control over the product less and less economic ob the presiding officer: the senate will come to order. the parliamentarian will read a communication to the senate. march 26, 2024. to the senate: under the provisions of rule 1, paragraph 3, of the standing rules of the senate, i hereby appoint the honorable laphonza r. butler, a senator from the state of california, to perform the duties of the chair.

signed: patty murray, president pro tempore. the presiding officer: under the stands adjourned until 10:00 a.m., thursday, marc much. and if you're not an f member, i hope your consider joining and my work at tffz has been hamperd by a couple of different factors. one is that a lot of the issues that we care about are quite abstract until they're not. and like a lot of technical questions like how much carbon can we released into the atmosphere they can seem like boring and abstract until everything's on fire and then it might be too late. so a lot of my work is has involved trying to get people to care about stuff but another part of my work and this is where how to destroy surveillance capitalism comes in and this book too is when do

start to care about it. they sometimes care about it in ways that areerproductive. and so, for example, i think we should be very worried that our bosses have like rock persistent -- for firing us and replacing us with shell scripts. but i don't think we need to worry that ai is going be better at us, better than us at writing. i think thatbosses who fired ale people who are good at answering phones and directing your call and replace with interactive voice response systems, you say no. i17 now, 17, 17 no. one seven. operator. operator. operator. i think that that they are perfectly willing to fire all our -- and make something defective and then try and get you to buy it. and i think that that is a reason we should worry. and i think that's that's really coherent. the story of the luddites. so for me, the book that i wrote now ties in with brian's book and with both our interest in science fiction.

so there is a great villain of history, a woman called margaret thatcher, whose favorite motto was there is no alternative. and the point of there is no alternative to dress up a demand as an observation and to really say stop trying to think of alternatives. and my job as a science fiction writer is try and think of alternatives, right? to say what if we had the same machine, but who would did things for and who things to were different. and a lot of the people who are critical of technology in ways that i think are counterproductive are unable to imagine that. so the foundation there are a bunch of people who are the internet has been reduced to five giant websites filled with of text from the other four. as tommy spence says. and the real problem there is the wrong people are running those websites right. mark zuckerberg is the wrong person to be the unelected social media czar for life for 4 billion people. we need someone better or we need to make him better at that job. and there's another current in

technology criticism that i think is the luddite current that like maybe that job shouldn't exist, maybe we should dismantle. maybe no one came down off a mount with two stone tablets and ■7 your files and start mining them for actionable market intelligence. right? maybe there's a way that we can talk to each other witut so thae mill owners who prosecuted their vicious war against the ttile workers played, it's the same trick that the tech barons today play is to insist that the menu they presented to us cannot possibly be to be decomposed into an ala carte menu, that if want to search the internet, you've got to get spied on. if you want to have a computer that's safe, you'veot to t a company in cupertino decide which software you can install on and take 30% out of every dollar if you want a taxi. the person driving has to be on food stamps and there is no other way. there is no alternative. and the cool thing about digital

technology, the exceptional thing about digital technology that my book really tries get into in some technical detail is that we really only know how to make one computer. and it's the universal turing complete vonich has a lot of fas that mean the only you know how to make is the computer that can run every program we can write. and so you can always write a program that will do the thing the shareholders it wouldn't do. and the third party ink or let you install third party software or block the ads or letou spied on or leave twitter, but continue to send messages to the people who aren't ready to go and that's the thing that stands in our way isd the luddite bookt brian wrote blood in the machine talks a lot about. policy is very contingent. and fragile, right. that the luddites when they rose up they were angry the law said that the mill owners allowed to put in these -- machtalking to d parliament said we don't care.

we passed the law. we don't care. in fact, we're going to make a new law that says that if you take an oath to support the luddites, we're going to hang you. right. and i think the lesson here is that when industry is so large that it's too big to fail and too big to jail the law ceases to protect us. but the corollary is that if we can cut the firms down to size, if we can bleed off the users that are their sources of profit, if we can rein them in on a technical level, then we can make them weak enough to rein-&a legal level. and so most of my book is about establishing a shovel ready technical program, doing just that, describing policies tt we can use to do it. and i'll finish in a minute. maybe we can go back and forth. but i want to explain the theory of change that comes from one of margaret thatcher's favorite, a guy call milton friedman. he is my archenemy. he was architect of neo liberalism and he was a freak. and he wanted to rollback all postwar gains and get people to start tugging their four locks for their social betters again.

and people would say, milton, people like sending their kids to university and like having retired in weekends and overtime and health. how are you going to convince them to like go back to the victorian age? and he said, you know, in times of crisis things that are on the periphery can move to the center very quickly. our job is to have good ideas lying around so that when the next crisis strikes, the impossible can become the inevitable and i like to quote friedman because i like to imagine that he looks up from that spit he's been roasting on since satan took him to hell in 22 and gurgles a curse around the red hot iron bar protruding his jaws while the demons laugh and more molten -- on his skin. but more to the point, there is no stable configuration or technologydoofus. mark zuckerberg is in charge of 4 billion people's lives, which means that we are lurching crisis to crisis and beuse we lack any good ideas, lying around with each one of these crises, we do the same thing we did last time, but harder and

hope for a different outcome. and i think there really is a version of the future that comes about because we start to talk about and think about how things could be different, what the so when the moment opens, the alternative we can demand it. and i think that's a maybe a kind of wishy washy to do. i think a lot ofs able buy soms the world better or like our recycling better and save planet. d like you can't shop your way out of the monopoly like. ultimately, these are problems that we solve as a polity because their structural problems and we solve them ■ yeah. so bryan yeah. no, absolutely. and i think that is such an important point because if you, you know think about the luddites, if you knew who the luddites were, you know, what, what was our baseline understanding of the luddites, right? it's they're they're dummies tey that was being developed all around them, the awesome

technology. and they hated it. and they smashed it because they didn't understand it because they knew not they did. right. and this is this is a fiction as sort of any of corey's fictions are, because it really behooves the the the the elites, the the folks that we like to think of as, you know, as sort of the tech titans of our day. brief look this this idea of of tech exceptionalism, right. as as these prime are handing dn technological and we should just thankful for themnd if you were able to question part and parcel what they were doing or ask that maybe we the systemñs]d hundreds of millions dollars in venture capital to do as see fit

or to pull levers and change tht then they might run into some problems they might have to contend with ideas likeentral tm book which i think we should touch on specifically which is which this idea of of interoperability because so of the digital problems we have have today you whether it's on a ■cial media network or it's a you know, or on the web writ large on on amazon, on or on uber or lyft. so many of these these these these services, as courageous pointed out, have consolidated into unassailable monopolies that we just, you know, feel like if want what they're what's on offer, we have no choice but to kind of play by the increasingly, increasingly punitive rules that are on offer. so especially on the social

media and some of the digital platform front, interoperability is, such an idea that that is one of those ideas. you know could that could very leftism that why people might want to you not have the true idea of on offer which is questioning or protesting the machinery that's hurtful to commonality that's they would say and the machinery that we have right now running our lives is pretty -- hurtful. the commonality and interoperability is a really interesting way to just sort of fix that can yeah yeah so you know interoperability on the one hand can be a very kind of mystical like anything can work with anything else you can sit in anyone's chair and read a book. someone else under yet a third . and no one gets to tell you what you can wear anyone's socks with, anyone's shoes and so on. but, you know, when it comes to digital, there's this like and t can't escape from try as we might. i mean, you know, as as a pretend computer scientist, i like to imagine tt printer th'n

viruses, because it would be great if we could make a printer that was a computer that could just spray ink on paper and not also infected with malware crawl your network and compromise all the computers on it and we don't know how to make that computer. we can only make the universal computer that can run all the programs. but if you think about a world in which we are broadly permitted, write those programs and run those programs, especially on the systems that we use and we own or that are part of our lives. you imagine how this might impose third discipline on companies, so companies are disciplined by two forces. normally, one is competition open and the other one is regulation. and really you can't have one without the other. if firms don't compete, they take the regulators right. when an industry is like five giant companies or three giant companies, no can regulate them. any time you question. is net neutrality good or can we use this concrete in our buildings and will they fall

down in england? knows what i'm talking abou because other concrete buildings are falling down this year or you know, are these medical safe? we have amy ziering, who who made a wonderful documentary about how medical implants are. and i thought about it with every moment as both of my hip replacements being installed last year. all of those questions are but when ask it of an industry with only three companies and they all show and they go, no, it's fine, it's fine and everyoneho like a muckraking documentary filmmaker or an activist working for a nonprofit or an academic or someone running a micro company with seven customers and the regulator who, when the sector is down like three companies, is probably a veteran of at least two of them are the regulator goes yeah, it's probably going to be fine. and then we all end up in a world of pain and, and so we have landed and so so rmdisciplr competition regulation. without one, you don't get the other. but a third one, which is

possibility that if you do something that is to the interests of your customers, users or workers or society, that they might just seize the means of computation, they might just reprogram whatever gadget you're using in order to impose this, this, this taking on them. and they might just unilaterally reconfigure it, like in indonesia, the gig riders use thesepp while. they reverse engineer the the gig delivery apps and they just add stuff onto them like the gig delivery app won't let you get a fair at the train unless you're right in front the train station. but when the train station comes, when train comes in, that is like a it's just a massive traffic jam. super dangerous. so they just spoof the gps. they go around corner, they spoof the gps, they tell the gps et a fair and then zoom up and get it. because it turns out that the person at the coalface knows about how to do their job than their boss does.

not provides a remedy for individuals who might be put in harm's way by technology, but it also so in the event that the people the show are not, you know, zero executive function toddlers with millions of other people's money to play with it might stop them from doing the bad thing right. might it might not they might actually say. hey, we can dot, then. the the the people were going to do it too are going to are just going undo it. so like if any of you remember the early days of the web, we had these things called pop up ads and you would open a browser and then like 25 little windows would open up. they'd run away from your mouse and they'df them would be one pixel square. and we didn't. to legislate against pop up ads, we just put pop pop up lockers and all the browsers write opera then everyone followed suit because back then we had competition in browsers and then the pop ups went away like i was running a web publisher.

then we had lots of advertisers who at one point were saying, you must have pop up ads or we want to advertise with you and. then once we got to say to them, well, you got the money, we'll do it. if you ask. but you have to know, like nobody sees the pop. so they're like, okay, no pop yeah, yeah. i mean, it is, it is interesting. think about this era reconfiguration. i mean, this year has has, as far as i'm concerned, as a as a tech writer had two sort of major three lines. and that has been the rise of the generative a.i. system, whether that's, you know, openai ai or chalkbeat or mit journey and then the social pressures, that's concerned and alongside it and sometimes related and sometimes less related, often linked in interesting ways, this this