Last week, Trump's FCC chair Brendan Carr reversed a rule that banned your landlord from taking kickbacks in exchange for forcing you to use whatever ISP was willing to pay the biggest bribe for the right to screw you over:
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replied to Cory Doctorow last edited by
Corporate fascists and their captured regulators are, of course, that most despicable of creatures: they are *plagiarists*. Like so many of our tech overlords, they have mistaken dystopian sf as a suggestion, rather than as a warning. I take this personally, because I actually wrote this as an sf story in 2013, and it was published in 2014 in MIT Tech Review's *Twelve Tomorrows*, edited by Bruce Sterling and published in 2014:
Twelve Tomorrows 2014
A diverse collection of science fiction authors, characters, and stories, featuring contributions by Pat Cadigan, Cory Doctorow, Warren Ellis, and Gene Wolfe...
MIT Press (mitpress.mit.edu)
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replied to Cory Doctorow last edited by
I adapted it for my podcast, in four installments:
Petard from Tech Review's Twelve Tomorrows : Cory Doctorow : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive
Here's a reading (MP3) of the first part of my story Petard: A Tale of Just Desserts from the new MIT Tech Review anthology Twelve Tomorrows, edited by Bruce...
Internet Archive (archive.org)
Petard, Part 02 : Cory Doctorow : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive
Here's the second part of my reading (MP3) of Petard (part one), a story from MIT Tech Review's Twelve Tomorrows, edited by Bruce Sterling; a story inspired...
Internet Archive (archive.org)
Petard, Part 03 : Cory Doctorow : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive
Here's the third part of my reading (MP3) of Petard (part one, part two), a story from MIT Tech Review's Twelve Tomorrows, edited by Bruce Sterling; a story...
Internet Archive (archive.org)
Cory Doctorow Podcast 294 Petard 04 : Cory Doctorow : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive
Here's the fourth and final part of my reading (MP3) of Petard (part one, part two, part three), a story from MIT Tech Review's Twelve Tomorrows, edited by...
Internet Archive (archive.org)
And, given the new currency of this old story, I thought it was only fitting that I serialize it here, on my blog, also in four parts.
Here's part one:
Here's part two:
And now, onto part three:
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replied to Cory Doctorow last edited by
* * *
One of the early Ftp code contributors was now CTO for an ISP, and they'd gotten their start as a dorm co-op at Brown that had metastasized across New England. Sanjay had been pretty important to the early days of Ftp, helping us get the virtualization right so that it could run on pretty much any cloud without a lot of jiggery and/or pokery. Within a day of emailing Sanjay, I was having coffee with the vice-president of business development for Miskatonic Networks.
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replied to Cory Doctorow last edited by
She was also Sanjay's boyfriend's girlfriend, because New England ISPs are hotbeds of Lovecraft-fandom polyamory. Her name was Kadijah and she had a southie accent so thick it was like an amateur theater production of *Good Will Hunting*.
"The Termite Mound?" She laughed. "Shit yeah, I know that place. It's still standing? I went to some super sketchy parties there when I was a kid, I mean sooooper sketchy, like sketch-a-roony. I can't believe no one's torched the place yet."
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replied to Cory Doctorow last edited by
"Not yet," I said. "And seeing as all my stuff's there right now, I'm hoping no one does for the time being."
"Yeah, I can see that." I could *not* get over her accent. It was the most Bostonian thing I'd encountered since I got off the train. "OK, so you want to know what we'd charge to provide service to someone at the Termite Mound?"
"Uh, no. I want to know what you'd charge per person if we could get you the whole Mound -- every unit in the residence. All 250 of them."
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replied to Cory Doctorow last edited by
"Oh." She paused a second. "This is an Ftp thing, right?"
"Yeah," I said. "That's how I know Sanjay. I, uh, I started Ftp." I don't like to brag, but sometimes it makes sense in the context of the conversation, right?
"That was you? Wicked! So you're seriously gonna get the whole dorm to sign up with us?"
"I will if you can get me a price that I can sell to them," I said.
"Oh," she said. Then "Oh! Right. Hmm. Leave it with me. You say you can get them all signed up?"
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replied to Cory Doctorow last edited by
"I think so. If the price is right. And I think that if the Termite Mound goes with you that there'll be other dorms that'll follow. Maybe a lab or two," I said. I was talking out of my ass at this point, but seriously, net-censorship in the labs at *MIT*? It was disgusting. It could not stand.
"Damn," she said. "Sounds like you're majoring in Ftp. Don't you have classes or something?"
"No," I said. "This is basically exactly what I figured college would be like.
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H [email protected] shared this topic
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replied to Cory Doctorow last edited by
"A cross between summer camp and an Stanford obedience experiment. If all I wanted to do was cram a bunch of *knowledge* into my head, I could have stayed home and mooced it. I came here because I wanted to level up and fight something tough and even dangerous. I want to spend four years getting into the right kind of trouble. Going to classes too, but seriously, classes? Whatever. Everyone knows the good conversations happen in the hallway between the formal presentations.
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replied to Cory Doctorow last edited by
"Classes are just an excuse to have hallways."
She looked skeptical and ate banana bread.
"It's your deal," she said.
I could hear the *but* hanging in the air between us. She went and got more coffees and brought them back along with toasted banana bread dripping with butter for me. She wouldn't let me pay, and told me it was on Miskatonic. We were a potential big account. She didn't want to say "But" because she might offend me. I wanted to hear the "but."
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replied to Cory Doctorow last edited by
"But?"
"But what?"
"It's my deal but...?"
"But, well, you know, you don't look after your grades, MIT'll put you out on your ass. That's how it works in college. I've seen it."
I chewed my banana bread.
"Hey," she said. "Hey. Are you OK, Lukasz?"
"I'm fine," I said.
She smiled at me. She was pretty. "But?"
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replied to Cory Doctorow last edited by
I told her about my talk with AA, and about Juanca, and about how I felt like nobody was giving me my propers, and she looked very sympathetic, in a way that made me feel much younger. Like toddler younger.
"MIT is all about pranks, right? I think if I could come up with something really epic, they'd --" And as I said it, I realized how dumb it was. *They laughed at me in Vienna, I'll show them!* "You know what? Forget about it.
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replied to Cory Doctorow last edited by
"I got more important things to do than screw around with those knob-ends. Work to do, right? Get the network opened up around here, you and me, Kadijah!"
"Don't let it get to you, you'll give yourself an aneurism. I'll get back to you soon, OK?"
# # #
I fished a bead out of my pocket and wedged it into my ear.
"Who is this?"
"Lukasz?" The voice was choked with tears.
"Who is this?" I said again.
"It's Bryan." I couldn't place the voice or the name.
"Bryan who?"
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replied to Cory Doctorow last edited by
"From the Termite Mound's customer service desk." Then I recognized the voice. It was the elf, and he was having hysterics. Part of me wanted to say, *Oh, diddums!* and hang up. Because elves, AMR? But I'm not good at tough love.
"What's wrong?"
"They've fired me," he said. "I got called into my boss's office an hour ago and he told me to start drawing up a list of people to kick out of the dorm -- he wanted the names of people who supported you.
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replied to Cory Doctorow last edited by
"I was supposed to go through the EULAs for the dorm and find some violations for all of them --"
"What if they didn't have any violations?"
He made a sound between a sob and a laugh. "Are you kidding? You're always in violation! Have you read the EULA for the Mound? It's like sixty pages long."
"OK, gotcha. So you refused and you got fired?"
There was a pause. It drew out. "No," he said, his voice barely a whisper. "I gave them a bunch of names, and *then* they fired me."
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replied to Cory Doctorow last edited by
Again, I was torn between the impulse to hang up on him and to hear more. Nosiness won (nosiness always wins; bets on nosiness are a sure thing). "Nicely done. Sounds like just deserts to me. What do you expect me to do about it?" But I knew. There were only two reasons to call me after something like this: to confess his sins or to get revenge. And no one would ever mistake me for a priest.
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replied to Cory Doctorow last edited by
"I've got the names they pulled. Not just this time. Every time there's been any kind of trouble in the Termite Mound, MIT Residence has turfed out the troublemakers on some bogus EULA violation. They know that no one cares about student complaints, and there's always a waiting list for rooms at the Termite Mound, it's so central and all. I kept records."
"What kind of records?"
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replied to Cory Doctorow last edited by
"Hardcopies of emails. They used disappearing ink for all the dirty stuff, but I just took pictures of my screen with my drop and saved it to personal storage. It's ugly. They went after pregnant girls, kids with disabilities. Any time there was a chance they'd have to do an air quality audit or fix a ramp, I'd have to find some reason to violate the tenant out of residence." He paused a moment. "They used some pretty bad language when they talked about these people, too."
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replied to Cory Doctorow last edited by
The Termite Mound should've been called the Roach Motel: turn on the lights and you'd find a million scurrying bottom-feeders running for the baseboards.
I was going to turn on the lights.
"You've got all that, huh?
"Tons of it," he said. "Going back three years. I knew that if it ever got out that they'd try and blame it on me. I wanted records."
"OK," I said. "Meet me in Harvard Square, by the T entrance. How soon can you get there?"
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replied to Cory Doctorow last edited by
"I'm at the Coop right now," he said. "Using a study-booth."
"Perfect," I said. "Five minutes then?"
"I'm on my way."
The Coop's study booths had big signs warning you that everything you did there was recorded -- sound, video, infrared, data -- and filtered for illicit behavior. The signs explained that there was no human being looking at the records unless you did something to trip the algorithm, like that made it better.
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replied to Cory Doctorow last edited by
If a tree falls in the forest, it sure as shit makes a sound; and if your conversation is bugged, it's bugged -- whether or not a human being listens in right then or at some time in the infinite future of that data.
I beat him to the T entrance, and looked around for a place to talk. It wasn't good. From where I stood, I could see dozens of cameras, the little button-sized dots discretely placed all around the square.
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