DIGITALIA.fm

Prima settimana di ottobre 2024, uno speciale estemporaneo per la prima volta su Digitalia e Lingua Inglese, un ospite d'eccezione, l'intervista a uno dei protagonisti della nostra battaglia per un web vero, vivo, libero, umano, da geek. Dall'emistudio Liguria 1 di Sanremo qui è Franco Solerio. Dallo studio di Milano Isola Michele Di Maio. E dallo studio di Milano Città Studi Francesco Facconi. Buongiorno a tutti amici digitaliani, bentornati su Digitalia. Vi facciamo una sorpresa. Tra l'altro poi non è anche così estemporanea, perché in realtà la stiamo preparando da luglio. Abbiamo dovuto imprendere il corso su audiocassette di inglese rapido, che siamo ascoltati di notte con le cuffie per impararlo veloce. Ah, non usi Duolingo tu? No, ma questo è, no, no. Sai, ti ricordate quelle cassette con le cuffie, che bastava ascoltarle di notte, no? È così che funziona, voglia, voglia. Veniamo al sodo che questi adesso hanno due puntate da ascoltare questa settimana, dicono dovete fare veloci, se no ci ascoltano col 2x, non capiscono niente, poi gli va in pappa. Cioè, avete letto quelle ricerche? Noi parleremo lenti. Mi sa che il nostro ospite non parlerà proprio esattamente. No, infatti conviene 05 per avendo, conoscendo il nostro parlantino. Allora, il nostro ospite è Cory Doctorow, lo conoscete benissimo se siete digitaliani da un po', se non siete digitaliani da un po'. Cori Doctorow è con noi da sempre, esiste su Digitalia da sempre. Giornalista, scrittore di fantascienza, scrittore di non fiction, di non fiction e di fiction, tutte e due. E certo, e certamente, ma soprattutto, beh, tra l'altro come scrittore di fantascienza anche autore di qualcuno dei nostri gingilli del giorno, per cui non poco, e soprattutto attivista per tutto quello che è, o gran parte, quello che preme a noi su Digitalia, per cui software libero, copyright debole, accesso alle informazioni. Esatto. Dimmi una parola che mi fa capire di chi stiamo parlando, che potreste aver usato recentemente. Nostro signore dell'inscittificazione. Mi piace questo, nostro signore dell'inscittificazione. Proprio lui, parliamo di Cori Doctorow. Allora, io ho una domanda, Franco. Se io, da bravo ascoltatore, non fossi ferratissimo in inglese, come potrei riuscire a capire di cosa mi sta parlando il buon vecchio Cori? Devi utilizzare un'app che ti permette di ascoltare i podcast e di vedere. Grazie per la domanda, dovevi dire. Era come se non fosse preparata. Non mi piacciono, proprio quelle cose lì, proprio non mi piacciono. Va bene, comunque, grazie per la domanda, Francesco. Se ascolti i podcast con un'applicazione che ti permette anche di vedere i sottotitoli e quindi abilitata a una feature del podcast in 2. , come ad esempio Apple Podcast, ma le trovate tutte su newpodcasthubs. om, potete vedere i sottotitoli della nostra intervista a Cori Doctorow. Tradotti in italiano. Devo ancora farli generare dalle nostre intelligenze speciali, spero che funzioni tutto, ma non dovrebbero esserci problemi. Tra l'altro ho letto che da questa settimana o nei prossimi giorni dovrebbe essere abilitato da Apple anche la generazione, la lettura dei sottotitoli per i podcast in italiano. Perché finora la cosa funzionava solo per i podcast in lingua inglese, per cui la nostra intervista è in inglese, però conoscendoci ed essendo siglata in italiano non saprei dirvi come funziona la cosa. Vabbè, tagliamo corto. Vi lasciamo. Questo prologo è una puntata. Vi lasciamo all'intervista che è meglio, noi ci siamo divertiti un sacco a farla e poi ci sentiamo dopo per i saluti. Ok, everything is going and recording. Ok, hello Cori, welcome to Digitalia. Hello. We are very, very glad you are here. I'm sure you're completely unaware, but you've been on this show many, many times. Here in Italy we say that when your ears are ringing, it means that somebody in some place in the world is thinking about you. And I think we made your ears ring a lot in the last 10 years. We say your ears are burning here. Ok. Slightly more violent, but same idea. Yes, it is. It is. Actually, I was checking yesterday and I saw in January 2012, we had an episode that was titled Le Paure del Giovanni Doctoro, which translates to something like the fears of the young doctor. Doctoro. That's how much we are fans of your work. Wow. That was. Wow. As a 53-year-old who just had his cataracts removed, young doctor is hilarious. Good old times, good old times. It is. It is. And that was some article of yours. I think it was on Boeing, but I'm not sure. And it was about how general purpose computing was risking extinction. That was in 2012. 12 years have passed. How are we going? Yeah, not great. But I'll tell you what's improved is the coalition. So, I think that I've been really thinking about political change lately, and I think this actually applies in quite a negative way to the Italian political scene, which is that if there's a thing that a group of people would like to have done, and it's been a long time and it hasn't happened yet, then you can probably assume that group of people is not capable of getting the thing done, and they're going to have to attract another group of people to their cause. So, when you look at, you know, neo-fascism in Italy, you see these, you know, this coalition building, right? People who weren't historically part of it, like a nativist or a authoritarian project, but who've been brought in by other means. And that's obviously very terrible. But broadly speaking, when things change, it's because people have recognized some kind of common cause. So, James Boyle is a copyright scholar, works at the Duke Center for the Public Domain in North Carolina, although he's a Scotsman. He says that before the term ecology was coined, there were lots of people who cared about different issues but didn't know that they were fighting on the same side. So, you know, you care about owls, I care about the ozone layer. What does the, you know, destiny of charismatic nocturnal avians have to do with the gaseous composition of the upper atmosphere? But by building a coalition between people who care about these things, by bringing them into a single umbrella, declaring them to be one issue, not a thousand issues, but one issue with a thousand facets, you make a movement. And in the world of people who care about general purpose computing, which is obviously a very esoteric, extremely narrow set of interests, although that's, to be clear, that's not the same as saying it's not important. I think it's incredibly important. And one of the things that makes me so scared is it's so narrow so that it, you know, it's hard to move the needle on this, is that the number of people who maybe don't know that they're on the side of general purpose computing, but who are concerned about the same things that general purpose computing advocates were concerned about, which is things like market concentration, surveillance, manipulation, control, monopoly power, monopsony power, disinformation, and a whole variety of things, some of which I think are actually not real, like people who think that big tech has built a mind control ray out of big data, and that, you know, they make your uncle a QAnon by brainwashing them with algorithms, which I don't think is real, but those people care about general purpose computing. They don't know it, right? They don't know that it's the same issue, but they're starting to arrive, and you're starting to see people on the doorstep of the sort of anti-tech monopoly movement who aren't there because they care about monopolies per se, but who care about broader things. I'm actually just writing my newsletter for today, and I was just writing about the fact that Michael Jordan, the basketball player, now owns a NASCAR team. So he owns a race car, and he's suing the NASCAR league for monopoly. And when you look at the things that NASCAR does to its team owners, who are, you know, not poor, helpless people, right? They're rich, powerful people. When you look at what they do to them, it's almost identical to what pharmacy benefit managers, which is this really weird aspect of the American healthcare industry, does to pharmacists and patients, which is also really similar to how Facebook treats advertisers and audiences. And so what you see is like, all of these people are actually worried about the same thing. They may not know it, right? But they, in fact, are worried about the same thing. And, you know, Matthew Stoller is a great theorist on this stuff, wrote an article about Jordan and NASCAR this week. And he says, one of the things that we can see from Jordan and NASCAR is although there's been a lot of movement on this subject from the Biden administration, that even if the Biden administration loses, there's still going to be a lot of movement on this because Jordan's case, it's not being brought by a government. It's a private action. And that there are a bunch of people who are in a position to bring private actions, who are furious, who want to build fact patterns and set precedents that make monopoly conduct illegal. And that monopoly conduct is at the heart of the war on general purpose computing. You know, companies don't want to eliminate general purpose computing because they're ideologically opposed to general purposeness. It's because they have an instrumental goal to increase their profits by controlling how you use your technology. And that instrumental goal is shared by a lot of other abusive firms. And there's a body of law and a set of legal principles that we can revive, increase and mobilize that will attack all of this stuff. So, so yeah, it's a long answer, but that's where I come down on where we're at on the war on general purpose computing. So we, we, we, we need a new, uh, something like a term, a label like ecology brings together all, all these different things. We, we, we need something with a, with a, with a catchy name. I don't know, maybe general purpose computing and war against monopolies. We, we, we, we, we have to find something. I mean, I have a negative term for it, right? I have a term for what we're fighting, which is in shitification. Yeah. We've heard about it. Yeah. Famous, famously now, but you know, the term for what we're fighting for, I mean, you call it, I call it pluralism sometimes, you know, it's the idea that like, uh, vetoes over the conduct of individuals and groups in society should be, they shouldn't be non-existent. Obviously there should be some vetoes, right? Your, your, your ability to build a nuclear reactor in your backyard should be subject to a veto, but that veto should be like spread around a lot of different groups and should require, uh, and, and should be countered by countervailing power, right? It shouldn't just be that you have like one autocrat who you hope is a benevolent dictator. You know, this is a thing we experimented with on the web, right? We had benevolent dictators and they disappointed us over and over again. Uh, and you know, the best of our benevolent dictator run institutions that have remained stable have done so by transitioning to a more pluralistic governance model like Wikipedia, where Jimmy Wales just said like, I can't be the God King of Wikipedia anymore cause I'm not infallible. Uh, and also I don't know when I'm wrong all the time, which, you know, is a very honest thing for him to have admitted. And so he transitioned to, you know, a board run by users that has democratic checks and balances and is imperfect and gets things wrong, including some of the things that Jimmy would have gotten right, but which still fails better on average than we'll just have Jimmy be infallible. Not least because Jimmy will someday be hit by a bus or whatever. And then, you know, we need something else. We don't know who will come next, of course, after Jimmy dies. Yeah, of course. Uh, Michele, Francesco, you have questions about sanctification, I'm, I'm, I'm sure. Yeah, no, I mean, uh, you, uh, as we said before, uh, we have been following your work since, uh, for a few years, let's say. And, uh, but now I think, uh, I feel that that you have become, you became in the last few months, uh, almost like an household names for, for many more people than before, because in sanctification, uh, um, it's a very clear word. And I figured that when we say it, everybody can understand what does it mean? And, uh, everybody knows, uh, from maybe they know, somebody knows it from Spotify, somebody else knows it from, uh, Google drive when Uber, yeah. And, uh, so my question is Google search. Yeah. Uh, so my first question that is very serious, how did you come up with this name? because it's very effective and, uh, I want to know a little bit about the backstory of it. Well, I come up with, uh, dumb words for things I hate every day. Okay. And, uh, and so, you know, the, there's the, the old saw, you know, to double your failure rate, triple or to double your success rate, triple your failure rate. I just take a lot of runs at this. And, you know, like this week I, I was describing how every company turns into the business model of an HP inkjet printer. And, you know, there's this idea in biology that organisms keep independently evolving to become crabs and they call that carcinization. And so I called it printernization, you know, obviously, you know, it's, I wasn't, I, the idea wasn't to make it into a household word, but just to make people laugh. Sometimes the words are deliberately hard to say so that they'll be funny. When people laugh, they, they, they, they remember it more. Yeah, yeah, exactly. It, it doesn't have to roll trippingly off the tongue. It can be hard to say and make people go like, ha ha ha, that's funny. Which is why like all of the declensions of inshittification are deliberately hard to say, like disinshittification. Anti-disinshittification. And translation, I can assure that we have been trying to find a translation for it, but we didn't come with a funny enough word. I did a radio quiz show with a live audience a couple of months ago. And so one of my fans was in the audience who was deaf and he had a sign interpreter. And the host asked me about, and so they provide it, the radio station provides it for their studio audiences. So the, the host asked me about inshittification, I was talking about it and the interpreter kept fingerspelling inshittification and the deaf guy said, stop, stop, stop, inshign. We have a sign for inshittification. It's this, which is like, it's, so this is, is shit and this is inshittification. So like, there's already like a, an American sign language sign. That's a good sign. So, um, I, uh, was, uh, on a family vacation and we were, um, my, my parents and my brother's kids and my daughter, my wife, we all went off and we rented a, a cabin in a, a cloud forest in Puerto Rico, which was very beautiful, uh, but very, very far from everything. And so before we would go for dinner, if we were going to have dinner in town, we really wanted to go on like TripAdvisor and check and see like where we were going and whether it was open and where to go and so on. And so, uh, our internet there was provided by a microwave relay that was on the mountain. Yeah. And, um, if you know anything about microwave relays, you know that they can't go through clouds. Yep. And we were in a cloud forest. So this was a weird technology decision and real clouds, not the server clouds. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. No clouds. It's like they can't go through like moisture, moisture and microwaves don't mix, which is why like a microwave oven works because moisture, uh, interrupts microwaves and gets excited and heats up and the microwaves stop. Stop there. Yeah. Uh, you know, so, so these microwaves were not reaching our, our antenna very reliably. And it turns out that TripAdvisor loads about 11,000 tracking beacons before it loads the content of a webpage. Absolutely. Why not? Yeah. And so here we are in this very unreliable internet situation and all that would load from TripAdvisor, like you would leave the tab open for 20 minutes and you come back and all that would have loaded was the, what's called the favico, which is the vector graphic that shows up in the tab as the little picture of the webpage. So just be the TripAdvisor logo. It's like a little, like 1k vector graphic. And so I got very frustrated and I tweeted like, uh, has anyone at TripAdvisor ever been on a trip? Because, you know, that's where your internet sucks. This is so unshittified. And a bunch of people went, ha, ha, ha, unshittification. That's a funny word. Uh, and so then I just used it later on when I was, as I do every day, writing about all the things that have made me angry about tech businesses. And I just used inshittification to describe, I think Amazon and people were like, ooh, inshittification, good word. And then I just kept using it. So it was very call and response. I mean, you know, it's like, it's one of the things that, um, working out your ideas in public gets you is that you can, uh, it's like, it's like, uh, why comedians, uh, practice their material at open mics before they take it on the road, because you have to, you have to see how the audience responds before you can, you know, refine the work. And, you know, when you see like, um, people like, like, uh, I think that this, this tactic of listening to what people say and then doubling down on the, or listening to how people respond and then doubling down on the parts that they find, um, attractive, it's underappreciated. And I think it's underappreciated by the left. And it explains partly why, uh, right-wing demagogues have done so well, because this is what they do, right? Trump is not smart, but if you see him working, he throws out this kind of word salad at his best. His mental decline is very bad now, but when he was at his best, when he was at the peak of his powers, he threw out a word salad and he threw out a hundred ideas, right? And he would listen back for the crowd going raw, and then he would just grab that one and just keep iterating off. That's the one. Like he's AB splitting it in real time. And, you know, that's not a tactic that's like, um, unique to, uh, right-wing demagogues. It's not a tactic that can only be used for evil. If you have an idea that you want to communicate and you break that idea down and you talk about it and then you hear how people respond to it. It's one of the reasons that, um, posting essays as threads on Mastodon and Twitter is interesting because people can reply to individual stanzas and you can see which ideas are landing for people in that way. And so if you're paying attention, you can refine a message that's otherwise like kind of hard to refine. because as I said, it's like esoteric and weird and complicated and technical, but you can refine it and start to find the inroads into getting normies to care about this esoteric stuff. And that's good that in your, on your social, you always say, if you don't like this way of posting, please follow me on my blog. Because I have unfollowed you from every social, but I follow you from the era. Yeah. And that's kind of the idea as well as I want to move as much of the, um, audience that I have from platforms where I have no control and where I can be de-platformed quickly into and without appeal onto a platform I completely control where it's very hard to, to shut me down because, you know, I've had like billionaires sue me and threaten me. And I've had giant companies sue me and threaten me. And I've had, uh, you know, bullies and, and thugs like docks me and try and get me shut down and make false reports, you know, copyright reports or whatever to try and get me shut down. And so, you know, I, I am keenly aware of the fragility of reaching an audience through platforms that are, you know, extraordinarily badly run and, and operate at these massive scales where they're, they're not even capable of taking notice of individual cases in most instances. And even if they were, they wouldn't probably take notice of mine. So I, I, uh, I'm, I'm, you know, really interested in migrating as much of the audience that I have everywhere to be a core and audience I have through my website, my mailing list. Back to the blog. Back to the blog. Back to the personal website. Yes. Yeah. It was, it was good times when we, we, everybody, it was, it was fashionable to have a blog. Then, then Facebook came, everything disappeared. Right now we see it's, it's becoming fashionable in a different way to move away from, from, from, from big tech with, uh, with Mastodon and the Fediverse. Do you like this, this, this new push away from, from, from there? I do. And I'm interested in seeing, you know, I, I'm, I'm quite, um, ideologically in favor of Mastodon's approach, primarily because there is this facility built into Mastodon where, uh, if you want to leave a server with one click, you can export all the people who follow you, all the people you follow, all of your mutes and blocks and other configuration elements. And then with another click, you can import them into another server. Maybe in your Raspberry in your home. Yeah. You can put it on, like, yeah, your own server. That's very cool. But you could also move it to another, so like, I don't think, I'm not opposed to intermediaries per se, right? Like, I think intermediaries are fine. I think when we were, uh, excited about disintermediation in the 1990s, it was because our intermediaries had become so powerful, uh, that they were able to usurp the relationship between producers and consumers or, you know, artists and audiences, you know, all these different groups. There's nothing wrong with, like, an app that tells the taxi driver that you would like a taxi, right? The problem is when they collect all the value, uh, and, uh, are able to arbitrarily, um, you know, punish or harm the rider and the driver. And when they lock you in. When you're locking. And then they lock you in. Yeah. And, you know, there's the, the lack of lock-in, right? The inability to lock people in or the, you know, technical controls on lock-in or legal controls on lock-in, all of which can work in together. It's, it's a, it's an and, not an or, um, all of that acts as a check on the impulses of people whose instinct is to try and lock you in and exploit, exploit you. Like, they, they just, they have to treat you better. And also, it acts as a, um, as an escape valve because sometimes their cupidity or their greed will get the best of them and they'll do something that, you know, does inspire you to leave, but then you can leave, right? So, I, I, I've got an Italian example here, um, about, uh, let's see, our daughter was about one or two. So, I think around 2009, I came to Milan for, uh, Meet the Media Guru. Do you remember this? Yeah, yeah. There was a lecture series there and the organizers were like, there's some local young Marxists who have arranged a television interview for you. Will, will you go to the TV station with them tonight? And so, yeah, I'm like, sure, of course. So, I get in the car with them and I'm like, so which TV station are we going to? And they say, oh, we're going to Sky, they're amazing. I'm like, Sky is amazing? And they're like, yes, Sky is amazing. Thank God for Rupert Murdoch. And I'm like, you're Marxist, right? And they're like, yeah, but, but, Rupert Murdoch. Yeah, I don't know if he was Berlusconi, so. He's Berlusconi honest, right? And so, like, here you have, like, Murdoch, who is not my friend, who, and whose, uh, networks are extremely ideological and unlikely to platform someone like me in a kind of state of nature, who nevertheless are sitting there going, what can we do because Berlusconi, you know, to, to counter Berlusconi's dominance, right? Like, how can we bring in a coalition, court an audience, do those things that, like, will count towards our success? And so, here you have bad people, like, objectively very bad people, who are nevertheless, because they are afraid of losing some of their advantage, are willing to act better than their nature would dictate that they act, right? And so, you know, and, and it makes for, coalitions make for weird bedfellows, right? Yeah. The, I think we were in, like, a tiny opal or something, right? So, like, me and four teenage Marxists and an opal driving through Milan traffic to the Sky Network, and they're all saying, thank God for, for, uh, Rupert Murdoch, is a weird coalition, objectively, right? It is. And yet, here we are, right? You know, like, I think, I think, yeah, and I think, you know, like, like, Gramsci's no fan of, of, of competition. Nope. But I think that if you told him that it's how to get Rupert Murdoch to act in ways that please Marxists, he might go, well, maybe some competition is good. Yes. You know, not so bad, yeah. Yeah. Yeah, it's the same as on relying on Mark Zuckerberg to counter power Elon Musk as many media are now pushing him. Yeah. You know, and, yes, Mark Zuckerberg is coming into fashion again, he's growing his air. The new cool. Media, yes, he's the new, new kid on the block, he's the new kid in town. It's magical. Zuckerberg is great. And, and, well, so this is why, like, I think it's important. to understand what we want from these people, right? We're not in bed with them because we like them or trust them, right? We, we are in a coalition with them because we have a confluence of interest and we know how far that confluence goes and we know where it diverges. So, you know, a lot of people are quite rightly worried about what happens when Threads joins the Fediverse. And, you know, there is on the one hand an enormous advantage to Threads joining the Fediverse, right? Threads joining the Fediverse, I think has really moved the needle on Blue Sky, finally talking about also joining the Fediverse. And I think it brought in a lot of other networks and firms. And I think that we should have a lingua franca for these different ways of socializing online. That I think that that is, like, ultimately beneficial in the way that HTTP and HTML were ultimately beneficial, even though, you know, IBM and Microsoft and a bunch of other tech monopolists tried to capture them or enclose them or what have you. And, and ultimately succeeded because we, we took our eyes off the ball there. But, you know, in the early days, the reason web standards were so good, right, in terms of not being liable to capture was because there was this ecosystem of both small and large firms and the large firms weren't large enough to dominate it. And they were, in fact, disciplined by the fear of small firms growing very quickly large by banding together and making standards. And so, you know, that's one of the ways that we get good open standards is by making large firms afraid that they will lose if they don't play fair in standards bodies and in standardization efforts. And, and so, you know, I don't, I don't want to say that, you know, Mark Zuckerberg is going to ever be our friend. And I don't want to say that there's no way that adding threads to the Fediverse could go wrong. But I think our, our best tactic here, and really our only tactic is to find a way to add thread to threads to the Fediverse that making it work, makes it work for us. Like we can't stop them, right? Like what, how can you have an open federation where you also say, I'm sorry, you know, you, people can defederate from them, but like, it's not gonna, it's not gonna, you know, ultimately what I think that the category or that a lot of people who are angry about threads on the Fediverse make is they say, um, Facebook users are like morally suspect, right? Like if you're a Facebook user and you're allowed to swim in our water, you will pollute it. And I think that that's a really profound misunderstanding why people are Facebook users. They're not Facebook users because they're ideologically committed to Mark Zuckerberg's project of world domination. Because all the friends are there. Because, yeah, yeah, their friends are there. They're, they're like, they're locked in a collective action problem. And the way that you solve the collective action problems by making it easy for people to leave. Yeah. And that's what's doing. 15 years ago are on Facebook. So, yeah. All the pictures, all the memories. Yeah, all the stuff. And so, the other reason I like this feature of the Fediverse, right, where you can export and re-import your followers and hop servers, not just because it disciplines the servers, but because it creates a framework for a highly administratable technology regulation. So, you know, we have in the Digital Services Act and, you know, the harmful content rules in Canada and Australia and the UK that have either been proposed or enacted. You have all these proposals to, you know, monitor all user conduct, discover which user conduct is harmful, adjudicate whether it's harmful, and then remove the user or take action on the content. And this, like, it's just too fact intensive to do at scale, right? Like, by the time you've done that for one user's one post, like, three years have gone by, and you've got 25 million other posts you've got to do this for. And so, you just end up with a shoot first, ask questions later, mass removal system. And, you know, this is an area, again, where we can make some coalition because the far right hates Facebook and other platforms because they do this. And not without reason, right? And the people they do it to mostly is leftists, which is, you know, always very funny to have the people whose content is removed the least, be the angriest. And to have the people whose content is removed the most say, okay, well, but that's not a real problem because my enemies are angry about it. It's just a really bad political move. But, you know, if we say to the commission and to all these other legislatures, it's going to be really hard to legally mandate that our online platforms be hospitable to people, be well managed. But it's actually very easy to make it easy for people to leave. Right? To make it frictionless and costless for people to leave and go somewhere where the management is better. Then on the one hand, we're going to make it easier for people to leave when the management is bad. But on the other hand, we're going to discipline these companies into behaving better. Right? If it's easy for people to leave, you know, Elon Musk wouldn't have a single journalist left on Twitter. People keep talking about how there's so many journalists still on Twitter. If you could leave Twitter but still talk to all the people who followed you on Twitter, because we mandated that Twitter provide this facility that you, like, be able to export and re-import your followers and continue to contact them once you've left the server, there would be no journalists left on Twitter. Right? Zero. Right? It would just be gone. And no other users. Who are you going to follow if you're not a journalist? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Some alt-rights or politicians. Yeah. But. Yeah. Same thing. Right? So, yeah. You just make it easier for people to leave. And when someone says, I tried to quit Twitter and Twitter wouldn't give me my data file, or when someone says, I tried to quit Corey's Mastodon server and Corey wouldn't give me my data file, the European Commission or the Canadian Competition Bureau or the FTC, they don't need an investigation. Right? They don't have to determine the facts. They don't have to subpoena records. All they have to do is go to Elon Musk or me and say, you know, Michele's data file, you will give it to us and we'll pass it on to him. And then we'll just resolve the question. I don't care if he's lying or you're lying or the file went to his spam folder or whatever. I don't care. Right? I can just solve this problem with one click. And so that is a thing you could do at scale. That is a thing you could do if 25 million people tried to leave Twitter and Twitter fucked them around. Right? You could just administer that remedy with one part-time worker and some Python. And so it's a way to actually cut to the root of the problem, which is that people stay in environments that they don't like because the cost of leaving is too high. And to do so without creating an administrative burden that either makes it hard for new people to set up competing services where they're better or and or is so hard to administer in respect of the existing services that you end up with something like the GDPR where it's just routinely violated and everyone shows up in Ireland to try and get the Irish court to do something about it. The Irish court says, I'm sorry, we're taking all days that end with a Y on vacation until the year 2029 because we can't afford to lose all these companies that are ducking their taxes in Ireland by enforcing privacy law here. You touched a good parallel, the one between privacy, GDPR and tax codes because they go in the same direction. And you talked about the DSA, DMA. Do you think that with those, the European Union will have enough strength, enough power to do something in a more effective way than what happened with tax codes and with GDPR? Well, I think that unlike the GDPR, the aspects of the DSA and DMA that I care about the most, which is things like openness in app stores, openness in payment processing. Trying to create a regulation for having more players on the side. Yeah, interoperability, API gateways, all of that. The number of cases is quite tractable, right? It's like, it might be something like signal suing Google over accessing Google Messenger or something, right? It's not going to be 20 million Google message users, each asking to have one action by Google evaluated by the court, which is just a thing that's like, it's not practical. This is the problem with the privacy stuff. One of the problems with privacy enforcement is that a lot of the victims are worried about small scale individual actions and that unless they can pull together class actions or do exemplary cases, it's hard to move those through the court and make a big difference. But when we're talking about four giant companies being sued by even a hundred small and medium sized enterprises, right? Like, yeah, I don't know, some refugees from Ivrea who are doing multimedia in Torino and who decide to stand up an interoperable, you know, Facebook, you know, post Facebook social media destination who want to sue. So even if there's a hundred of those, you know, a hundred SMEs times four dominant players is 400 cases, right? It's like, it's a tractable number of cases relative to, and you won't have to adjudicate all 400 of them. You just need five or six, you know, and where you really, really hurt the tech giants for dragging their feet. You know, Camus said, sometimes you have to exit, I wasn't, was it Camus? Sometimes you have to execute an admiral to encourage the others. Okay. So, you know, once you've, once you've, once you've, once you've, once you've like made Facebook's shareholders sufficiently sad, Apple shareholders and Google shareholders and Microsoft shareholders are going to say, you just can't, you cannot drag your feet on this, right? It's, you just, you just can't. If you cost us, you know, half a billion dollars in aggregate, $50 billion in aggregate, whatever it ends up being in the share price, then we are going to sell. And, you know, these companies, they have these, they have these dual share structures where the majority of the decision-making is held by, you know, founders or a few key insiders. And so they're often characterized as insulated from consequences. And they are to first approximation, right? The board can't fire Mark Zuckerberg, but Mark Zuckerberg is as powerful as he is because he can hire people by paying them in shares instead of money. And Facebook only gets money when they convince someone to buy something, but Facebook gets new shares when they type more zeros into a spreadsheet. And so for so long as Facebook share price is going up, they hire people for free, basically, right? And that's one of the advantages that monopolies have, especially growth-driven monopolies. And I know leftists are often very like, oh, look at the right and their ideological commitment to growth without end, right? That's the ideology of a cancer tumor. And it's true, but it's not an ideological matter. It's an instrumental one. If your firm is growing, your share price goes up. If your share price goes up, you can buy things with shares. You don't have to buy them with money. And so you can keep the money and just print shares. And so there's like a, there's a technical reason that people like to do this. It's not just ideology. It's material. And, you know, like good leftists are supposed to be thinking about material conditions here. And so I think that if, with DMA-DSA, because the enforcement starts at the federal level, right? It's all at the European federal court and not in the national courts. We are going to see a relatively small number of extremely spectacular cases brought. And if the court, the court is much less likely to be deferential to these large tech firms than, say, the Irish courts would be or the Irish regulators would be. And that this could kick off a cascade where tech companies become sufficiently disciplined by the fear of really serious consequences that they do stuff. It's like aiming for Achilles' heel of monopolies. Monopolis, their strength is getting bigger and getting fewer. And the issue has always been that, at least in our country, we always heard the saying that you can't make a law for one entity or for a few entities. The law must be for everyone. But maybe this was revolutionary in the EU, saying this law applies if you have more than this count of users, if you have more than this count of dollars. If you are one of these. If you are a monopoly. And look, practically speaking, every regulation has had some version of that, even if the fiction was the same law applied to everyone. Right. So like we have finance laws about record keeping and transparency and limitations and stuff on lending. But it doesn't apply to like lending your friend, you know, a few euros to buy them an espresso. Yeah. Right. Like it's, and so we just have thresholds for regulatory enforcement. And, you know, sometimes we structure those by like creating a conduct or naming a conduct or an activity that you have to have a lot of money to engage in. So like historically copyright said you had to be making a copy of a work to come into the purview of entertainment law, which is what copyright is. Right. And so that, you know, when that was like you had to have a record pressing factory or a printing press or a film duplication lab to have copyright affect you. Sure. Like it affected everyone equally, but not everyone had a record pressing factory. Right. And then, and then we, we ended up with a kind of democratization of access to tools that satisfy the threshold for copyright enforcement. And we just didn't adjust copyright law. Right. It's just, it's just very like, like the fact that, um, if you're a kid and you sing a song for another kid, copyright law doesn't affect it is right because no kid is going to like write a letter to the lawyer at Warner Chappelle and inquire about the publishing rights to a song. Right. Right. Uh, but the fact that if the kid sings it to another kid on Tik TOK, suddenly someone has to talk to a lawyer at Warner Chappelle is just weird and dumb. Uh, and it doesn't mean that we should abolish like law that regulates the conduct of the supply chain of the entertainment industry. Like as someone in the supply chain of the entertainment industry who like pays my mortgage with it. I do want rules. I don't want a free for all, but I think it's like insane to say that, you know, anyone who makes or handles a copy should have to do the things that I do when I sign a contract with a publisher. That's just, they're just like, the publishers don't have legal departments that large and it just doesn't make any sense to say, oh, you never, like, we don't want people to loan books anymore because now loaning a book involves like emailing a, um, you know, an EPUB file from one person to another. Like lending books is good and you shouldn't need to talk to a lawyer every time you do it. Or sign for an EULA that's, uh, 15, uh, Lord of the Rings long. Yeah, exactly. Michele is our retro gaming guy. He is always alert on those issues and, uh, I'm sure he has, he wants to connect to this. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Uh, I mean, since you, we have spoken about copyright and, uh, we have seen in the past few months, uh, both on international, but also on local news, uh, from one side. We have a Nintendo that is going back, uh, going after, uh, the main switch, uh, emulators. On the other hand, you may not be, uh, know that, but in Italy, uh, very recently, the police seized, uh, a big shipment of, uh, retro gaming consoles. Uh, of course it was like, uh, it is worth, uh, 15 billions because, uh, you can, they count like 50 euro for each game. Yeah, because I can't go outside in the market and buy these games. Yes, yes, absolutely. This is, this is, the Amiga, the Commodore 64 card rides. Yeah, I can buy them. Yeah. It's cryptocurrency math, right? It's cryptocurrency, crypto math. I made a shit coin. I sold one of them for a dollar. I made a trillion more shit coins. My shit coin has a market cap of a trillion dollars. Yeah, absolutely. Uh, so, uh, going back to the, uh, going back to the question, how do you think, uh, that we can still keep a copyright law? Because, I mean, we need some kind of copyright law to, for the, for the innovation, but how can we keep that, uh, but also preserve, uh, ancient, I mean, ancient, old technologies. This is today's retro gaming, but one day might be even books or, uh, or whatever, website and so on. What is the balance? Well, there's two ways that this stuff has been satisfied historically, right? The first is by creating, um, a limitation or exception. Uh, so that would be something like fair dealing or fair use. And so we could carve out fair dealing and fair use. We, there are within most copy, modern copyright systems, fair dealing and fair use exceptions for, um, preservation, archiving, and so on. These can be fleshed out to, um, uh, accommodate the, uh, contours of activity that wasn't contemplated when the statutes were drafted. Uh, that are necessary for, for example, running, um, alternative server so that you can play client server games that were, um, you know, that were built, uh, uh, you know, uh, and where the server is shut down, but where there are still users who want to play the game. Um, uh, the other thing that's happened is there have been blanket licenses. And so those are the, those are the two methods. So blanket licenses, you know, if you, um, you know, if you, if you have a bar and it's got a stage and you have an open mic and people show up and sing whatever song they want, uh, they don't need to like call the lawyer of the record label or the composer to find out whether they can play the song, right? They just pay a blanket fee and the blanket fees, um, are administered by these collecting societies. And so collecting societies are intermediaries. It's very easy for intermediaries to grow very powerful and to usurp the, the, um, actual beneficiaries of the license, which are the users and the, and the people are supposed to receive it. Um, and so historically there's been a lot of organized crime involved in intermediation, you know, Spanish, uh, collecting society for music. Uh, they were, they were crooked and they all got arrested and same in the Netherlands and so on. And I'm sure this has happened in Italy, uh, as well. Um, but there's no, the monopoly deal a few years ago. Yeah, but there's no intrinsic reason, you know, here in the 21st century that we couldn't have open ledgers recording the payments, the income. Uh, the, uh, recording, the, the collection methodology, the data collection methodology, the calculations and so on, that this couldn't all be in the public domain. Um, and there, uh, I wrote a book in 2020 with my colleague, Rebecca Giblin called Chokepoint Capitalism. And we've got a, uh, uh, in the last half of the book, so the last six chapters are shovel ready policies for reforming monopoly and entertainment and tech. And when we talk about collecting societies, there's two things that we propose. Um, one is quite major intervention. One's a much smaller intervention. One of the things that collecting societies struggle with both legitimately and because it lets them steal from people is that there isn't a unified database of rights holders. Um, so every, if you're like a collecting society that collects, uh, for the public lending rights where libraries, uh, um, pay a small fee for every time a book is checked out. Every PLR in the world has its own separate database of authors and where to reach them and which books they've written. Uh, this is very expensive and it, the expense of maintaining a bunch of parallel databases means that the, um, resources that you might spend on improving the quality of the database is actually, uh, it's wasted, uh, on replicating the database. And so the databases are, are low quality. And so we could formalize a global standard for rights databases, uh, for payment. Um, and, uh, it would be a very good idea. Uh, and it would make a really big difference. Um, and you could imagine doing that for retro games. You could imagine doing it for lots of different things, right? The other part of this that we think is, um, a really easy and effective intervention is that one of the things that, um, the collecting societies do, one of the major sources of corruption is if they claim that they don't know where royalty should be, uh, given, right? If it's an, what's called an unattributable royalty, they just pocket it, they put it into general operations and they spend it on things like, quote, artist development. And that's often like my idiot nephew goes to a bunch of bars and sees bands, right? Uh, or whatever, right? So there's just, there's just a lot of money that just disappears into the pockets of people who run it. So our proposal is to prohibit collecting societies from using unattributable royalties for any purpose, except improving royalty attribution. Okay. It's literally the only thing you're allowed to use it for, right? Uh, and that, that would be overseen, right? So you wouldn't just be paying your idiot nephew to stick his thumb up his ass all day and say, oh, I'm improving attribution, right? Like you would actually have to show some progress on this and that those two interventions, one quite large. One very modest that you could do at the stroke of a pen would produce, I think, much higher quality, uh, collecting societies. Um, and you know, it's not that we should collect a royalty for every use, right? We should also think about expanding, um, limitations and exceptions, but a mix of both of those things has historically been really effective. Like the way we got radio was that when people who made phonograms, records complained that they didn't want their records played on the radio, we created a blanket license, right? You don't have to call up the, the composer or the performer and find out whether you can play their record on the radio. You just have a blanket license and we would never have had radio otherwise. You know, John Philip Sousa, who was a composer, he wanted to get rid of records, right? And we did the same thing. We created a compulsory license for records. So once a song has been recorded, once anyone else can record it. You know, when, when Sid Vicious recorded my way, he didn't get Paul Anka's permission. He just paid a set fee. John Philip Sousa did not want that. John Philip Sousa, you know, this famous American composer. He said, if the infernal talking machines are allowed to continue, we will lose our voice boxes as we lost our tails when we came down out of the trees, right? And like, this was obviously very dumb and wrong. And, but he wasn't wrong that there's something unjust about a system where a bunch of people make a ton of money and you don't. And so they created a system where the workers who did the work had a plausible conduit for getting paid when their work, when their labor was exploited. And, you know, today, like, we haven't talked about AI and thank God, because what a boring subject. Honestly, Corey, this is what I was thinking a few seconds ago. We have been 45 minutes into the interview and we have not said once AI. And we have to finish this. Let's keep it like that. There's all these people who are freaked out about AI training. And the thing is that if you decompose AI training into its individual steps, like scraping and mathematical analysis and building models that embody the mathematical analysis, all of those are, like, profoundly beneficial activities that have given us a bunch of things that we all value. And that if we were to create a system of licensing for them, they would be effectively impossible. And so, you know, we can do a couple of things about AI, none of which involve banning that conduct, right? We could either or both expand fair use and fair dealing to exempt certain aspects of that conduct. And then where we don't want to cover them with fair use and fair dealing, we could cover them with blanket licensing. Yes, of course. And that's, you know, a way to make sure that people are paid when their labor is exploited and also that activities that are broadly socially beneficial, including to creative workers, don't grind to a halt. Also, because at the end of the day, if it was not for retro gaming and emulation in the past few years, Nintendo would have done much less money because they wouldn't have done the master or remaster of Final Fantasy VII because people would have forgotten about Final Fantasy VII. And at the end of the day, they are still improving their balance sheet anyway. Yeah, this happens all the time. You know, Star Trek was nearly canceled in the late 1960s, but it was recovered because of fans, right? Who were doing fanfic and doing fan performances and making fan films and so on. And literally, like, you know, it became a multi-billion dollar franchise because its fans rescued it. But then Paramount goes after fans who make fanfic and fan movies and so on. So, like, you know, this is often the case that firms that benefit from this unpermissioned outside activity by people who love their work then turn around and go after those people. Well, and it happens in politics, you know, like Obama was elected by this grassroots mobilization effort that was run off a server that he had, but he didn't want them around when he was governing because he thought they'd get in the way. And so he turned the server off when he was elected, right? And then alienated the grassroots that he needed to carry his agenda, which is why so little of the positive parts of his agenda were carried forward. And even his one signature achievement, the Obamacare, was so weakened. It's a common tactic because it's hard to share power with people who are, you know, your fans, your audience, your supporters. It's hard to share power with them. And a lot of people, because the law or because the system gives them the power to unilaterally ignore the people who love what you do, end up doing so to their own detriment. Yep. Francesco. Yes. So I think we have discussed a lot of very, very current situation and very, very different topics. And I am a reader of your, also of your novels, because I've seen that you are a journalist, you have a lot of different topics you talk about. And I can see when you write things that you really love the technology, because that's what, what I can feel in your book. So the first thing is that, can you give, so I know that you're writing the third book of Martin Hench. Do you, can you tell anything about, and since they are not published in Italian, they are not being translated, we will ever be possible for our Italian listener to get that or, I don't know. Yeah. Just for curiosity. Well, the second question is easier to answer than the first. So the reason these books haven't been translated in Italian is not because I've said no Italian translations. It's because no Italian publisher has come forward to offer to buy them when my agents go to Frankfurt every year to sell the rights. So I've, I've sold a bunch of other Italian rights, a lot of nonfiction rights. Uh, but, um, my fiction hasn't come out in Italian in quite a while. Uh, and, uh, if you know any Italian publishers, um, you can just send them to my, uh, uh, it's called the Barore Agency, B-A-R-O-R. And they, they'll, they'll know how to reach them because they're big, famous international agents. So they can just go buy the rights and that would be great. Um, Martin Hench is this, uh, character I came up with, uh, in a novel called Red Team Blues, uh, in which he, uh, appears as a 67-year-old forensic accountant who has spent 40 years in Silicon Valley unwinding every weird scam that tech bros can come up with. And he's been there for all of them. And, uh, I wrote it. It was a very strange conceit I had. I thought, what if I wrote a book that was like the final volume of a beloved long-running series, like, you know, Spencer for Hire or something, where people have been reading these for 20 years, uh, they fall in love with the character and here is the final volume. Yeah, it looks like the last case of Martin. So it's, yeah, I've done all my work, I'm super famous, super cool, my friend asked me to do this. To do one last job. Yeah. So what if I wrote that book without the tedious business of writing all the books in which he's going on? It looks like episode four. So, yeah, yeah, exactly like episode four. Star Wars starts with episode four. The Iliad. Yeah, mise-en-scene, you know, and, and, and, and it would have that kind of last day of summer camp vibe, uh, or, you know, the final episode of MASH, you know, without the tedium of 11 seasons of MASH. Just that final triumphant episode. I actually think you could make a great TV show that used an ensemble cast and every week they just did the final episode of a series that never existed. I think that would be an amazing TV show. Yeah. Uh, or, you know, you do it as a limited run, like one year's worth of grand finales. Uh, so I wrote this, it, it just sort of poured out of my fingertips. I wrote nine books during lockdown. I write when I'm, I'm anxious. So it was very stressful time. Uh, you know, life gives you SARS, you make sarsaparilla. So I, I, I wrote, uh, this book and I sent it to my editor and like the next morning he sent back an email that said, that was a fucking ride. Whoa. Three lines. And then he called my agent and bought three of them. And, uh, I didn't know what to do because this was Marty Hinch's final adventure and I didn't want to bring him out of retirement. He clearly earned his retirement by the end of that book. Uh, you know, there's some precedent for this. So you had to write the previous books. The preceding books. Say again? So you had to write the preceding books. That's, that's how I landed there, right? So I figured I'd write the previous books. And, you know, if you write them out of sequence, you're not foreshadowing, you're backshadowing. And the more weird stuff you put in that you then pay off when you move back in time, the more premeditated you seem, even though you're just making it up as you go along. So it's quite a good look. So the, the second one of these was the bezel that came out last year. And it's a book about, uh, Marty and prison tech in the mid two thousands, the mid, the mid, uh, part of the, the first decade of the two thousands, uh, and about the scam that is prisons, prison tech. And it's like all of them, a bit of a heist novel. Uh, the, the third one picks and shovels, which is done and not writing it, it's finished, uh, and, and has been fully edited and is now, uh, you know, out for early reviews and blurbs and whatnot. Uh, just got a great review, uh, great blurb from the, um, president and CEO of the computer history museum. And it's set in the 1980s, which is why we sent it to the computer history museum so that it's, it's Marty's first adventure. And it's about him dropping out of MIT, moving to Silicon Valley as an accountant and getting his first job. And he finds himself working in the weird PC industry because this was the era of weird PCs when everyone was making a PC and they were all very weird. And the weird PC company he's working for is run by a Mormon bishop, a Catholic priest, and an Orthodox rabbi. And it's actually a pyramid selling scheme that sells into faith groups. And he realizes that he's on the wrong side and he has to switch sides and help three of their rogue employees destroy the company. So, uh, it's, it's, it's a fun book. Very cool. Yeah. Looking up for that. Yes. Yes. And that'll be out in February. Okay. Very, very, very. And an Italian publisher could buy all three of them and bring them out, you know, in a year or in three years or however, whatever pace they want, because they're all done. So, if you know, if you're an Italian publisher listening, uh, you get in touch with the borrower agency. Go to Frankfurt for the fair. Yeah. Yeah. I can, I really can wait to read the third part. So, yeah, I'm, I'm really a fan of that. And I think that in Italian it's, uh, it's easy to read also your English from an Italian point of view. Oh, well, thank you. Just for our listeners. Yeah. That's very cool. Um, we are, we are writing a book too. We are writing the Almanacco Digitaliano, which means the, the recap of all the, the, the main stories we talked about, you know, Digitalian. We have a chapter, we have a chapter about podcasting, of course. Uh, we are working with, uh, uh, the podcasting 2. group. I don't know if you are aware of those. Sure. Uh, I, I, I'm also the, the, the, um, the developer of, uh, iOS podcast app. It's, uh, customatic. Oh, cool. And we, we look into, into this stuff a lot. And we were asking ourselves, uh, just a couple of weeks, of weeks ago, is podcasting inshittifiable? Is there a risk of inshittification? So it's been pretty inshittification resistant, right? You know, Spotify and Apple have both tried to enclose it, neither without, with much luck. Some of that is because there's an RSS directive that allows you to move a feed. Uh, so you can, you can, between HTTP, I think they're, um, 305 directive or whatever it is, the, the file moved. Yes. And, uh, and then there's an XML directive as well that says like, this feed is now over here. Uh, it's really easy to escape the clutches of a large firm. I'm actually in the middle of doing this now with my own feed. So I've had a feed since the mid 2000s, I think 2005 or six, uh, where, um, you know, initially I, I served it off a WordPress install and then piped it through feed burner. Um, uh, back when WordPress didn't support enclosures natively and now they are, right? And so I've been getting out of feed burner and, uh, even though this feed is now 20 years old, it's actually pretty straightforward. Uh, and Evo Terra showed me the last piece of the puzzle there with feed burner. Uh, and so I'm, I'm, I think just a few days out from moving completely from feed burner to somewhere else. And so this is, I think the crux of, of, um, understanding and shitification is that companies that don't have to worry about losing your business won't worry about losing your business. If you can leave, they have to worry about you leaving. Uh, and so it's so easy to leave. It's so easy to export your OPML file and go into a new podcatcher. It's so easy to, um, move the feed from one host to another that the hosts are, uh, have struggled to gain dominance. Uh, and the apps with the exception of iTunes, obviously Apple podcasts have struggled to gain dominance and Apple, I think Apple could and should if I podcasting so far, they haven't, uh, to the extent that they have, it's through the, um, content warnings. If you swear in your podcasts, Apple will move you into, uh, no man's land. And so you sometimes hear people talking on podcasts in these circuitous ways. Uh, but for the most part, I think podcasts have been really in shitification resistant. I think it's great. We should look at, at that for, for, for other technologies. I think when we're working on the fed diverse, when we're working on matrix, on other things. Because it's based on, on open standards. That's the real. It's based on open standards and those open standards contain redirection directives. They are good. So it's not just that it's based on open standards because the cloud is based on open standards, right? But the firms go to a lot, great lengths. And, you know, in part, because there aren't dominant firms, they find it hard to capture regulators. And so conduct that they might use otherwise to capture you. So think about clouds, right? We have Docker, uh, and other forms of portability within the cloud. So you can move, uh, your cloud presence from one firm to another very easily. But as we see with Google's complaint against Microsoft over Azure in the EU, Microsoft makes the bulk of the other services that you need from Microsoft free if you use Microsoft's cloud, but then makes them punishingly expensive if you don't. And it's really hard to get your data out of those other services. So you, you sign up to Microsoft's cloud, you get all those other services for free. You put all your data in those services that aren't portable. And then if you leave the cloud, this non-portable data is stuck in something that suddenly becomes very expensive. And so everyone keeps their data locked in Microsoft's cloud. So that's conduct that is just, it's, um, unlawful under antitrust law. Uh, it's, it's called tying. Uh, and that's the basis of Google's complaint. One other thing that I'll mention, I, I, antitrust is obviously an American word. Uh, it refers to these things called trusts that were set up in the 19th century. where like all the railroad companies would sell themselves to a trust, uh, and they would get as many shares in the trust as was represented by their market share in the railroad industry. And then they would have a new board of directors that would run all these separate companies as one business, right? So that's what trust busting comes from antitrust. It's about getting rid of these trusts. Monopolization took a different form in Europe. It wasn't in these trusts. The reason we talk about antitrust law in the context of Europe and also other countries like Japan and Korea is that, uh, the Marshall Plan, which is when American technocrats after World War II rebuilt the economies and legal systems of Europe and other nations that were caught in the theater of war, basically just copied and pasted American antitrust law into the statute books. And so European antitrust is American antitrust. It's just, it was imported in the post-war era by American technocrats. I didn't know about this. Even though I think, uh, the, um, it's, uh, we have less focus on, uh, the, uh, price on the price reduction, uh, uh, that, uh, yeah, yes, yes. Okay. Okay. Now I was just saying that, uh, have we, uh, have we reached a natural stopping point with the Marshall Plan? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. No, I mean, absolutely. We are closing with, I think we are closing the interview. I was just saying for me to say something. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. That's why. Okay. Well, that makes a lot more sense. No problem. No problem. Just, just, just, just that. But we can, we are moving to an end. Maybe we are, we are, we are, just widening the angle and going back to incentivization. Edward Snowden, a couple of weeks ago, was talking, I think, at a Bitcoin conference, maybe, and he was asking, do you think that upcoming elections in the USA are something normal and it looks like incentivization is not just something in the fate of technology and that it can touch a lot of other things. And maybe democracy risks in the same, when you have a monopoly, when you have a monopoly, just two big parties and, and, and, and, you know, it's, it's, it's, they can lock you in with ideas. Maybe we should, we should, we should look at that with a wider angle and, and, and look for, for, for, for, for something that, that, that has to be corrected in the whole fabric or of our societies. And yes, of course, technology nowadays is, is, is one of the most important things, is, is one of the engines of our societies, but maybe there's more to it. Well, I, I think that every, um, electoral system, oh, uh, Michele's back. Yes. There we go. Yeah. So I think every, uh, every electoral system is either formally or informally a coalition system. So either you have something like the Italian parliament, where you have all these different parties and they form coalitions in parliament, or you have something like the American system where the coalitions are inter-party, right? So they're, they're, they're, and it's all negotiated through the party's own institutions. So you see things like this with the Biden administration, where they formally created an agreement between the Biden administration and the Sanders Warren left wing of the party that involved handing out different appointments and different, um, uh, policy directions to different wings of the party. So the judges were mostly appointed by the right of the party and the, uh, administrative enforcers were appointed by the left wing of the party. So you have Lena Kahn running the federal trade commission, who's quite muscular on corporate concentration, but some of her cases have been shut down by judges who are also appointed by Biden. So you have this, this is, this is coalition politics, uh, and, and back to, you know, the start of our conversation, coalitions are, are the root of all of these things and they can be constituted and reconstituted in lots of ways. One of the things that happens when you, um, have safe seats. So when you not only have a democracy that is, uh, say bipartisan, but also where the electoral districts are drawn such that the seats aren't competitive, it means that all of the contestation over that seat is an intra-party seat. It doesn't happen in the election. It happens using the party's own internal mechanisms. So I used to live in Hackney in London. It's the largest borough in London. Uh, governmentally it's larger than, uh, many of the biggest cities in the United Kingdom, but it's just, it's a district within one city. Okay. So it has a fairly weak electoral system to begin with because it's just a district election. And then on top of that, um, it's a very strong labor strong, stronghold, uh, which means that the elections for counselors take place at the level of selection within the labor party and not within the general election because the general election always goes for labor. And so it's the nomination that determines who wins, not the, not the vote. And the labor party has pretty weak institutions and like, that's not necessarily a bad thing, right? Like the party could either spend its energy developing policy or running every one of the junctures where they discuss that policy, like a general election, which is expensive and slow and difficult. So they, they have to do one of the, they, that it's not bad to have weak institutions within a party, but because there is no discipline on the party from the electorate, right? So I had a problem with my local politics, like a classic problem of local politics, which was, um, illegal construction in the building next door taking place overnight on the party wall. So there was literally someone jackhammering from midnight till 7am on my bedroom wall every night. And I was trying to get hackney noise enforcement out and they're understaffed. They have two people who work at, it takes them five to six hours to respond to a call. By the time they got there, it had stopped. And so it just, it was just impossible and was making me crazy. So I went to my counselor and my counselor, first of all, didn't even show up for the, he's supposed to hold, the British called them surgeries, which is when your counselor is available in his office and you can drop in and talk to him. And he just didn't show up for several surgeries in a row. I was standing in the snow with my infant waiting for this guy day after day, Saturday, several consecutive Saturdays. I finally get in to talk to him. He does nothing. So I start complaining on Twitter about it and I go to the local coffee shop and someone who knows me comes over and says, I saw your tweets. You need to understand that the meeting at which your counselor was selected had 12 people at it, right? 12 labor party members and seven of them voted for him. So your counselor is accountable to seven members of the labor party. The reason your counselor doesn't show up to your, to his surgery, the reason he doesn't do anything when you complain is it doesn't matter. He doesn't care. This person has no discipline on him, right? His discipline is entirely down to seven people at a selection meeting who have to be labor party members in good standing, right? So you have these very weak institutions that not only are weak, but are not subject to the external discipline of a general election, which is a strong institution. So you have the worst of all worlds. And so a lot of what's happening within America right now has to do with the weakness of certain institutions, partly the weakness of the party institutions. So you see within the Republican party that there's a lot of people who are very worried that Trumpism is actually not good for the Republicans. Like Trump may still win this election, but if he does, it will be in spite of him, not because of him, because he's so unpopular with people who might normally vote Republican because he's just such a loose cannon. He's such a, you know, bunga bunga, right? And so he's, he's just, people don't like him. And if they would like to have a better candidate for him and they can't because the internal institutions suck. And then on top of that, you have all these safe seats. You have all this gerrymandering where it doesn't matter who you vote for. And then on top of that, you have voter suppression. But, but even if you take the voter suppression out, which is very bad, you still have the safe seats. And so the safe seats are the places where the Republican party is bringing in federal officials and local officials who are themselves like Trump. So this whole clown car, Marjorie Taylor Greene and so on, all these, all these people, they, they, they sit in safe seats. And so the party selection process is the process by which they are elected. The general election doesn't matter. And so it's not just a matter of what normally happens with gerrymandering. So you have this, the saying about gerrymandering, the gerrymandering is when politicians pick the voters. And what you want is a, an election where the voters pick the politicians. So in addition to that, you have the secondary problem that when the politicians pick the voters, the party picks the politicians and whoever they pick wins. And the parties are not robust institutions. And they shouldn't be because we want them doing things like developing policy, not running high quality secret ballots that are extremely expensive and slow moving. We, we, we, we limit those to quadrennial or biennial elections because they're so cumbersome and you can't make all of your policy on the basis of quadrennial secret ballots, right? You have to, you have to have more nimble institutions, but then they need some other source of discipline, which should be that high quality quadrennial national ballot, but isn't because of safe, safe seats. Because of gerrymandering and voter suppression. And so I think that like, this is not a normal election in the sense that we are now at like a zenith of weak parties and strong gerrymandering. But at the same time, weak parties and strong gerrymandering are a trend that has been trending up for a long time and has reached a kind of apotheosis now. Okay. So we, we'll see where we will be here or you will be here for years. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I've got Canadian and British citizenship and we'll work on Polish. If anyone, if anyone out there knows how to find Jewish Polish refugees papers in Poland and wants to get in touch, we need to find my grandfather's papers and then I can get back into the EU. But if you, if you can find like a very distant relative, if you have like a grand, grand, grand, grand, grand, grandparent in Italy, we have a very easy way to get the passport. People named Dr. Rovich don't have Italian ancestors. Usually they don't. Yeah. But okay. Who knows? Maybe, maybe. Yes. But no, we actually have, we have a running joke because the Polish names and Italian names are so distinctive. Right. Yeah. So someone will say, you know, like his name is like Giovanni, I don't know, some very Italian last name, you know, Giovanni Berlusconi. And we'll joke and we'll say, oh, he's Polish. Okay. Thank you, Corey. This was, this was a great, great, great, great view from, for everything, everything we love about technology, society in Digitalia. And we were glad to have one of our, and we're glad to have one of our heroes and, well, I really enjoyed the conversation, guys. Thank you. We speak the same language. I think this was the great thing. Avanti Popolo. That's it. Thank you very much, Corey. Thank you. All right. We will send everyone, of course, to, to, to, to, to your website and make, and you know, you have a voice over here because many of our listenership prefer to listen to, to, to, to, to, to about technology in Italian. And we, we, we, we, we try to be of, of resonance for, for good ideas that come from, from, from abroad to, to our listenership. And we are, we are proud when, when we can talk about things like when, when we read about, about what you, what you, what you write. Oh, well, thank you. We have, we, we, we have some that there are close to our, from, from, from, from John Perry Barlow up to Corey Doctorow. There, there's a big line up of very, very, very well, good company. Barlow's, Barlow's, Barlow's, you know, dear old pal of mine. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Rest in peace. I met him in, in LeWeb in Paris some years ago and it's an amazing human being. Yes. Yeah, he really was. He was something else. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. All right, guys. Thank you very much, Corey. Thank you very much. Thank you. Bye. Eccoci qui. Una bella esperienza. Bello. È stato molto a ricchette. Poi se abbiamo parlato di tante cose di cui abbiamo parlato tante volte. Ha parlato lui, tanto per cui abbiamo portato in via e abbiamo fiume di parole, ma è bellissimo ascoltare una persona che ha tante cose da dire, tanta voglia di comunicare ed è anche molto bravo, diciamo. E' anche una bella voce poi come speaker proprio. Sì, sì, sì, sì. Spero che l'inglese, secondo me l'inglese era anche. Ma innanzitutto perdonateci il nostro, il suo era ottimo, credo anche abbastanza comprensibile. Sì, sai, l'inglese sì, ma non è un problema perché cerchiamo di mettere i sottotitoli in italiano. Eh, ragazzi, bene. Io sono contentissimo, uno dei picchi della nostra carriera. Forse l'ultima domanda, quella sulla politica, potevo evitarmela io perché siamo andati un po' al di fuori di quello che sono gli argomenti digitaliani classici e siamo andati anche molto sullo specifico di politiche. Quando hai iniziato a girarla sul Gerry Mandering. Guardate su Wikipedia se non lo sapete cos'è il Gerry Mandering. Mi sono perso un pochino. Però, però, però. Francesco, non volevo interromperti. No, no, anzi, stavo dicendo, senza il Gezzino non è un finale, quindi stavo aspettandoti, stavo aspettando il VAR. È un Gezzino speciale. No, però è vero, è stata un'intervista interessante, tanti argomenti e anche quello politico. Hai ragione, non un po' fuori, ma in realtà comunque un punto di vista di una persona che comunque dall'altra parte dell'oceano conosce l'Europa, ci conosce, sa aiutarci a capire parecchie cose e le elezioni americane sono dopo domani. Esatto. Il giorno più giorno meno, quindi, insomma, fa sempre meglio bene a capirsi quello che sta succedendo, da cui poi deriva tutto quello di cui parliamo, quindi. È vero. Ci sta, ci sta. Felici di avervi portato questa cosa. Chiudiamo questa puntata speciale 744 e vi diamo appuntamento la prossima settimana. Dall'Emi Studio Liguria 1 di Sanremo, un saluto da Franco Solerio. Dall'Emi Studio, sì, ciao, dallo studio di Milano Isola, Michele Di Maio. E dallo studio di Milano Città Studio, un bye bye da Francesco Facconi. Alla settimana prossima, come al solito, con una nuova puntata di Digitalia.