoly audiobook platform that controls >90% of the audio market. They require mandatory DRM for every book sold, locking those books forever to Amazon’s monopoly platform. If you break up with Amazon, you have to throw away your entire audiobook library.
That’s a hell of a lot of leverage to hand to any company, let alone a rapacious monopoly that ran a program targeting small publishers called “Project Gazelle,” where execs were ordered to attack indie publishers “the way a cheetah would pursue a sickly gazelle”:
It’s Independent Bookstore Day! I love bookstores, especially indies. I’m a recovering bookseller (love you, BakkaPhoenix!) and an inveterate and absurdly optimistic buyer of books — just this weekend, I bought three books at the LA Times Festival of Books, from Pages and Octavia’s Bookshelf!
If you’d like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here’s a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
If you’d like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here’s a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
Red Team Blues is my next novel, a post-cyberpunk anti-finance finance thriller; it’s a major title for my publishers Tor Books and Head of Zeus, and it’s swept the trade press with starred reviews all ‘round. Despite all that, Audible will not sell the audiobook. In fact, Audible won’t sell any of my audiobooks. Instead, I have to independently produce them and sell them through Kickstarter:
If you’d like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here’s a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
One of the finest pleasures in life is to discover a complete series of novels as an adult, to devour them right through to the end, and to arrive at that ending to discover that, while you’d have happily inhabited the author’s world for many more volumes, you are eminently satisfied with the series’ conclusion.
I just had this experience and I am still basking in the warm glow of having had such a thoroughly fulfilling imaginary demi-life for half a year. I’m speaking of the nine volumes in Naomi Novik’s Temeraire series, which reimagines the Napoleonic Wars in a world that humans share with enormous, powerful, intelligent dragons.
If you are like me, this may not sound like your kind of thing, but please, read on! Novik is a gifted, brilliant storyteller, and even if you, like me, had never read a tale of naval or aerial battles that didn’t bore you to tears, you should absolutely read these books, because I have never been so gripped by action sequences as I was by Novik’s massive military set-pieces.
Likewise, if you’re not a fan of dragon fiction — I’m not, though I do enjoy some heroic fantasy — or talking animal stories (ditto), you owe it to yourself to read these books! Novik’s dragons straddle the line between fantasy and sf, with decidedly nonmagical, bioscience- and physics-grounded characteristics. In the hands of a lesser writer, this can be deadly, yielding an imaginary creature that is neither fantastic nor believable.
But Novik’s deft handling of her dragons — variegated in biological characteristics, sociological arrangements, and umwelt — renders them as creatures both majestic and relatable, decidedly inhuman in outlook but also intensely likeable characters that you root for (or facepalm over, or sometimes both — a delicious sweet-sour cocktail of emotions!).
Finally, if you’re not a fan of historical fiction — again, as I am not! — you should absolutely get these books. Novik is an exhaustive researcher with a gift for rendering the people and circumstances of the past simultaneously comprehensible and unmistakably different, making the past “a different country” indeed, but nevertheless a place whose contours can be firmly grasped and inhabited.
In other words, Novik has written a work of historical-military fiction with dragons in it that I enjoyed, despite having almost no interest in historical fiction, military fiction, or high fantasy. She did this by means of the simple trick of being consistently and variously brilliant in her execution.
First, she is brilliant in the themes that run through these nine volumes: the themes of honor, duty and love, and the impossible dilemmas that arise from trying to be true to yourself and others. Captain William Laurence — the sea captain who finds himself abruptly moved into the dragon corps — is a profoundly honorable man, bound by the strictest of mores. Nominally, Laurence’s moral code is shared by his fellow gentlemen and officers, but where most of the world — all the way up to the Lords of the Admiralty — pays lip service to this code, Laurence truly believes in it.
But there is something of Godel’s Incompleteness in Laurence’s Georgian morality, in that to be completely true to his ethics, Laurence must — again and again, in ways large and small — also violate his ethics, often with the most extreme consequences imaginable at stake. Novik spends nine volumes destruction-testing Laurence’s morality, in a series of hypotheticals of the sort that you could easily spend years arguing over in a philosophy of ethics seminar — but these aren’t dry academic questions, they’re the stuff of fabulous adventure, great battles, hair’s-breadth escapes, and daring rescues.
Next, there is Novik’s historicalness, which is broad, deep, and also brilliantly speculative. Novik has painstakingly researched the historical circumstances of all parts of Napoleonic Europe, but also the Inca empire, colonial Africa, settler Australia, late-Qing China, and Meiji Japan.
It would be one thing if Novik merely brought these places and times to life with perfect verisimilitude, but Novik goes further. She has reimagined how all of these societies would have developed in the presence of massive, powerful, intelligent dragons — how their power structures would relate to dragons, and how the dragons would have related to colonial conquest.
The result is both a stage that is set for a Napoleonic War that is recognizable but utterly transformed, a set of social and strategic speculations that would make for a brilliant West Point grad seminar or tabletop military strategy game or an anticolonial retelling of imperial conquest, but is, instead, the backdrop for nine exciting, world-spanning novels.
Next, there’s Novik’s action staging. I have the world’s worst sense of direction and geometry. I can stay in a hotel for a week and still get lost every time I try to find my room. I can’t read maps. I can’t visualize 3D objects or solve jigsaw puzzles. Hell, I can barely see. Nevertheless, I was able to follow every twist and turn of Novik’s intricate naval/aerial/infantry battles, often with casts of thousands. Not just follow them! I was utterly captivated by them.
Next, there’s Novik’s ability to juggle her characters. While these novels follow two main characters — William Laurence and the dragon Temeraire — they are joined by hundreds of other named characters, from Chinese emperors to the Sapa Inca to Wellington to Napoleon, to say nothing of the dragons, the sea captains, the Japanese lords, the drunken sailors, the brave midshipmen, and so on and so on. Each one of these people is distinct, sharply drawn, necessary to the tale, and strongly individuated. I am in awe (and not a little jealous). Wow. Just wow.
Finally, there’s Novik’s language: the tale is told primarily through Laurence’s point of view, which is rendered in mannered, early 19th century English. Again, this is the kind of thing I usually find either difficult or irritatingly precious or both — but again, it turns out that I just hadn’t read anyone who was really good at this sort of thing. Novik is really, really good at it.
At the end of one summer, years ago, I ran into Vernor Vinge at a conference and asked him how he was doing. He lit up and told me he’d just had one of the best summers of his adult life, because he’d started it by reading the first Terry Pratchett Discworld novel, and had discovered, stretching before him, dozens more in the series. It was an experience he hadn’t enjoyed since he was a boy, discovering the writers that preceded him.
As I read the Temeraire books, I kept returning to that conversation with Vinge. I listened to the Temeraire books as audiobooks, downloading them from Libro.fm and listening to them on my underwater MP3 player as I swam my daily laps. Simon Vance’s narration truly did the series justice, and I could only imagine how complex it must have been for Vance and his director to juggle all the character voices, but they pulled it off beautifully.
I normally read pretty widely, but almost always within a band of themes, settings and modes that I’ve specialized in. This can be a very satisfying experience, of course. Last year, I read dozens of fantastic books that were in my wheelhouse, for all that that wheelhouse is an extremely large one:
But reading against type, outside of one’s comfort zone, yields new and distinct delights. The Temeraire series joins the very short list of heroic fantasy novels that I count among my all-time favorites, along with such marvels as Steven Brust’s Vlad Taltos/Jhereg series:
Brust is tremblingly close to finishing the Vlad books, which I started reading as a 13 year old and have been devouring ever since. I can’t wait for the final volumes to come out, so I can binge-read the whole series from beginning to end.
There are so many good new books coming out every month, and it can feel like a disservice to those writers to indulge in backlist reading, but there is a lot to be said for revisiting beloved works of decades gone by. I am so glad to have read Temeraire at last — I haven’t been this excited to read something I missed the first time around since I read Red Mars 12 years after its initial publication:
My next book is Chokepoint Capitalism, co-written with the brilliant copyright expert Rebecca Giblin: it’s an action-oriented investigation into how tech and entertainment monopolies have destroyed creators’ livelihoods, with detailed, shovel-ready plans to unrig creative labor markets and get artists paid.
Ironically, the very phenomenon this book describes — “chokepoint capitalism” — is endemic to book publishing, and in audiobook publishing, it’s in its terminal phase. There’s no way to market an audiobook to a mass audience without getting trapped in a chokepoint, which is why we’re kickstarting a direct-to-listener edition:
What is “chokepoint capitalism?” It’s when a multinational monopolist (or cartel) locks up audiences inside a system that they control, and uses that control to gouge artists, creating toll booths between creators and their audiences.
For example, take Audible: the Amazon division controls the vast majority of audiobook sales in the world — in some genres, they have a 90%+ market-share. Audible requires every seller — big publishers and self-publishers alike — to use their proprietary DRM as a condition of selling on the platform.
That’s a huge deal. DRM is useless at preventing copyright infringement (all of Audible’s titles can be downloaded for free from various shady corners of the internet), but it is wildly effective at locking in audiences and seizing power over creators. Under laws like the USA’s Digital Millennium Copyright Act, giving someone a tool to remove DRM is a felony, punishable by 5 years in prison and a $500k fine.
This means that when you sell your audiobooks on Audible, you lock them to Audible’s platform…forever. If another company offers you a better deal for your creative work and you switch, your audience can’t follow you to the new company without giving up all the audiobooks they’ve bought to date. That’s a lot to ask of listeners!
Amazon knows this: as their power over creators and publishers has grown, the company has turned the screw on them, starting with the most powerless group, the independent creators who rely on Amazon’s self-serve ACX system to publish their work.
In late 2020, a group of ACX authors discovered that Amazon had been systematically stealing their wages, to the tune of an estimated $100,000,000. The resulting Audiblegate scandal has only gotten worse since, and while the affected authors are fighting back, they’re hamstrung by Amazon’s other unfair practices, like forcing creators to accept binding arbitration waivers on their way through the chokepoint:
I have always had a no-DRM policy for my ebooks and audiobooks. Amazon’s Kindle store — another wildly dominant part of the books ecosystem — has always allowed authors to choose whether or not to apply DRM, but in Audible — where Amazon had a commanding lead from the start, thanks to their anti-competitive acquisition of the formerly independent Audible company — it is mandatory.
Because Audible won’t carry my DRM-free audiobooks, audiobook publishers won’t pay for them. I don’t blame them — being locked out of the market where 90%+ of audiobooks are sold is a pretty severe limitation. For a decade now, I’ve produced my own audiobooks, using amazing narrators like @wilwheaton, Amber Benson and @neil-gaiman.
These had sold modestly-but-well, recouping my cash outlays to fairly compensate the readers, directors and engineers involved, but they were still niche products, sold at independent outlets like Libro.fm, Downpour, and my own online storefront:
But that all changed in 2020, with the publication of Attack Surface, an adult standalone novel set in the world of my bestselling YA series Little Brother. That time, I decided to use Kickstarter to pre-sell the audio- and ebooks and see if my readers would help me show other creators that we could stand up to Audible’s bullying.
Holy shit, did it ever work. The Kickstarter for the Attack Surface audiobook turned into the most successful audiobook crowdfunding campaign in world history, grossing over $267,000:
Which brings me to today, and our new Kickstarter for Chokepoint Capitalism. We produced an independent audiobook, tapping the incomparable Stefan Rudnicki (winner of uncountable awards, narrator of 1000+ books, including Ender’s Game) to read it.
We’re preselling the audiobook ($20), ebook ($15), hardcover ($27), and bundles mixing and matching all three (there’s also bulk discounts). There’s also the option to buy copies that we’ll donate to libraries on your behalf. We’ve got pins and stickers — and, for five lucky high-rollers, we’ve got a very special artwork called: “The Annotated Robert Bork.”
Robert Bork was the far-right extremist who convinced Ronald Reagan to dismantle antitrust protection in America, and then exported the idea to the rest of the world (Reagan tried to reward him with a Supreme Court seat, but Bork’s had been Nixon’s Solicitor General and his complicity in Nixon’s crimes cost him the confirmation).
Bork’s dangerous antitrust nonsense destroyed the world as we knew it, giving us the monopolies that have wrecked the climate, labor protections and political integrity. These monopolies have captured every sector of the economy — from beer and pro-wrestling to health insurance and finance:
“The Annotated Robert Bork” is a series of five shadow-boxes containing two-page spreads excised from Bork’s 1978 pro-monopoly manifesto
The Antitrust Paradox
, which we have mounted on stiff card and hand-annotated with our red pens. The resulting package is a marvel of museum glass and snark.
[Image ID: A prototype of ‘The Annotated Robert Bork]
Bork’s legacy is monopolistic markets in every sector of the world’s economy, including the creative industries. Chokepoint Capitalism systematically explores how tech and entertainment giants have rigged music streaming, newspapers, book publishing, the film industry, TV, video streaming, and others, steadily eroding creators’ wages even as their work generated more money for the monopolists’ shareholders.
But just as importantly, our book proposes things we can do right now to unrig creative labor markets. Drawing on both existing, successful projects and promising new experiments, we set out shovel-ready ideas for creators, artists’ groups, fans, technologists, startups, and local, regional and national governments.
Artists aren’t in this struggle alone. As we write in the book, chokepoint capitalism is the final stage of high-tech capitalism, which atomizes workers and locks in customers and then fleeces workers as a condition of reaching their audiences. It’s a form of exploitation that is practiced wherever industries concentrate, which is why creators can’t succeed by rooting for Big Tech against Big Content or vice-versa.
It’s also why creative workers should be in solidarity with all workers — squint a little at Audible’s chokepoint shakedown and you’ll recognize the silhouette of the gig economy, from Uber to Doordash to the poultry and meat-packing industries.
40 years of official pro-monopoly policy has brought the world to the brink of collapse, as monopoly profits and concentrated power allowed an ever-decreasing minority of the ultra-rich to extract ever-increasing fortunes from ever-more-precarious workers. It’s a flywheel: more monopoly creates more profits creates more power creates more monopoly.
The solutions we propose in Chokepoint Capitalism are specific to creative labor, but they’re also examples of the kinds of tactics that we can use in every industry, to brake the monopolists’ flywheel and start a new world.
I hope you’ll consider backing the Kickstarter if you can afford to — and if you can’t, I hope you’ll check out one of the copies our backers have donated to libraries around the world:
I love audiobooks. When I was a high-school-aged page at a public library in the 1980s, I would pass endless hours shelving and repairing books while listening to “books on tape” from the library’s collection. By the time iTunes came along, I’d amassed a huge collection of cassette and CD audiobooks and I painstakingly ripped them to my collection.
Then came Audible, and I was in heaven — all the audiobooks, none of the hassle of ripping CDs. There was only one problem: the Digital Rights Management (DRM). You see, I’ve spent most of my adult life campaigning against DRM, because I think it’s an existential danger to all computer users — and because it’s a way for tech companies to hijack the relationship between creators and their audiences.
In 2011, I gave a speech at Berlin’s Chaos Communications Congress called “The Coming War on General Purpose Computing.” In it, I explained that Digital Rights Management was technologically incoherent, a bizarre fantasy in which untrusted users of computers could be given encrypted files and all the tools needed to decrypt them, but somehow be prevented from using those decrypted files in ways that conflicted with the preferences of the company that supplied those files.
As I said then, computers are stubbornly, inescapably “general purpose.” The only computer we know how to make — the Turing-complete von Neumann machine — is the computer that can run all the programs we know how to write. When someone claims to have built a computer-powered “appliance” — say, a smart speaker or (God help us all) a smart toaster — that can only run certain programs, what they mean is that they’ve designed a computer that can run every program, but which will refuse to run programs unless the manufacturer approves them.
But this is also technological nonsense. The program that checks to see whether other programs are approved by the manufacturer is also running on an untrusted adversary’s computer (with DRM, you are the manufacturer’s untrusted adversary). Because that overseer program is running on a computer you own, you can replace it, alter it, or subvert it, allowing you to run programs that the manufacturer doesn’t like. That would include (for example) a modified DRM program that unscrambles the manufacturer-supplied video, audio or text file and then, rather than throwing away the unscrambled copy when you’re done with it, saves it so you can open it with a program that doesn’t restrict you from sharing it.
As a technical matter, DRM can’t work. Once one person figures out how to patch a DRM program so that it saves the files it descrambles, they can share that knowledge (or a program they’ve written based on that knowledge) with everyone in the world, instantaneously, at the push of a button. Anyone who has that new program can save unscrambled copies of the files they’ve bought and share those, too.
In reality, DRM vendors know that technical countermeasures aren’t the bulwark against unauthorized reproduction of their files. They aren’t technology companies at all — they’re legal companies.
In 1998, Bill Clinton signed the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) into law. This is a complex law and a decidedly mixed bag, but of all the impacts that the DMCA’s many clauses have had on the world, none have been so quietly, profoundly terrible as Section 1201, the “anti-circumvention” clause that protects DRM.
Under DMCA 1201, it is a felony to “traffick” in tools that bypass DRM. Doing so can land you in prison for five years and hit you with a fine of up to $500,000 (for a first offense). This clause is so broadly written that merely passing on factual information about bugs in a system with DRM can put you in hot water.
Here’s where we get to the existential risk to all computer users part. As a technology, DRM has to run as code that is beyond your observation and control. If there’s a program running on your computer or phone called “DRM” you can delete it, or go into your process manager and force-quit it. No one wants DRM. No one woke up this morning and said, “Dammit, I wish there was a way I could do less with the entertainment files I buy online.” DRM has to hide itself from you, or the first time it gets in your way, you’ll get rid of it.
The proliferation of DRM means that all the commercial operating systems now have a way to run programs that the owners of computers can’t observe or control. Anything that a technologist does to weaken that sneaky, hidden facility risks DMCA 1201 prosecution — and half a decade in prison.
That means that every device with DRM is designed to run programs you can’t see or kill, and no one is allowed to investigate these devices and warn you if they have defects that would allow malicious software to run in that deliberately obscured part of your computer, stealing your data and covertly operating your device’s sensors and actuators. This isn’t just about hacking your camera and microphone: remember, every computerized “appliance” is capable of running every program, which means that your car’s steering and brakes are at risk from malicious software, as are your medical implants and the smart thermostat in your home.
A device that is designed for sneaky code execution and is legally off-limits to independent auditing is bad. A world of those devices — devices we put inside our bodies and put our bodies inside of — is fucking terrifying.
DRM is bad news for our technological future, but it’s also terrible news for our commercial future. Because DMCA 1201 bans trafficking in circumvention devices under any circumstances, manufacturers who design their products with a thin skin of DRM around them can make using those products in the ways you prefer into a literal crime — what Jay Freeman calls “felony contempt of business model.”
The most obvious example of this is in the Right to Repair fight. Devices from tractors and cars to insulin pumps, wheelchairs and ventilators have been redesigned to use DRM to detect and block independent repair, even when the technician uses the manufacturer’s own parts. These devices are booby-trapped so that any “tampering” requires a new authorization code from the manufacturer, which is only given to the manufacturer’s own service technicians.
This allows manufacturers to gouge you on repair and parts, or to simply declare your device to be beyond repair and sell you a new one. Global, monopolistic corporations are drowning the planet in e-waste as a side-effect of their desire to block refurbished devices and parts from cutting into their sales of replacements:.
DRM laws like DMCA 1201 are now all over the world, spread by the US Trade Representative, who made DRM laws a condition of trading with the USA, and a feature of the WTO agreement. Whether you’re in South America, Australia, Europe, Canada, Japan, or even China, DRM-breaking tools are illegal. But remember: DRM is a technological fool’s errand. So while there is no above-ground, legal market for DRM-breaking tools, there is still a thriving underground for them.
For example, farmers all over the world replace the software on their John Deere tractors with software of rumored Ukrainian origin that floats around on the internet. This software lets them fix their tractors without having to wait days for a $200 visit from a John Deere technician, but no one knows what’s in the software, or who made it, or whether it has sneaky back-doors or other malicious code.
And yet, manufacturers keep putting DRM in their products. The prospect of making it a felony to displease your corporate shareholders is just too much to resist.
Which brings me back to Audible. Back before Amazon owned Audible, I bought thousands of dollars’ worth of Audible audiobooks, and they worked great — but they failed badly. When I switched operating systems and could no longer get an Audible playback program, I was in danger of losing my audibook investment. In the end, I had to rig up three old computers to play my Audible audiobooks out in real time and recapture them as plain old MP3s. It took weeks. If I’d made the switch a couple years later, it would have been months (the “audiobooks” folder on my current system has 281 days’ worth of audio!).
Amazon bought Audible during a brief interval in which the company was taking on DRM. They had just launched the Amazon MP3 store, as a rival to Apple’s iTunes Store, which sold music without DRM, so users wouldn’t be locked to Apple’s platform. This was a problem the music industry had just woken up to, after years of demanding DRM, they realized that nearly all the digital music they’d ever sold was locked to Apple’s platform, and that meant that Apple got to decide whether and how their catalog was sold.
Amazon’s MP3 store’s slogan was “DRM: Don’t Restrict Me.” They even sent me a free t-shirt to promote the launch, because they knew my feelings on DRM.
When Amazon announced its Audible acquisition, they promised that they would remove DRM from the Audible store, and I rejoiced. Then, after the acquisition…nothing. Not a word about DRM. The Amazon PR people who’d once enthusiastically pitched me on Amazon’s DRM-free virtue stopped answering my email.
When I got new PR pitches from Amazon, I’d reply by asking about DRM and I’d never hear from those PR people again. I got invited to give a talk at Amazon and I said sure, I’d do it for free — but I wanted to talk to someone from Audible about DRM. The invitation was rescinded.
Once on a book-tour, I gave a talk at Goodreads — another Amazon division — about my work and when they asked if I had any questions for them, I raised Audible’s DRM and the senior managers in the audience promised to look into it. I never heard from them again.
Today, Audible dominates the audiobook market. In some verticals, their market-share is over 90 percent! And Audible will not let authors or publishers opt out of DRM. If you want to publish an audiobook with Audible, you must let them add their DRM to it. That means that every time one of your readers buys one of your books, they’re locking themselves further into Audible. If you sell a million bucks’ worth of audiobooks on Audible, that’s a million bucks your readers have to forfeit to follow you to a rival platform.
As a rightsholder, I can’t authorize my users to strip off Audible’s DRM and switch to a competitor. I can’t even find out which of my readers bought my books from Audible and send them a download code for a free MP3. Even when I invest tens of thousands of dollars of my own money to hire professional narrators to record my audiobooks, if I sell them on Audible, they get the final say in how my readers use the product I paid to create. If I provide my readers with a tool to unwrap Audible’s DRM from my copyrighted books, I become a copyright infringer! I violate Section 1201 of the DMCA and I can go to prison for five years and face a $500,000 fine. For a first offense.
All of this is so glaringly terrible that it prompted me to coin Doctorow’s First Law:
“Any time someone puts a lock on something that belongs to you, but won’t give you the key, that lock is not there for your benefit.”
It’s been more than a decade since Amazon bought Audible and it’s clear that their DRM policy isn’t going anywhere.
Which is why none of my audiobooks are available on Audible.
I don’t want to contribute to the DRM-ification of our devices, turning them into a vast, unauditable attack-surface that is designed to run programs that we can’t see or terminate. I don’t want my work to be a lure into a DRM-poisoned platform. I don’t want to make myself beholden to Amazon, locking my customers to its platform with every sale.
This doesn’t mean I don’t have audiobooks — I do! Early on, I worked with great audiobook publishers like Random House and Blackstone and Macmillan to produce DRM-free audiobooks which were sold everywhere except Audible. But Audible has the vast majority of the market, and it just didn’t make financial sense for these publishers to pay me a decent sum for my audio rights and then pay great narrators and engineers to produce books.
So I started retaining my audio rights in my book deals, and paying to record my own audiobooks. The first one was Information Doesn’t Want to Be Free, recorded by @wilwheaton, with introductions by @neil-gaiman and Amanda Palmer, which explains Doctorow’s First Law in detail.
Since then, I’ve produced many more independent audiobooks, including the audio for Homeland (the bestselling sequel to my YA novel Little Brother, also narrated by Wil), Walkaway (a fabulous multi-cast audiobook starring Amber Benson, Wil Wheaton, Amanda Palmer, Miron Willis, Gabrielle de Cuir and others), and Attack Surface (the third Little Brother book, narrated by Amber Benson).
Generally, these books recoup and make a little money besides, but not nearly so much as I’d make if I sold through Audible. My agent tells me that if I’d been willing to set aside my ethics and allow Audible to slap DRM on my books, I’d have made enough money to pay off my mortgage and save enough to pay for my kid’s entire college education.
That’s a price I’m willing to pay. In the years since the Amazon acquisition, Audible has become the 800-pound gorilla of audiobooks. They have done all kinds of underhanded things — like buying up the first couple books in a series and releasing them as Audible-only recordings, then refusing to record the rest of the series, orphaning it. They’re also notorious among narrators for squeezing their hourly rates lower than anyone else. Audible also refuses to sell into libraries, so all the “Audible Original” titles are blocked from our public library systems.
I think audiences get that there’s something really wrong with a system where a single company controls an entire literary format. In 2020, I Kickstarted the independent audiobook of Attack Surface and broke every record for audiobook crowdfunding, raising $276,000.
But Audible continues to dominate. It is the only digital audiobook channel Amazon will allow, so anyone who searches Amazon for a book will only see the Audible audio edition. It’s also the exclusive audio partner for Apple’s iTunes/Apple Books channel, which is the only iOS audiobook store that doesn’t have to pay Apple a 30 percent commission on all its sales, so it’s the only audiobook store that lets you actually buy new audiobooks.
Other audiobook stores require you to buy your books with a web-browser (which avoids Apple’s sky-high commissions) and then switch back to the app to download them — a clunky experience that has ensured that Apple’s own audiobook channel — with its mandatory DRM — is the only one iOS customers really use.
Not surprisingly, a lot of people assume that if an Audible search for an author or book comes up empty, that means there is no audiobook available. They don’t think of searching for the book on Google Books, or Libro.fm, or Downpour. They never think to check to see whether the author maintains their own storefront, as I do, where you can get all their ebooks and audiobooks without DRM.
That’s bad enough, but it gets worse. So much worse.
Audible has a side-hustle called ACX: it’s a “self-serve” platform where writers and narrators can team up to self-produce their own audiobooks, which are locked to Audible’s platform and encumbered with Audible’s DRM.
ACX has some nominal checks to ensure that the audiobooks that land on its platform are duly licensed from the rightsholders, but these are trivial to circumvent. Here’s how I know that: on multiple occasions, I’ve discovered that my own books have been turned into unauthorized audiobooks over ACX.
Scammers claiming to have the rights to my books commission narrators to record them on the cheap, with the promise of a royalty split when they are live. Inexperienced narrators, excited at the prospect of recording a major book by a bestselling author, put long, grueling hours into recording them. Then the book goes live, and I discover it, and have it taken down. The scammer disappears with the profits from the sales in the interim, and the narrator is screwed.
As am I.
Because these illegal ACX audiobooks compete with my own, self-produced editions, for which I pay narrators, directors and editors a fair wage for their creative labor. These unauthorized ACX audiobooks show up in searches for my name on Audible and Amazon, where my own (vastly superior, authorized) DRM-free audiobooks are not allowed.
This isn’t an isolated incident. It’s happened over and over again. It just happened again.
Last week, I heard from Shawn Hartel, a narrator who got scammed on ACX by someone calling themself “Barbara M. Rushing,” who told Hartel that they held the audio rights to my 2017 novel Walkaway. They do not have those rights.
I spent about $50,000 recording a stupendous audiobook edition of Walkaway, which you can buy here for $24.95.
This audiobook has met with widespread critical acclaim and the print edition has been translated and celebrated around the world. But Hartel didn’t know that.
On January 11, 2021, he accepted an offer from “Barbara M. Rushing” to record the book and worked long hours to produce a 16-hour narration. On February 1, 2021, the book was accepted by Rushing. On July 7, 2021, ACX listed Walkaway for sale. On November 9, 2021, ACX took the book down, having figured out that it was infringing.
In the meantime, Rushing sold 119 copies and gave away ten more, diverting people from buying my own, DRM-free edition.
129 times $24.95 is $3,218.55, and as far as I’m concerned, that’s what Amazon owes me.
Now, I’m not going to sue them (probably). I don’t have the money or time to fight that kind of battle. For one thing, I have eight books (four novels, a YA graphic novel, a short story collection and two nonfiction books) in various stages of production right now, and I’m going to be producing my own audio editions for them, which is going to suck up a lot of time.
But Amazon does owe me $3,218.55.
I don’t expect they’ll pay it.
Anyone who’s paid attention to Audiblegate knows about Amazon’s dirty ACX dealing. The company has been credibly accused of more than $100 million in wage-theft from ACX authors and narrators, whom it has scammed with a combination of a one-sided refunds policy and out-and-out accounting fraud.
Chokepoint Capitalism explains how large media and tech companies have cornered the markets for creative labor, and why giving creators more copyright won’t unrig this rigged game. The tech and entertainment giants are like bullies at the school gate who shake down creators for their lunch money every day.
To reach your audience you have to go through the chokepoints they have erected, and when you do, any additional copyright powers Congress has granted you is taken away as a condition of entry (think of how Audible nonconsensually takes away your right to use DRM law if you want to list your audiobooks).
If you give your bullied kid more lunch money, you won’t buy them lunch — you’ll just make the bullies at the school-gate richer. Giving creators more copyright inevitably results in those copyrights being transferred to Amazon and other monopolists. To get lunch for your kid — or justice for creators — you have to get rid of the chokepoints.
That’s what Chokepoint Capitalism is really about — not just how the markets got rigged, but how to fix them, with a list of shovel-ready, practical actions for local governments, national legislatures, artists’ groups, as well as creators, technologists and audiences.
We’re going to be rolling out a crowdfunding campaign for the Chokepoint Capitalism audiobook in a couple of weeks (the book comes out in mid-September). We’ve scored an incredible narrator, Stefans Rudnicki, who you may have heard on the Ender’s Game books, Hubris by Michael Isikoff and David Corn, or any of 1,000 other audiobooks. Stefan’s won a Stoker, a Bradbury, dozens of Audies and Earphones, two Grammys, and two Hugos. It’s gonna be fucking great.
And it won’t be available on Audible. Who owe me $3,218.55.
But you know what will*be available on Audible?
This. This essay, which I am about to record as an audiobook, to be mastered by my brilliant sound engineer John Taylor Williams, and will thereafter upload to ACX as a self-published, free audiobook.
Perhaps you aren’t reading these words off your screen. Perhaps you are an Audible customer who searched for my books and only found this odd, short audiobook entitled: “Why none of my books are available on Audible: And why Amazon owes me $3,218.55.”
I send you greetings, fellow audiobook listener!
I invite you to buy all my audiobooks at prices lower than Amazon’s, free from DRM and unencumbered by comedy-of-the-absurd “user agreements” that no one in their right mind would ever*agree to. They are for sale at craphound.com/shop.
Among those audiobooks, the $15 edition of Information Doesn’t Want to Be Free, where I explain not just Doctorow’s First Law, but also my Second and Third Laws (my agent was Arthur C. Clarke’s agent; when I told him I had come up with “Doctorow’s Law,” he told me that I needed three laws). As noted, this is superbly read by Wil Wheaton, and Neil Gaiman and Amanda Palmer read their own intros:
Of course, you will only find this book if Amazon ACX accepts it. I’ve combed quite carefully through their terms of service and I don’t see anything that would disqualify this from being listed as an ACX book.
But then again, they say they ban books produced without permission from the copyright holder and we’ve seen how that works out, right? From poking around on ACX, it looks like Amazon’s main way of checking whether a user has the rights to a book is by looking in Amazon’s catalog to see if there’s already an audiobook edition. That means that if a writer refuses to sell on Audible because of their DRM policies, Audible will use that boycott as an excuse to let ripoff artists bilk the writer, the narrator and the listeners — because if there’s no Audible edition, they assume that the audio rights must be up for grabs.
Will Audible let me use its platform to give away a book that criticizes Audible? Or will they exercise their overwhelming market power to both abet a $3,218.55 ripoff and suppress a critique of their role in that ripoff?
Only time will tell.
#
[Image ID: A screengrab of the ACX page for the audiobook, showing that it is ‘pending audio review]
Addendum: I wrote the above on July 4, 2022, just before submitting the audiobook to Amazon and leaving for a holiday. Over the past two weeks, I’ve checked in with ACX daily, but the audiobook still shows as “Pending Audio Review.” ACX advises that this process should take a maximum of ten business days. It’s been 15. Perhaps they’re very backlogged.
Or maybe they’re hoping that if they delay the process long enough, I’ll give up. In the meantime, there is now a Kindle edition of this text:
I had to put this up, it’s a prerequisite for posting the audio to ACX. I hadn’t planned on posting it, but since they made me, I did.
[Image ID: A screengrab of the Kindle listing page for my ebook showing it as the number one new release in antitrust.]
Bizarrely, this is currently the number one new Amazon book on Antitrust Law!
Also bizarrely - given the context - this book was taken down for several days due to a spurious copyright issue over the cover art, a cack-handed collage of some Creative Commons icons I put together with The GIMP. Amazon flagged this as a copyright violation (despite correct Creative Commons attribution) and took the book down, demanding that I change the cover art, ignoring my explanations. I was ultimately able to get the book restored by contacting someone I know at Amazon legal, who intervened.
I don’t know if Amazon will ever release my audiobook, but I hope they do. In the meantime, you can listen to the audiobook of this essay for free via my podcast:
[Image ID: An anti-pickpocketing graphic featuring a stick figure reaching into an adjacent stick-figure’s shoulder-bag. The robber’s chest is emblazoned with an Amazon 'a’ logo. The victim’s chest is emblazoned with an icon of a fountain-pen. The robber’s face has an Amazon 'smile’ logo. The victim’s face has an inverted Amazon 'smile’ logo (and is thus frowning). Beneath these two figures is a wordmark reading 'Audible: Am Amazon Company.’]
I have a favor to ask of you. I don’t often ask readers for stuff, but this is maybe the most important ask of my career. It’s a Kickstarter - I know, ‘another crowdfunder?’ - but it’s:
a) Really cool;
b) Potentially transformative for publishing.
c) Anti-monopolistic
Here’s the tldr: Attack Surface - AKA Little Brother 3- is coming out in 5 weeks. I retained audio rights and produced an amazing edition that Audible refuses to carry. You can pre-order the audiobook, ebook (and previous volumes), DRM- and EULA-free.
That’s the summary, but the details matter. First: the book itself. ATTACK SURFACE is a standalone Little Brother book about Masha, the young woman from the start and end of the other two books; unlike Marcus, who fights surveillance tech, Masha builds it.
Attack Surface is the story of how Masha has a long-overdue moral reckoning with the way that her work has hurt people, something she finally grapples with when she comes home to San Francisco.
Masha learns her childhood best friend is leading a BLM-style uprising - and she’s being targeted by the same cyberweapons that Masha built to hunt Iraqi insurgents and post-Soviet democracy movements.
I wrote Little Brother in 2006, it came out in 2008, and people tell me it’s “prescient” because the digital human rights issues it grapples with - high-tech authoritarianism and high-tech resistance - are so present in our current world.
But it’s not so much prescient as observant. I wrote Little Brother during the Bush administration’s vicious, relentless, tech-driven war on human rights. Little Brother was a bet that these would not get better on their own.
And it was a bet that tales of seizing the means of computation would inspire people to take up digital arms of their own. It worked. Hundreds of cryptographers, security experts, cyberlawyers, etc have told me that Little Brother started them on their paths.
ATTACK SURFACE - a technothriller about racial injustice, police brutality, high-tech turnkey totalitarianism, mass protests and mass surveillance - was written between May 2016 and Nov 2018, before the current uprisings and the tech worker walkouts.
But just as with Little Brother, the seeds of the current situation were all around us in 2016, and if Little Brother inspired a cohort of digital activists, I hope Attack Surface will give a much-needed push to a group of techies (currently) on the wrong side of history.
As I learned from Little Brother, there is something powerful about technologically rigorous thrillers about struggles for justice - stories that marry excitement, praxis and ethics. Of all my career achievements, the people I’ve reached this way matter the most.
Speaking of careers and ethics. As you probably know, I hate DRM with the heat of 10000 suns: it is a security/privacy nightmare, a monopolist’s best friend, and a gross insult to human rights. As you may also know, Audible will not carry any audiobooks unless they have DRM.
Audible is Amazon’s audiobook division, a monopolist with a total stranglehold on the audiobook market. Audiobooks currently account for almost as much revenue as hardcovers, and if you don’t sell on Audible, you sacrifice about 95% of that income.
That’s a decision I’ve made, and it means that publishers are no longer willing to pay for my audiobook rights (who can blame them?). According to my agent, living my principles this way has cost me enough to have paid off my mortgage and maybe funding my retirement.
I’ve tried a lot of tactics to get around Audible; selling through the indies (libro.fm, downpour.com, etc), through Google Play, and through my own shop (craphound.com/shop).
I appreciate the support there but it’s a tiny fraction of what I’m giving up - both in terms of dollars and reach - by refusing to lock my books (and my readers) (that’s you) to Amazon’s platform for all eternity with Audible DRM.
Which brings me to this audiobook.
Look, this is a great audiobook. I hired Amber Benson (a brilliant writer and actor who played Tara on Buffy), Skyboat Media and director Cassandra de Cuir, and Wryneck Studios, and we produced a 15h long, unabridged masterpiece.
It’s done. It’s wild. I can’t stop listening to it. It drops on Oct 13, with the print/ebook edition.
It’ll be on sale in all audiobook stores (except Audible) on the 13th,for $24.95.
But! You can get it for a mere $20 via my first Kickstarter.
What’s more, you can pre-order the ebook - and also buy the previous ebooks and audiobooks (read by Wil Wheaton and Kirby Heyborne) - all DRM free, all free of license “agreements.”
The deal is: “You bought it, you own it, don’t violate copyright law and we’re good.”
And here’s the groundbreaking part. For this Kickstarter, I’m the retailer. If you pre-order the ebook from my KS, I get the 30% that would otherwise go to Jeff Bezos - and I get the 25% that is the standard ebook royalty.
This is a first-of-its-kind experiment in letting authors, agents, readers and a major publisher deal directly with one another in a transaction that completely sidesteps the monopolists who have profited so handsomely during this crisis.
Which is where you come in: if you help me pre-sell a ton of ebooks and audiobooks through this crowdfunder, it will show publishing that readers are willing to buy their ebooks and audiobooks without enriching a monopolist, even if it means an extra click or two.
So, to recap:
Attack Surface is the third Little Brother book
It aims to radicalize a generation of tech workers while entertaining its audience as a cracking, technologically rigorous thriller
The audiobook is amazing, read by the fantastic Amber Benson
If you pre-order through the Kickstarter:
You get a cheaper price than you’ll get anywhere else
You get a DRM- and EULA-free purchase
You’ll fight monopolies and support authorship
If you’ve ever enjoyed my work and wondered how you could pay me back: This is it. This is the thing. Do this, and you will help me artistically, professionally, politically, and (ofc) financially.
ALT
