Pluralistic: Petard, Part IV (03 Feb 2025)


Today's links


The cover of MIT Tech Review's 12 Tomorrows anthology, an oil painting from one of Herbert's *Dune* novels

Petard, Part IV (permalink)

Last week's announcement that Trump's FCC was going to once again allow ISPs to bribe landlords to force you to use their service was easy to miss, amidst all the chaos:

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/01/fcc-chair-nixes-plan-to-boost-broadband-competition-in-apartment-buildings/

But it sure got my attention, since that was the plot of "Petard," a techno-Lovecraftian sf story I wrote for Bruce Sterling's "Twelve Tomorrows" anthology for MIT Tech Review in 2014:

https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262535595/twelve-tomorrows-2014/

Some years ago, I read it aloud for my podcast:

https://archive.org/details/Cory_Doctorow_Podcast_278

https://archive.org/details/Cory_Doctorow_Podcast_292

https://archive.org/details/Cory_Doctorow_Podcast_293

https://archive.org/details/Cory_Doctorow_Podcast_294_-_Petard_04

I've been serializing the story in the last three editions of my newsletter, and I'm finishing it today.

Here's part one:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/01/30/landlord-telco-industrial-complex/#part-one

Here's part two:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/01/31/the-blood-speech/#part-two

Here's part three:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/02/01/miskatonic-networks/#part-three

And now, for the thrilling conclusion!

Kadijah didn't buy the coffee this time. And I bought my own banana bread.

"I met that Sergey dude," she said.

"Creepy, huh?"

She blew on her coffee. She drank it black. "Wicked smart, I think. And it looks like he's got your number."

Kadijah heard about the mass evictions through Ftp — she'd been watching our campaign carefully. When she messaged me, I assumed that she was outraged on all our behalf. She'd made an offer of free, uncensored connectivity for six months for everyone in the Termite Mound and everyone who'd been evicted. But she'd met Sergey? "He's scary, too," she said as an afterthought. "But scary-smart."

"He's a droid," I said. "He's reinventing high-speed trading. All he cares about is the code, and not the people it effects."

"A droid? Come on, no way. Evil, sure, but brilliant. World's full of evil landlords. When was the last time you met a smart one?"

I felt my cheeks getting hot. "Who cares how smart someone is, if he's a dick?" I couldn't quite bring myself to use the word "Evil."

"Dude. Smart is at least as important as evil."

I'd been taking Miskatonic as an existence proof of a part of the world that the rot-fungus had not yet colonized. But, afterward, I found myself turning our conversation over and over in my head. Yes, maybe she had offered all that great, free, uncensored Internet goodness because she was outraged by the dirty tricks campaign. But maybe she was doing it because she knew that appearing outraged would make her — and her company — seem like the kind of nice people that we should all give more money to. Maybe they don't give a damn about Ftp or fairness or eviction. Maybe it's just an elaborate game of soundbites and kabuki gestures that are all calibrated to the precise sociopathic degree necessary to convey empathy and ethics without ever descending into either. She hadn't bought the coffee or the banana bread.

It's easy to slip into this kind of metacognitive reverie and hard to stop once you start. Now I found myself questioning my own motives, scouring my subconscious for evidence of ego, self-promotion, and impurity.

The thing was.

The thing was.

The thing was that I had not ever met someone like Sergey before. Sergey, who'd shown me something glittering and cool and vast that waited for us to realize it and bring it to perfection. Sergey, who'd both understood the collective action problem and found it to be secondary, a thing to solve on the way to solving something bigger and more important.

Sergey's words had awoken in me a feverish curiosity, an inability to see the world as it had once been. And I hated the feeling. It was the sense that my worldview had come adrift, all my certainty calving off like an iceberg and floating away to sea. If you accepted Sergey's idea, then the human race was just the symbiotic intestinal flora of a meta-organism that would use us up and crap us out as needed. The global networks that allowed us to organize ourselves more efficiently were so successful because they let businesses run their supply-chains more efficiently, and all the socializing and entertainment and chatter were just a side-effect. Ftp was a mild pathogen, a few stray harmful bacteria in the colon of the corporate over-organism, and if it ever got to the point where it was any kind of real threat, the antibodies would show up to tear it to parts so it could be flushed away.

In other words, I was the rot-fungus. Everything I did, everything I'd done, was an infection, and not even a very successful one.

#

Christmas break arrived quicker than I'd have guessed. Bryan and his girlfriend had me over to their new place for dinner during the last week of classes. She was an elf, too, of course, and their place was all mossy rocks and driftwood and piles of leaves. The food was about what you'd expect, but it was better than the slurry I'd been gulping at my desk while I wrestled with my term-assignments and crammed for exams.

The Internet access at the Termite Mound was now uncensored, but I still found myself working at the lab. There was something comforting about being around my labmates instead of huddling alone in my dorm-room.

Bryan's girlfriend, Lana, was in mechanical engineering and she made some pretty great-looking mobiles, which dangled and spun around the tiny studio, their gyrations revealing the hidden turbulence of our exhalations. Every time I moved, I whacked one or another of them, making their payloads of mossy rocks and artful twigs clatter together. The floor was littered with their shed dander, which I took to be a deliberate act of elfy-welfy feng shui.

"So, how's things at the Termite Mound?" Bryan said, as we wound down over a glass of floral mead (this is pretty terrible, even by the standards of elf cuisine).

It was the question that had hung over the whole evening. After all, I'd cost Bryan his home and his job and had walked away Scot-free.

"Yeah," I said. "Well, the city and the university are both investigating MIT Residences LLC and it looks like they're going to be paying some pretty big fines. There was a class-action lawyer hanging around out front last week, trying to track down the old tenants who'd been turfed out. So there's going to be some more bad road ahead of them."

"Good," he said, with feeling. The expression of rage and bitterness that crossed over his face was not elfin in the slightest. It was the face of someone who'd been screwed over and knew he had no chance of ever getting back at his attackers.

"Yeah," I said again. The class-action guy had really been a gut-punch for me. Class-action was so old school, the thing that Ftp was supposed to replace with something fast, nimble, networked, and collective. Class-action was all about bottom-feeding lawyers slurping up the screwed-over like krill and making a meal of their grievances. Ftp let the krill organize into a powerful mass in its own right, with the ability to harness and command the predatory legal kraken that had once been its master. The fact that Ftp had managed to get us cheap, unfiltered broadband while this sleazeoid was proposing to actually skewer the great beast, straight through the wallet? It made me feel infinitesimal.

"But you're still there," he said. The place seemed a lot smaller. Bryan seemed a lot less elfin.

"Yeah," I said. "Don't guess they figure they can afford to evict me."

"That worked out well for you, then."

"Bryan," Lana said, putting her hand on his arm. "Come on. It's not Lukasz's fault those assholes are douchehats. He didn't make them fire you. It's –" She waved her hands at the mobiles, the walls, the wide world. "It's just how it is. The system, right?"

None of us said anything for a while. We drank our mead.

"Want to go vape something?" I said. There were lots of legal highs on campus. Some of them were pretty elfy, too. I wanted to blot out the world right then, which wasn't elfy, but we could all name our poisons.

I stumbled into the cold with them, in a haze of self-pity and self-doubt. The winter had come on quick and bitter, one of those Boston deep freezes the combined gale-force wind, subzero temperature and high humidity that got right into your bones. Too cold to talk, at least.

As we settled into crowd of vapers shivering in front of a brewpub, I heard a familiar voice. I couldn't make out the words, but the tones cut through the cold and the self-pity and brought me up short. I turned around.

"Hey, Lukasz," Sergey said. He was in the center of a group of five other guys, all vaping from little lithium-powered pacifiers that fit over their index fingernails, giving them the look of Fu Manchu viziers.

"Sergey," I said, getting up from our bench and moving away from Byran and Lana, suddenly not wanting to be seen in elfin company. "How's the hivemind?"

He looked over to Bryan and Lana in their layered furs, then back at me. He gave me a courtesy smile. "You'd be amazed at how well it's doing." The rest of the group nodded. I thought I recognized some of them. He closed the distance between us. "Going home for the holidays?" he asked in conspiratorial tones.

"Don't know," I said. I had some invites from my old hackerspace buddies to go on a little couch-trip, but whenever I contemplated it, I felt like a fraud. I hadn't said yes and I hadn't said no, but in my heart I knew I wouldn't be going anywhere. How could I look those people in the eye, knowing what I knew? Knowing, in particular, what a fraud I turned out to be?

"Well," Sergey said, leaning in a little closer. I could smell the vape on his breath, various long-chain molecules like a new-car smell with an undertone of obsolete tobacco. "Well," he said again. "There's an opening at the office. In the chaos monkey department. Looking for someone who can work independently, really knocking the system around, probing for weaknesses and vulnerabilities, pushing us out of those local optima."

"Sergey," I asked, the blood draining out of my face, "are you offering me a job?"

He smiled an easy smile. "A very good job, Lukasz. A job that pays well, and lets you do what you're best at. You get resources, paychecks, smart colleagues. You get to organize your Ftp campaigns, make it the best tool you can. We'll even host it for you, totally bulletproof expansible computation and storage. Analytics — well, you know what our analytics are like."

I did. I wondered what algorithm had suggested that he go out for a smoke at just that minute in order to be fully assured of catching me on the way home. The Termite Mound was full of cameras and other sensors, and it knew an awful lot about my movements.

A job. Money. Friends. Challenges. Do Ftp all day long, walk away from AA's lab and the fish-eyed games of the grad students. Walk away from my tiny dorm room. Become a zuckerbergian comet, launched out of university without the unnecessary drag of a diploma into stratospheric heights, become a name to conjure with. Lana and Bryan were behind me on the bench, and couldn't hear us, not at the whispers in which we spoke. But I was drug-paranoid sure that they could decipher our body language, even from behind the wall of synthetic psilocybin they had scaled.

I could have a purpose, a trajectory, a goal. Certainty.

To my horror, I didn't turn him down. A small part of me watched distantly as I said, "I'll think about it, OK?"

"Of course," he said, and smiled a smile of great and genuine goodwill and serenity. I waved goodbye to Bryan and Lana and headed back to the Termite Mound.

Hey look at this (permalink)


A Wayback Machine banner.

Object permanence (permalink)

#20yrsago Euro software patents are DEAD AGAIN! https://web.archive.org/web/20100505075815/http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20050202162302114

#20yrsago HOWTO sleep in an airport https://www.sleepinginairports.net

#20yrsago Simpsons Choo Choo Choose You valentine to print & cut https://blog.deconcept.com/2005/02/02/i-choo-choo-choose-you/

#20yrsago Herpes rabbi used mouth in circumcisions https://web.archive.org/web/20050204003002/https://www.cnn.com/2005/US/02/02/circumcision.health.ap/index.html

#15yrsago Judge censured for ordering class-action lawyer to take pay in $125,000 worth of gift-cards https://www.loweringthebar.net/2010/02/reprimand-for-judge-who-ordered-gift-card-payment.html

#15yrsago Australian censorship law collapses under public disapprobation https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2010/02/internet-uprising-overturns-australian-censorship-law/

#10yrsago David Graeber’s The Utopia of Rules: On Technology, Stupidity, and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy https://memex.craphound.com/2015/02/02/david-graebers-the-utopia-of-rules-on-technology-stupidity-and-the-secret-joys-of-bureaucracy/

#10yrsago Molly Crabapple’s FBI file is 7,526 pages long (UPDATED, it’s worse) https://memex.craphound.com/2015/02/02/molly-crabapples-fbi-file-is-7526-pages-long-updated-its-worse/

#1yrago Worker misclassification is a competition issue https://pluralistic.net/2024/02/02/upward-redistribution/#

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

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A screenshot of me at my desk, doing a livecast.

Recent appearances (permalink)


A grid of my books with Will Stahle covers..

Latest books (permalink)


A cardboard book box with the Macmillan logo.

Upcoming books (permalink)

  • Picks and Shovels: a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about the heroic era of the PC, Tor Books, February 2025

  • Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It, Farrar, Straus, Giroux, October 2025
    https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374619329/enshittification/

  • Unauthorized Bread: a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, 2025


Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing:

  • Enshittification: a nonfiction book about platform decay for Farrar, Straus, Giroux. Status: second pass edit underway (readaloud)

  • A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

  • Picks and Shovels, a Martin Hench noir thriller about the heroic era of the PC. FORTHCOMING TOR BOOKS FEB 2025

Latest podcast: Canada shouldn't retaliate with US tariffs https://craphound.com/overclocked/2025/02/02/canada-shouldnt-retaliate-with-us-tariffs/

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