Kitchensink callithump linkdump

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On July 14, I’m giving the closing keynote for the fifteenth HACKERS ON PLANET EARTH, in QUEENS, NY. Happy Bastille Day! On July 20, I’m appearing in CHICAGO at Exile in Bookville.

With just days to go before my summer vacation, I find myself once again with a backlog of links that I didn’t squeeze into the blog, and no hope of clearing them before I disappear into a hammock for two weeks, so it’s time for my 21st linkdump – here’s the other 20:

https://pluralistic.net/tag/linkdump/

I’m going to start off this week’s ‘dump with a little bragging, because it’s my newsletter, after all. First up: a book! Yes, I write a lot of books, but what I’m talking about here is a physical book, a limited edition of ten, that I commissioned from three brilliant craftspeople.

Back in March 2023, I launched a Kickstarter to pre-sell the audiobook of Red Team Blues, the first novel in my new Martin Hench series, about a forensic accountant who specializes in unwinding tech bros’ finance frauds:

https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865847/red-team-blues

One of the rewards for that campaign was a very special hardcover: a handmade, leather-bound edition of Red Team Blues, typeset by the typography legend John D. Berry:

https://johndberry.com/

Bound by the legendary book-artist John DeMerritt:

https://www.demerrittstudios.com/

And printed by the master printer JaVae Berry:

https://www.jgraphicssf.com/

But this wasn’t a merely beautiful, well made book – it had a gimmick. You see, I had already completed the first draft of The Bezzle, the second Hench novel, by the time I launched the Kickstarter for Red Team Blues. I had John Berry lay out a tiny edition of that early draft as a quarter-sized book, and then John DeMerritt hand-bound it in card.

The reason that edition of The Bezzle had to be so small was that it was designed to slip into a hollow cavity in the hardcover, a cavity that John Berry had designed the type around, so that both books could be read and enjoyed.

I offered three of these for sale through the Kickstarter, and the three backers were very patient as the team went back and forth on the book, getting everything perfect. Last month, I took delivery of the books: three for my backers, one each for John DeMerritt and John Berry’s personal archives, one for me, and a few more that I’m going to surprise some very special people with this Christmas.

Look, I had high hopes for this book. I dote on beautiful books, my house is busting with them, and I used to work at a new/used science fiction store where we had a small but heartstoppingly great rare book selection. But these books are fucking astounding. Every time I handle mine, my heart races. These are beautiful things, and I just want to show them to everyone:

https://www.flickr.com/photos/doctorow/albums/72177720318331731/

As it happens, the next thing I’m going to do (after I finish this newsletter) is turn in the copyedited manuscript for the third Hench novel, Picks and Shovels, which comes out in Feb 2025 (luckily, I had enough time to review the edits myself, then turn it over to my mom, who has proofed every book I’ve written and always catches typos that everyone else misses, including some real howlers – thanks Mom!):

https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865908/picksandshovels

Of course, the majority of people who enjoy my books do not end up with one of these beautiful hardcovers – indeed, many of you consume my work exclusively as electronic media: ebooks and (of course) audiobooks. I love audiobooks and the audio editions of my books are very good, with narrators like Amber Benson, Wil Wheaton, and Neil Gaiman.

But here’s the thing: Audible refuses to carry my books, because they are DRM-free (which means that they aren’t locked to Audible’s approved players – you can play my audiobooks with any audiobook player). Audible has a no-exceptions, iron-clad rule that every book they sell must be permanently locked into their platform, which means that Audible customers can’t ditch their Audible software without losing their libraries – all the books they purchased:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/07/25/can-you-hear-me-now/#acx-ripoff

Being excluded from Audible takes a huge bite out of my income – after all, they’re a monopolist with a 90% market share. That’s why I’m so grateful for indie audiobook stores that carry my books on equitable terms that Audible denies – stores like Libro.fm, Downpour and even Google Books.

This week, I discovered a new, amazing indie audiobook store called Storyfair, where the books are DRM-free and the authors get a 75% royalty on every sale:

https://storyfair.net/helpstoryfairgrow/

Storyfair is a labor of love created by a married couple who were sickened and furious by the way that Audible screws authors and listeners and decided to do something about it. Naturally, I uploaded my whole catalog to the site so they could sell it:

https://storyfair.net/search-for-audiobooks/?keyword=cory+doctorow&filter=any

These books are DRM-free, which means that no matter who you buy them from, you can play them in the same player as your other DRM-free audiobooks. You know how you can read all your books under the same lamp, sitting in the same chair, and then put them in the same bookcase when you’re done with them? It’s weird – outrageous even! – that tech companies think that buying a book from them means that they should have the legal right to force you to read or listen to it using their technology exclusively.

Keep reading

Kickstarting “The Bezzle” audiobook, sequel to Red Team Blues

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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:

http://thebezzle.org

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:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/12/algorithmic-wage-discrimination/#fishers-of-men

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.

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The Lost Cause prologue part IV

I’m coming to Minneapolis! Oct 15: Presenting The Internet Con at Moon Palace Books. Oct 16: Keynoting the 26th ACM Conference On Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing.

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:

http://lost-cause.org

To whet your appetite, I’m serializing the book’s prologue, which really kicks things off:

Here’s part one:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/06/green-new-deal-fic/#the-first-generation-in-a-century-not-to-fear-the-future

And part two:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/07/met-cute-ugly/#part-ii

And part three:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/09/working-the-refs/#lost-cause-prologue

And now, part four:

Keep reading

The Lost Cause prologue, part III

I’m coming to Minneapolis! Oct 15: Presenting The Internet Con at Moon Palace Books. Oct 16: Keynoting the 26th ACM Conference On Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing.

My next novel is The Lost Cause, a solarpunk adventure about “the first generation in a century that doesn’t fear the future.” It comes out on Nov 14, and its early fans include Naomi Klein:

https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865939/the-lost-cause

Amazon won’t sell my audiobooks, so I made my own, doing the narration this time around. I’m running a Kickstarter campaign to pre-sell the audiobook, ebook and hardcovers, including signed, personalized hardcovers – I hope you’ll consider backing it:

http://lost-cause.org/

This week, I’m serializing the prologue to the book.

Here’s part one:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/06/green-new-deal-fic/#the-first-generation-in-a-century-not-to-fear-the-future

And part two:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/07/met-cute-ugly/#part-ii

I woke at noon, the house hot because Gramps had left the blinds up in the front room, and ever since the big live oak had been cut up and taken away for blight, we’d lost its shade.

I used the bathroom, pulled on shorts and a tee, and went looking for breakfast, or brunch, or whatever.

“Gramps?”

He didn’t answer. That was weird. Gramps was a late riser and he rarely got up before ten, and then he took a long time to get going, listening to his podcasts and drinking coffee and sending memes around to his buddies with his giant tablet, with the type zoomed way, way up. He didn’t like going out in the heat, either, so in the summer he rarely left the house before four or five, once the sun was low to the hills. He’d left his coffee cup in the sink and his tablet on the table, so I knew he’d gone in a hurry. He hated dirty dishes and hated dead batteries even more.

I put his stuff away and thawed out some waffles and got a big iced coffee from the cold-­brew jug I kept in the fridge and started the process of becoming human.

I gobbled my first waffle before the emotional weight of the previous night settled on me. Those emotions were way too big, so big that they all layered on top of each other, leaving me with nothing but numbness.

I did the reflex thing and pulled out my screen, giving myself a brief sear of shame for my mindless screen-­handling, just as I’d been trained to do in mindfulness class. That was enough to prompt me to run through the checklist: Do I need to look at my screen? Do I need to look at it now? What do I hope to find? When will I be done? I answered the questions (Yes, yes, news about last night, when I’ve looked at two or three stories), and then unlocked it, but didn’t look at it until I’d poured myself another glass of coffee.

Two hours later, there was no coffee left and my eyes hurt from screenburn. I dropped my screen, came out of my trance, and stood up.

I’d gone viral. Or rather, Mike had.

My post had been picked up, first in Burbank, then statewide, then nationally, then internationally. Amateur comedians had edited the footage into highlight reels, moments chosen to demonstrate just how idiotic and hateful he was. Someone made a White Nationalist Bingo Card whose every square had a quote from Mike Kennedy. There were lots of jokes about inbreeding, hillbillies, musket-­fuckers and ammosexuals, master race masturbation, senility, removable boomers—­all the age-­and class-­ based slurs that we weren’t allowed to say in school, but that everyone busted out as soon as we were off the property. It was pretty gross, but on the other hand, I couldn’t exactly argue with them. Bottom line was, Mike Kennedy had been up on that roof for no good reason, and he’d been ready to kill me to let him finish his stupid, senseless project. So yeah, fuck that guy. I guess.

I was pleased to see that I came off as a hero, with strangers around the world praising me for my cool head, saying I’d saved his life.

I put my plate in the dishwasher and wiped up my crumbs and checked the clock on the kitchen wall—­I’d always loved its plain analog face with its thick and thin lines, the yellowing AC cord that came off it. It had belonged to Gramps’s own parents, and it was the only thing in the house I considered anything like an heirloom.

It was coming up on one and if I showered fast and ran, I could make my physics class. I decided to go for it, had the fastest shower in history, pulled on whatever was on the top of my dresser drawers, and sprinted for the street.

I was just jogging up to the entrance to Burroughs when I got a screen chime, which stopped me because, like all the students, I’d installed the school app that turned off audible alarms while I was on property during school hours. It wasn’t mandatory, but the punishment for having an alarm in class was confiscation, so …

I pulled out my screen as I panted by the doorway, mopping my face with my shirttail. It was a text from Burbank PD, informing me that Mike Kennedy was headed for a bail hearing in two hours, and I was entitled to present a victim impact statement, either recorded or in person. I’d known that the police could override the school app (there was a kid in my class whose parole office sometimes paged him, and the fact that he audibly dinged was just part of the package, I figured—­a way to remind us all that this kid had fucked up bad), but I hadn’t expected them to ping me, let alone on school property.

I tapped out a quick thanks-­no-­thanks, and headed to physics.

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:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/09/working-the-refs/#lost-cause-prologue

My next novel is The Lost Cause, a hopeful novel of the climate emergency. Amazon won’t sell the audiobook, so I made my own and I’m pre-selling it on Kickstarter!

Serializing the opening of “The Lost Cause”

On October 7–8, I’m in Milan to keynote Wired Nextfest.

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”:

https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865939/the-lost-cause

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:

http://lost-cause.org

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.

Keep reading

Kickstarting the audiobook of The Lost Cause, my novel of environmental hope

Tonight (October 2), I’m in Boise to host an event with VE Schwab. On October 7–8, I’m in Milan to keynote Wired Nextfest.

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:

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/doctorow/the-lost-cause-a-novel-of-climate-and-hope

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.

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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”:

https://locusmag.com/2022/07/cory-doctorow-the-swerve/

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”:

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

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:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/07/25/can-you-hear-me-now/#acx-ripoff

Keep reading

Kickstarting a book to end enshittification, because Amazon will not carry 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:

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/doctorow/the-internet-con-how-to-seize-the-means-of-computation

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”:

https://www.businessinsider.com/sadistic-amazon-treated-book-sellers-the-way-a-cheetah-would-pursue-a-sickly-gazelle-2013-10

Keep reading

Kickstarting the Red Team Blues audiobook, which Amazon won’t sell (read by Wil Wheaton!)

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:

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/doctorow/red-team-blues-another-audiobook-that-amazon-wont-sell

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:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/03/21/anti-finance-finance-thriller/#marty-hench

Keep reading

Kickstarting the “Chokepoint Capitalism” audiobook

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.

http://www.beacon.org/Chokepoint-Capitalism-P1856.aspx

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:

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/doctorow/chokepoint-capitalism-an-audiobook-amazon-wont-sell

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:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/11/03/somebody-will/#acx

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:

https://craphound.com/shop

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:

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/doctorow/attack-surface-audiobook-for-the-third-little-brother-book

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.”

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/doctorow/chokepoint-capitalism-an-audiobook-amazon-wont-sell

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:

https://www.openmarketsinstitute.org/learn/monopoly-by-the-numbers

“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:

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/doctorow/chokepoint-capitalism-an-audiobook-amazon-wont-sell

Keep reading

My first-ever Kickstarter: Help me change publishing with the audiobook for Attack Surface, the third Little Brother book.

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.

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/doctorow/attack-surface-audiobook-for-the-third-little-brother-book

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.

https://twitter.com/search?q=%20(%23dailywords)%20(from%3Adoctorow)%20%22crypto%20wars%22&src=typed_query&f=live

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.

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/doctorow/attack-surface-audiobook-for-the-third-little-brother-book

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.

Thank you!

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/doctorow/attack-surface-audiobook-for-the-third-little-brother-book

PS: Tell your friends!