Imagine a world in which your toaster will only toast bread from approved vendors and your dishwasher will only clean approved dishes using specific brands of soap. Think that’s far-fetched? Cory Doctorow doesn’t.
The science-fiction author points to familiar headaches in modern life. Many computer printers will only print using brand-name inks. A DVD player sold in the US won’t play DVDs from the UK.
Doctorow doesn’t see these as inevitable annoyances, but rather a pattern in which we’re forced to use products in ways that benefit the corporations that produce them. He explores that theme in one of the stories in his new book, "Radicalized: Four Tales of our Present Moment."
“All the most abusive uses … have come very slowly and have percolated up and been normalized one little use at a time,” he told Living Lab Radio on Tuesday. “And I fear that we're going to wake up one morning with a new kind of feudalism.”
By that he means a system in which only the elite get to own property and everyone else is a tenant. Tenants must use the property in accord with the wishes of the property owner.
The aristocracy in this case is not populated by kings and queens, but rather “these trans-human immortal colony organisms called limited liability companies for whom we represent a kind of inconvenient gut flora,” Doctorow said.
Doctorow, who is the co-editor of Boing Boing, has become an activist for the open sharing of information and access to technology.
In another story in the book, a superhero comes to Earth to take on police brutality and corruption. But once he questions white supremacy, the public turns on him.
“And people start asking, ‘Well we call him an American hero. How do we know he won't become an Iranian hero?’” Doctorow said. “That head-spinning ejection from the white privilege boat into the seas of racialization is something that I think is very much alive … in our debates.”
Though the stories have dark themes, Doctorow thinks they’re also optimistic.
“I think that science fiction can help us find our way to a point where we start to care about and take action on issues before it's too late to do anything about it,” he said. “We are always poised on a knife edge between denialism and nihilism.”
