New York Times best selling author Cory Doctorow joins us to discuss his 2023 solarpunk novel The Lost Cause!
Links
- The Lost Cause
- Books mentioned in the episode:
Attributions
Our theme song is Tanz den Dobberstein, and our interstitial song is Puck’s Blues. Both tracks used by permission of their creator, Erik Brandt. Find out more about his band, The Urban Hillbilly Quartet, on their website.
This episode was produced and transcribed by Parker Seaman, and was hosted and edited by Ian R Buck. Many thanks to Cory Doctorow for coming on the show! We’re always looking to feature new voices on the show, so if you have ideas for future episodes, drop us a line at [email protected].
Transcript
[00:00:02] Ian: Welcome to the Streets.mn podcast, the show where we highlight how transportation and land use can make our communities better places. Coming to you from beautiful uptown Minneapolis, Minnesota, I am your host, Ian R. Buck. It’s time for another book club episode, and this time our producer Parker Seaman got us a very exciting guest. So I’ll throw it over to Parker to introduce us.
[00:00:27] Parker: Welcome back to the Streets.mn podcast book club, everybody. The book for this session has been Lost Cause by Cory Doctorow, and we are very thrilled to have Cory in the recording for us. Cory, do you want to say a quick hello?
[00:00:44] Cory: Hello. It’s a pleasure to be recording with you. Ian, I’ll switch over to you. Do you want to give us a little quick overview of the book Lost Cause? Because you were the one that picked this out for us.
[00:00:55] Ian: Yeah, yeah. I can’t believe that the book that I suggested, number one, that you went with my suggestion, and number two, that you went so far as to like ask the author himself to hop on a call with us.
[00:01:08] Parker:We’re very excited about your new book. It seems very good. Let’s talk about not that.
[00:01:10] Cory: Sure. I love all my children.
[00:01:11] Ian: So The Lost Cause, released in 2023, it’s a solar punk novel set roughly 30 years in the future in Burbank, California. Our main character is Brooks Palazzo. He’s 19 years old, and all of the good and bad that comes with that. Yeah, he and his crew are mostly dealing with the issues that come with living in a world where climate change has been on the doorstep for the last like 20 years. And what do you do as a society to address that head on, and what happens when you still have vocal minorities who do not want to do any of that? So there’s a lot of stuff in there that hits really hard right now in particular.
[00:02:16] Parker: So I suppose we can just jump right into the first question that we have. So why Burbank specifically? It’s not exactly the first place we think of when we’re thinking of climate refuges.
[00:02:28] Cory: My friend Tim Wu has got a book out that we’ve actually been touring together because our two books are on similar themes. His book’s called The Age of Extraction. And he said a couple of times now that we’ve done events that he started the book thinking that the first line of it was going to be, everything has to happen somewhere. And everything has to happen somewhere. I, for the last 10 years, have lived in Burbank. It’s a really interesting town. I started the book before the pandemic. And then I, during lockdown, I found myself spending a lot more time around home than I normally do for the obvious reasons. But also you should know that I travel like 100 days a year at least. So I was, you know, it was unusual for me to have this kind of daily longitudinal view of my city. And you know, I’m kind of a stress feeding politics junkie. And so wherever I find myself, I get involved in the local politics. And I fell in with the local DSA and started going to city hall meetings before the pandemic, before the lockdown. We were one of three cities left in California that had no fault evictions still on the books. And there was a statewide order.
[00:03:44] Ian: Oh, wow.
[00:03:45] Cory: Yeah.So there’s a state law coming in to ban no fault evictions. And the landlords in the city started doing mass evictions ahead of the state law. Like they served an entire building, including the babies, and kicked them all out. And because the law kicked in January 1st, their move out week was Christmas week. And so we mobilized a lot of people for that. It was really amazing to see. And you know, Burbank, it’s a good town to set a book in. So it’s full of makers. You know, it’s historically like it’s a union town. So if you know LA geography, Burbank’s like this right on the edge of Los Angeles. So Griffith Park, which is where the Hollywood sign is, and the Griffith Observatory, there’s like a lobe of it that extends into Burbank. And so if you sort of follow that around, follow the LA River, and you get to Burbank. And it was where the skilled trades lived from the studios. So we have three studios in town. We used to have four. We had Warner, Columbia, Universal, and Disney. And so all the like pipe fitters, electricians, and scene painters, and costumers, they all lived in Burbank. All the carpenters and all the union halls are there. So there’s like 10 union halls on Burbank Boulevard and 10 more on Magnolia Boulevard, which are the two main drags. And it’s also where Lockheed Martin was based. And so there’s like this weird right wing contingent in this union town. But of course, everyone who worked at Lockheed Martin was also unionized. They were like aerospace engineers, they were metal beaters, they were welders, you know, everything you do in a kind of heavy industry. We have a tiny little airport that used to be Lockheed’s experimental airstrip. Amelia Earhart used to fly out of it. And now it’s Burbank Airport. It’s the airport I fly out of when I can. And it’s never been brought up to code. All the gates are so close together that you can walk the whole length of the terminal in 10 minutes. The planes come so close to the terminal, there’s no jetways, that you board from the back and the front of the plane at the same time. The load and unload takes half the time. My sofa to gate time is 15 minutes. It’s astounding. And, you know, someday one plane is going to catch fire and then they’re all going to go up and we’re all going to die. And I think actuarially, we’ll have saved so much time by not walking to like a long terminal and waiting to debark that we will have saved more human life hours than we will have cost by killing everyone there in a single place. So it’s a it’s a funny town. Like it’s it’s just got a weird vibe, like in the same way that Sarah Palin can see Russia from her back porch, we can see Hollywood from our back porch, like the L.A. town line is just like sort of three blocks from my front door. Burbank has got weird old blue laws. We haven’t licensed a whiskey bar in 25 years, but we have the loosest licensing for gun stores in Southern California, the second highest number of gun stores per capita of any city. So everyone who lives in Southern California comes to Burbank to buy guns. And when you go to the when you go to the city line between Burbank and Hollywood, L.A. and Burbank on one side of that line is just gun stores. And on the other side, it’s it’s weed dispensaries and whiskey bars. It’s tattoo parlors. It’s a it’s a good time. It’s very Tijuana.
[00:07:02] Ian: And it’s yeah, that’s usually the kind of thing that you get like at a state border where it’s like, you know…
[00:07:07] Cory: Fireworks. So it’s a town like of contrast. It’s interesting. It’s one hundred thousand people. It’s really, really well run. We have a WPA era courthouse that was built by Hollywood set designers. So it’s this trompe l’oeil art deco. Incredible. Like it looks like it’s five stories tall. It’s only two and a half stories tall. But it’s got like the trompe l’oeil forced perspective stuff. And it’s it’s beautiful. It’s full of murals. And, you know, there’s stuff in that book that is real. So there was a guy who started going to town hall meetings in L.A. or in Southern California, which all have sunshine laws. And so they all automatically put their videos on YouTube. And he started doing stand up during the five minute public comment period. And he went viral and he went on Ellen. And then he got a career as a comedian. And this has prompted a bunch of people who are a lot less funny than him to come to all of our town hall meetings. And so during the public comment period, there’s always two or three stand ups who do five very bad minutes of like topical town humor. Like it’s a weird we have three year round Halloween stores. It’s kind of the goth district because we have all these makers. We have all these hobby stores. So there’s like when I moved there, it’s gone now. When I moved there, we still had a store that sold gas powered airplane models that you could like, because if you were an aerospace engineer, the thing you wanted to do on the weekend was fly little planes instead of making big ones. It’s a great little town. It’s a well run town of 100,000 people with many contradictions and good schools. And, you know, my daughter went to the high school that Glee was based on, which is just like our local high school.
[00:08:54] Ian: Which is probably because, like, you know, hey, the studio that was making Glee is like, well, you make what you know.
[00:09:00] Cory: We’ll use that one. It’s just over there. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, yeah.
[00:09:04] Ian: So in the in the book, it was just kind of assumed that like, well, anytime that I want to get around town, I’m going to grab a bike share. Yeah. You know, and it’s and it’s it’s such a non thing to Brooks that he just like refers to it like my bike. Right. You know, oh, I’m glad that nobody like claimed my bike while I was gone. You know, and it’s like, how close are we to that?
[00:09:24] Cory: Nothing like that in Burbank. But e-bikes are blowing up, but they’re all personal. So the thing is that we still have zoning with big lots and big setbacks. And so everyone’s got a bike in like a big backyard or whatever. So the e-bikes are ubiquitous, but they’re personal with all the problems that entails. I mean, not all of them. We don’t have the New York problem where people with bad batteries keep their bikes in house and then in their houses and they kill everyone. People keep their bikes out of doors for the most part. But still, it’s it’s it’s still this super inefficient. Everyone owns their own bike kind of world. Do you know where it is like that, though? You know, I’m back in London and it’s like that in London. You cannot walk more than three blocks without or even one block without hitting a bike share bike that’s just sitting there waiting for someone to claim it.
[00:10:14] Ian: Mm hmm. Mm hmm. Yeah. The closest that I’ve encountered that in North America was Montreal. Yeah. Which I visited last summer. And they are extremely proud of their bike share system.
[00:10:27] Cory: Yeah, yeah, yeah. And, you know, it’s not Minnesota cold, but it’s cold there in the winter and people and they get a lot of snow.
[00:10:33] Ian: Yeah. Yep.
[00:10:34] Cory: I was a winter summer cyclist in Toronto for 10 years, like all the best Americans. I’m Canadian and and, you know, thermals, ski mask, the whole thing. I’m old now. I don’t think I could do it, but it was an adventure. And it was those were the years I never got a cold because I wasn’t on the subway.
[00:10:54] Ian: You know, let’s let’s talk a little bit about like the richness of the setting and like the the kind of the world building that you sprinkle in about, you know, OK, where like where has the country in the world been in the last 30 years? Yeah. Politically, especially, you know, to get us to this point, like I in particular, when I first read this book, I had been kind of percolating in the back of my head an idea for a like kind of magical realism sort of, you know, retelling of like the odyssey. But it’s a it’s like a group of cyclists who are trying to get across the country for some reason. And when I read The Lost Cause, I was like, this is it. It could be set like during the early presidency of like Uwayni and like like.
[00:11:40] Cory: Yeah. So slight sidebar, one of my favorite writers is a kid’s writer named Daniel Pinkwater. He’s written more than 100 books. He’s an incredible kind of surreal kids, kids book writer. And he wrote a book called The Yggyssey and The Neddiad that are a retelling of the Odyssey. But it’s set in the 1950s and it’s about a family who are crossing the country on a train to eat corned beef sandwiches at the Brown Derby. But in every other regard, it’s exactly like the Odyssey in the Iliad. It’s really good.
[00:12:11] Ian: I’ll have to check this out. So we’ll have to put a link to them in the show notes.
[00:12:14] Cory: Yeah. So I got to say like like the you know, I have spent a lot of time looking at when things went well politically and when things went badly politically. And I’ve concluded that like you just never know, like you never know when things are about to change and when your adversary is blitzing because they have so much power, they have power to burn. And when your adversary is blitzing because they’re afraid that if they lose even a small battle at the periphery, that the whole thing will collapse. There’s a there’s a great bit in the writer China Miéville, a science fiction writer, but also a political scientist, wrote a novelistic history of the Russian Revolution called October. He talks about how in the run up to the revolution, the kind of well, the kind of what you think of as the Schumer Democrats were saying this is the wrong time for bold action. You can tell that the czar is at the peak of his strength because you’ll get a tiny peasant uprising in the most distant province and he’ll send like 100 troops to put it down. And, you know, look at how strong he is. And then when the revolution broke out, it turned out the reason the czar was doing that is that he knew that he was about to lose his grip on power and he was very weak. And it’s really hard to distinguish that. And so, you know, the kind of conceit of the book is that through like extremely contingent, difficult to predict ways, you can end up with extremely transformative politics. You know, I don’t think FDR had a New Deal in mind when he ran on the New Deal. I think he just liked the slogan. It’s like if you read the kind of platform of the New Deal, it was just like, I will do different stuff. I’m not sure what it is. It was just it was Obama. Hope bullshit. Right. And then he got into office with supermajorities like Obama, but he didn’t know how to neutralize his base, unlike Obama, who had his whole base organized through a computer network that he shut down the day he won the election. And so they showed up and they made it clear that they were going to fuck him up unless he figured out what a New Deal was and did it. And that is kind of the premise of the book is that, like, it’s very hard to know. You don’t need like a visionary leader. You don’t need. I love it helps. Right. You don’t need, you know, generationally great order like Obama or whatever. You just need the moment and the right political conditions to seize it. And then you get these big dramatic changes, which is what the what the prehistory of the book is about. This is about the counterrevolution after those big dramatic changes.
[00:14:50] Parker: So with all of that in mind, when you’re looking back through history of other sort of similar events and in the book writing about the near future, you’ve written with other books like Little Brother and Picks and Shovels, like getting into the headspace for writing something like that. Talk a bit more about like what your process is for therefore making a like a realistic, convincing world building.
[00:15:18] Cory: Well, you know, there’s that Douglas Adams bit about why you should carry a towel, because if you have a towel, people will assume that you’ve got your toothbrush and, you know, spare set of keys and like change of clothes and a sleeping bag and a backpack and, you know, a camp stove and everything else. And so if you show up with just a towel and tell them you’ve lost the rest of it, they’ll just they’ll just fill it in. And we talk about world building in a very grandiose way. And I’m sure there are writers who approach it like they’re writing a story Bible for a series or like a detailed source book for RPGs. I am of the view that a few well-chosen details with some blank spots in the background will produces a verisimilitude that arises from the audience filling in those blank spots with their own imaginative stuff, which is always going to like have a higher polygon count than anything I can render there. I have a friend, James McDonald, James McDonald, is a science fiction writer. He’s got a background in the military and he writes military science fiction. I co-taught a workshop with him, the Bible Paradise Workshop. And he was talking to the students about how to write about guns. And he said, and it is a subject I know nothing about. And he said, no matter how much research you do on guns, anything you say about a gun will have some kind of defect. And the gun people in your audience will find it and they’ll just like make your life miserable telling you about how your gun is wrong. But if you just add the word modified before the gun, so he fired six shots with his modified Walther PPK, they will tie themselves in knots thinking about whatever cool modification you came up with and they will just attribute to you the most insane, clever, kind of fantastic gun praxis. And so, yeah, there’s like there’s a lot of like lacunae and blank spots, a lot of stuff that’s only partially rendered that kind of fills it in. And then there’s some stuff that’s very sharp. That’s the areas that I’m really interested in.
[00:17:24] Ian: Like, especially in like Little Brother and the other books in that series, like our main character kind of stops the narrative for a few pages at a time sometimes to give us a bunch of information about whatever networking tools are important for us to understand.
[00:17:40] Cory: Yeah. So there’s two things going on there. So one is that we have this dictum in prose to show, don’t tell. And I think that the reason for that dictum is that it’s harder to be dull when you’re dramatizing. And so if you are reading a book and it’s not gelling, it might be because you’ve got too much exposition in there, not because exposition is bad, but because exposition is hard. And so you take away the stuff that’s hard and you replace with something that’s easier. But science fiction has a tradition of extremely interesting exposition. And so you see this in the first ever science fiction novel, which is Frankenstein. You see it in techno thrillers from the earliest days, like Moby Dick. Moby Dick is like a techno thriller that has just like it’s just it’s just like nerding out about whale tech, right? That whole. Yeah. And of course, you see it in contemporary work. There’s a six thousand word passage in Neal Stevenson’s book, Cryptonomicon, that describes someone eating a bowl of Cap’n Crunch cereal that is like and the way that he eats it and the thoughts that he has as he eats it. That is so interesting. Like I would read just a trilogy about cereal if he could carry it off in that in that mode. So so one of the things that’s going on there is like exposition is if you can do exposition well, exposition is good. It’s just hard to do well. The other thing that’s going on is that I’m a blogger. And so for now, more than a quarter of a century, every time I have a thought, the way that I develop it is not by making a note to myself in a little notebook, because when I do that, not only can I not decipher my handwriting, I also kind of cheat. I say like, oh, I’ll know what I mean later. I can just make a few jot a few words down. I never know what I mean later. So instead, I write it up for a public audience. And the act of, you know, making your thoughts public requires you to impose rigor on them. That is like powerfully mnemonic. It helps you recall them, but it also is accretive because people send you links to things that are related to the things you said. They annotate what you’ve written by telling you you’re full of shit. And then you have a database, right? Like a blog is just like a MySQL database with a front end. And so you can like grab, you know, type some keywords into your own blog search engine and find all the things you ever thought about a subject. And so what ends up happening is when you do this for tens of thousands of blog posts, you end up with a subconscious that’s a kind of super saturated solution of fragmentary story ideas that periodically nucleate into like stories or novels or speeches and crystallize. Right. And so, you know, the themes of like library socialism, this idea of sort of circulating abundance, that’s part of this book that I think is a much better way of talking about things, sustainability than degrowth, which I just think is like it’s the world’s dumbest marketing campaign to tell people that you’re going to have less and enjoy fewer material comforts as opposed to like instead of everyone owning one drill in a drawer, there’ll be the world’s greatest drill, but it’ll be somewhere in your neighborhood and it’ll take you 10 seconds to find it and it’ll be like better than any drill you’ve ever used, which is like a so much better way to own a drill than to have the minimum viable drill that you use to make two holes a year and hope that it doesn’t explode and kill you when you use it. You know, and so that kind of library socialism idea I developed through many, many blog posts and some of the other ideas about solarization and so on.
[00:21:14] Ian: By the way, when you personally go to the extreme of like library socialism, people even in the library system start to look at you funny. I know. For ages, I didn’t own a hammer. And I would go to the Minnesota tool library and I would be like, I need to borrow a hammer. And they’re like, seriously? Yeah, that’s that’s that’s all that I need. And they’re like, OK, sure. You don’t even need to bring this back. Nobody ever borrows hammers from us.
[00:21:39] Cory: Right, right. Everyone’s got a hammer at home or at the very least, like a shoe or a toddler or a puppy that they can use, you know.
[00:21:47] Parker: Yeah, yeah. Yeah.
[00:21:48] Ian: That’s very funny. I think I can probably freeze a banana. Yeah, yeah. What were you what were you going to do with this hammer? Well, I figured I’d hammer in the morning, I’d hammer in the evening, all over the land.
[00:21:59] Parker: Oh, my God.
[00:22:03] Ian: And the way that our characters just so matter of factly like take all of this for granted, it’s like, yeah, it seems like a great world. Why wouldn’t we build this?
[00:22:13] Cory: So this is also one of the themes of the book is that and it comes from Thomas Piketty and Capital in the 21st Century. There’s a bit in that book where he talks about the fact that tradition of primogenitor, where the eldest son inherited the whole fortune, which kept the dynasties intact, you know, without it, the dynasties would have would have all crumbled because you split split up the fortune among all the children or all the sons. And eventually you’re just you’re just normal people again. You’re just petty bourgeois. And the thing that ended that was colonization. And suddenly you had like geometric expansion in the money available to the great fortunes, which meant that you could you could have three sons create three dynasties. And that lasted like two generations. And then in the third generation, because of geometric expansion, they’d run out of people and lands to steal. And so they were like, well, time to do primogenitor again. And at that point, the people who’d sort of grown up in the system were like, that’s crazy. That’s unnatural. Everybody knows that all the sons get their own fortunes. It is unimaginable to me that even though this had been the system for a thousand years, right, it is unimaginable to me that we would do this any other way because we’ve been doing it for 40 years now. So obviously it’s a thing that’s lasted forever. Right. And, you know, one of the themes I want to play with in this book is just how quickly a world in which you were accustomed to confronting the climate emergency, like actually doing stuff about it, like, oh, something’s on fire. We should deal with that. We have refugees. We should house them. How quickly it will become normal and how hard it would be to say we’re going to stop doing it that way. That’s not how things work. And so how hard it would be to carry off a counter-reformation after a generation and a half of successful climate realpolitik. And, you know, I think this is like I think smart people understand this. I think Trump understands this. I think or the Trump movement understands this. I think they think that if they can just get like 10 years of a reign of terror under their belts, that we would all just accept it as normal that, you know, brown people get snatched off the street or whatever.
[00:24:26] Ian: It’s the long term Overton window.
[00:24:29] Cory: Yeah, exactly. And it’s not all that long term, right? Like, that’s the thing. Yeah, like it was invented five minutes before you were born or before you started noticing. And of course, it’s been that way forever, you know, which tells you that we can change it because like it’ll have been our way forever if we can change it for not very long to, you know.
[00:24:48] Parker: Mm hmm. The people not wanting people understanding both the need to change their environment, but then also not wanting change in general is something I’ve been able to see myself when trying to do going to town hall meetings and stuff like that in this area of people going like specifically, I’ve heard from some business owners who have been upset about the possibility of being of parking being taken up by bike lanes and them going, No, I understand that the climate crisis is a really big deal. And we really need to make some drastic actions to make it to stop us from having the worst outcome. But I need this parking.
[00:25:26] Cory: Sure. I mean, the version of that in Burbank, so we have this strip Magnolia Boulevard in Magnolia Park. It’s like a two mile long strip. It doesn’t have any chain stores on it. And it started as the place where there were a couple of stores where the studios sold off their surplus. There’s a place called It’s a Wrap that sells the whole wardrobe of any show that’s struck. So if you’re the same size as like a soap opera star, you go down, they’ll have like three copies of everything that Star War in that series because the wardrobes buy them in threes in case something gets spilled or wrecked or whatever with the tags on at 90 percent discounts. And then there was a place that sold props, props like surplus props, and then that metastasized into like all kinds of vintage stores, all kinds of junk shops and antique stores. And it’s a pilgrimage, right? People come from like teeny boppers come from all over L.A. for it, but they have to nag their parents to drive them. And so there was it’s a strode, right? It’s six lanes wide.
[00:26:20] Parker: Oh my God.
[00:26:22] Cory: And they were going to take the like, well, but the parking lanes on the side. So four lanes into parking, parking lane. And they were going to take the parking and make them bus lanes. And they were going to run it from the red line stop in North Hollywood, which is our subway stop. And it’s there’s just no way to connect it like this going from the subway to there is a huge pain in the ass. It’s a milk run bus that goes around all the streets. No one ever does it if they have a choice. And so they’re going to like bring in an infinity amount of foot traffic of kids who didn’t own cars who are their bread and butter. And the local merchants, including the ones I like, like that I shop at, were like, oh, you can’t do this. Everyone who visits our store drives here. It’s like, yeah, because they don’t have that’s the only way transit, you know?
[00:27:10] Ian: Yep. Yep. So I have a whole list of things in the book that hit me really hard right now in this moment in twenty twenty six. Some of them hit hard in twenty twenty three, but a lot of them hit harder this year. And, you know, everything from like, OK, fake environmentalists like suing using the like the EPA to like, you know, stop density. That’s a thing that has literally happened in Minneapolis. And we only like we only settled that lawsuit by getting the state legislators to retroactively pass a thing that said like and this applies to the thing that’s in courts right now.
[00:27:51] Cory: So, you know, I work at the Electronic Frontier Foundation and we do a lot of trying to get well-meaning people to understand that the law that they’re militating for is not well crafted and will be used primarily against them. I mean, everyone who’s like we should hold platforms liable for their user speech. It’s what do you who do you think they’re going to primarily stop from speaking? It’s not going to be Nazis. It’s going to be me, too, because that’s the people they’re worried about getting sued. You know, they’re going to be worried about getting sued by abusers, not by, you know, like white nationalists or whatever, you know.
[00:28:25] Parker: And there’s also the plot point in the book of the MAGAs using acid and squirt guns. And, you know, like a week or two ago, Ilhan Omar got squirted by something at a press conference. And thankfully, I don’t think that was acid. I heard one thing saying it was apple cider vinegar, but that’s hearsay. I’m not sure entirely, but yeah.
[00:28:50] Cory: Here in the UK, there was a bunch of that. Powerful acids are neither hard to procure nor to make.
[00:28:56] Ian: Right. So, yeah. Cops being absolutely useless for protecting us from like, you know, right wing extremists in the book like those were individuals.
[00:29:07] Cory: Oh, do you have that problem in Minneapolis? I hadn’t heard.
[00:29:09] Ian: I wonder.
[00:29:10] Parker: A little bit.
[00:29:13] Ian: Right now, the right wing extremists are the federal government. Like, yeah. And that kind of leads me into like, it felt very strange hearing the folks from the flotilla in the book advocating for like California secession, because right now in this moment, I’m like, I am desperately waiting for somebody to talk me back from the ledge of like, I want Minnesota to secede from the union. Like, like I hate right now that we are saddled with a bunch of so-called super conservative states who are sending their worst people to Minnesota to, you know, violate our constitutional and human rights. And like, and like, and I need I need the perspective of like, OK, right now everything sucks. Is the federal government even redeemable? Like, can we use this for good still?
[00:30:11] Cory: In California, we have this story that where the world’s, depending on what day it is, fourth or sixth or fifth largest economy. We give the country more than we get when you look at sort of federal tax remittances and federal programs and so on. And there’s definitely an air of truth to that. But California is as wealthy as it is because it has customs free border, free access to the Atlantic, the Gulf and the Canadian border, as well as important human and material inputs to its industrial and commercial processes and services that are drawn from a pool of 300 million people and not over 60 million people. And so there is definitely a sense in which secession makes states weaker. You know, this is again, maybe it’s a thing that was very informed by my upbringing in Canada, because we came twice within half a point of a referendum that would have seen Quebec separatism. And one of the things about Quebec separatism that became very clear was that there were it was fractal. There were units within Quebec that did not want to be a part of an independent Quebec. Most notably, a lot of indigenous communities were like, what do you mean you’re going to be a country like we are? Like, first of all, we don’t have a treaty with the sovereign nation of Quebec. So I don’t know what you think you will do with the whatever it is, 60 percent of the land mass that is treaty land if you secede from Canada. You know, so it’s it’s it’s just not the slam dunk people think it is.
[00:31:56] Ian: Right.
[00:31:58] Cory: And, you know, you talk about conservative states. You know, I think a thing that people who don’t live in the South sometimes forget is the reason there is racial animus and white supremacy in the South is because they are states with very large populations of black people in them who are assuredly not the conservatives who are voting to say so. It’s not like they are. I mean, it’s a cliche to say all the states are purple, but you cannot have a white supremacist project of the sort that you see in the former Confederate states unless you have a large population of black people, even after the Great Migration and the decades that followed. So these are not like just neoconfederates. And in fact, there are other stories I’ve written in this series. So I wrote I wrote a couple of short stories that are set in the same world as this, one of which is set in Mississippi, and it’s about Canadians going to Mississippi as part of this Blue Helmets thing, which is the kind of the back story of the book is that you have these these these international youth corps of climate relief workers who become a transnational political force and movement, kind of the shovels and sandbags wing of the Greta Thunberg tendency.
[00:33:13] Ian: OK, so that wasn’t actually supposed to be a part of the United Nations.
[00:33:17] Cory: No.
[00:33:18] Ian: Because that was that was kind of an assumption that I made while reading, mostly because of the blue berets kind of, you know.
[00:33:24] Cory: Yeah. No, they’re like they’re like their own thing. They’re like a transnational volunteer network that are all sort of connected with one another and get money from national government. I mean, this is one of those things we’re never filling in the details helps. But yeah, money from national governments, donors, fundraisers, host nations for materiel, you know, their supply lines, food and so on. Although the quartermastery stuff, volunteerism that isn’t stupid, basically that’s responding to real needs. I mean, you know, there’s a lot like if you look to the CCC, you know, the civilian conservation corps, you know, and you look to them, you see this model where like people were really brought together. They did incredible work. I mean, every national park in America starts with CCC. And it had this lasting effect on the ethos of the people who practiced it. So, you know, kind of a truly transnational, truly bottom up version of this. One of the things that this book struggles to make clear is that unlike, say, the Peace Corps that assumes that things are good in America and bad everywhere else. It’s this is grounded in the idea that everything is fucked, which I think is true broadly of the kind of projects in the era of the heyday of the Peace Corps, but especially true in an era of climate emergency, you know, that we’re going to like America will be on fire, you know, look, I’m an Angeleno, right? America will be.
[00:34:57] Ian: Yeah. I wonder if like the end game or the end goal should be like, OK, we need to have a federal system that is more similar to like the European unions where, you know, it’s like, OK, right, right now in the United States, the federal government is the end all be all like, you know, if like in the 60s when the states were trying to, uh, um, you know, resist integration and violating people’s human rights, you know, like the federal government was a force for good right now it’s the opposite way. And the, and, and, you know, the state of Minnesota has basically no legal recourse to stop what’s going on. Um, you know, so it’s like, OK, what, like what parts of the federal government are like, are producing good and cannot produce bad and which parts, you know, are producing bad and maybe should be like let up to the states. Right.
[00:35:56] Cory: Um, so I think that, um, maybe you’re situating problems with, um, the failure of the rule of law in a failure of federalism because hypothetically the, uh, question of states rights, do you know that there’s, um, there’s a model in behavioral economics called you cut, I choose. So if you want to divide like a cake into two, I make the cut, you make the first choice and it keeps us both honest. Right. Um, there’s a kind of you cut, I choose in the idea that if you, um, weaken states rights, then like if you’re, if you’re a neo-Confederate, right. And you’re weakening the rights of many Minnesota, then you, uh, should contemplate the possibility that, uh, in the future, someone might weaken the rights of Alabama and say, you can’t have a right to work state, or you can’t, um, you no longer have discretion over how you distribute, uh, you know, ACA block grants or other block grants or what have you. Right. Um, or you lose control over your state college, uh, curriculum, you know, all these things that Trump is trying to do now, right. That you can imagine being bad in the other direction. And I think the problem is that our adversaries don’t believe in the rule of law. So the reason that like, imagine a game of you cut, I choose that’s, uh, you cut, I choose, but if you don’t like my choice, you get to reverse my choice. Right. That is a recipe for getting a very small piece of pie. Right. And, uh, and so this is not a problem of federalism per se. I mean, federalism has lots of difficult problems. Um, one of which is like intrinsically anti, anti-majoritarianism, like anti-majoritarianism, you cannot get away from in federalism because why would a small state join a federation if there wasn’t some form of anti-majoritarian institution? You know, Newfoundland joined Canada in the, after World War II, they had their own fighting force in the war. That wasn’t the Canadian troops. Uh, and they’re a tiny little province strategically super important, right? Cause they’re the Eastern most edge that you can basically spit and hit Ireland from Newfoundland and they need anti-majoritarian institutions. Otherwise, eventually Canada’s going to say, well, yeah, our East coast is very strategically important. We’re just going to federalize your decisions about how your coast is handled, how your fisheries are handled, how your whatever, right. Because it’s just tactically, nationally important. And so you, you, you need these anti-majoritarian institutions. So they’re hard to manage and they can go really awry and it needn’t be as, um, you know, as, as bad as the electoral college, but you’re always going to have them. But I think that like the problem you’re identifying of Minneapolis, Minnesota, not having a recourse is just a rule of law issue, right? It’s, it’s not a, like, you know, we know it, the Supreme court’s illegitimate, right? Like that’s the problem, right? It’s not like it’s, it’s, it’s, it’s like, you know, you’re playing chess against someone who keeps eating the pieces and the problem is not the rules of chess.
[00:39:09] Ian: I have some friends who have referred to our current moment as like, well, the, the constitution’s going through and enshittification, um, which I, I thought, you know, you might enjoy that. But also like, I, I don’t know that it actually matches the exact pattern of enshittification that you describe.
[00:39:27] Cory: You know, to the extent that enshittification is a theory about when you have choices, the people you interact with have to treat you better than they do when you’re locked in. Uh, and you’re, you know, Americans are locked into America by, as in lots of ways, monetarily in terms of their family and their personal lives and all these other things. So it’s very hard to go. You know, I, I, I think about this a lot. My, my father was a Soviet refugee. My grandmother had been a child soldier in the siege of Leningrad. And, uh, after the third year, they got evacuated over the winter ice into, um, and they went to Siberia and she was drafted and she met my grandfather who was a Pole and he got her pregnant and they deserted and they went to Azerbaijan and had my dad. And then the war ended and they just kept going West after the war. They did not stop in Leningrad. They did not stop in Poland. They went to Frankfurt and got on a displaced persons boat to Germany, to Canada, which is how I, I came to be a Canadian and they’re unique in their families, right? Everyone else stayed. And it was like pretty clear post-war that staying was bad. And in the years since, and especially the last couple of years, very, very obvious that staying in St. Petersburg, staying in Leningrad compared to out migrating to Canada, the U S was like a huge mistake, but they were connected to each other in a way that I think my grandmother had been disconnected. I think the, you know, the trauma of the war and being a young mother and just wanting to get out of there with a baby made her like willing to sever connections that were hard otherwise for the, her other relations to sever. So now we get on these group calls with my family in Russia, you know, all the men are worried about getting drafted, you know, it’s, it’s really bad. And I think, you know, if not this situation that a lower quality of life was foreseeable in the, in the weeks and months after the war, and yet no one else could do it. And I, I think that people are very much held prisoner by their love for each other and their social bonds. You know, it’s a, like the only people who can just walk away are people who’ve lost everything.
[00:41:44] Ian: Yeah. The, the moment in the book when Brooks says to Phuong, like, I would follow you out of here.
[00:41:50] Cory: Yeah.
[00:41:50] Ian: If you wanted to move away, I would move with you. And, and I, like my partner and I have been having very similar conversations. Um, and it’s, yeah.
[00:41:59] Cory: But, you know, and the difference is that like, you know, post-war it’s like in Europe or rather, you know, post EU, it’s quite easy. Like if you’re an, uh, what would have been an East German 40 years ago and you’re just like a hipster living in Kreuzberg and, uh, you know, uh, artisanal mustache wax district. And do you think you’d like to live in, in Paris for a couple of months? You get on a train and you can like FaceTime with everyone back in, in, in Kreuzberg every night. And then if you don’t like it, you can just go back again. So it’s much less of a one-way gateway. So back to your secession.
[00:42:33] Ian: Trains solve everything.
[00:42:35] Cory: Yeah. Yeah. Getting back to your secession question, right? Imagine if, if the nation of, of, of Minnesota did not have easy relations with its neighboring states, it would be a much more momentous choice. Right. Yeah.
[00:42:49] Ian: I mean, I, I’ve like, um, fantasized about everything from like, you know, full secession to just like, Hey, we would like to join Canada and maybe Washington and Portland and California would also like the same thing, you know? And it’s like, there’d be, there’d be some weird borders, uh, borders, although, you know, like they have those in Europe. So there’s parts of Belgium that are in the Netherlands and vice versa. So like islands of the Netherlands in Belgium. And then one of them, I can’t remember this. I, it is this direction. So there’s a part of Belgium that has a little isolated island of the Netherlands in it, and then within that, there is an isolated island of Belgium. So, and there’s like, there’s a restaurant on one of these borders where half the restaurant is in one country and half is in the other. And at one o’clock when it’s last call in one country, they all have to move over to the other side of the restaurant to keep drinking.
[00:43:42] Parker: That, that sounds like it’s a product of what you were talking about earlier with the different dynasties, uh, changing between different or like expanding like that.
[00:43:51] Cory: I don’t know the history of it, but that wouldn’t surprise me.
[00:43:54] Parker: My, my recent like history focus has been on the Iberian peninsula and it feels like it’s removed enough from like the, the Bourbon dynasty and the Habsburgs, but it wasn’t completely isolated from it. So as I’m reading through it history, it’s like the Habsburgs and I’m like, we’re not going to touch that today. I don’t have, I don’t want to, I don’t want to go into like the weirdness of all of that. Like the Netherlands were French for a bit. That’s odd.
[00:44:19] Cory: Yeah. Yeah. Very true. So yeah, it’s, um, you know, the future compost the past, there are all these weird political arrangements. You know, one of the things that digitization has done, and, and I kind of play with this a little in the book too, is it’s taken things that were historically fuzzy because no one had to fit them into a data model. So like, for example, if your name was really long, they could just continue it on the back of the form. Right. Um, there wasn’t like a hard limit on how long a name could be. This ambiguity, you know, is, is, uh, uh, a feature of the world. And back to this idea that anything that’s like more than 10 minutes old feels eternal. The idea that like, we have a crisply defined thing that is a name and we have a crisply defined thing that is a, uh, an age reactionaries talking about an era in which things were simple. Um, what they actually mean is that it was an era in which things were flexible enough that you didn’t notice the, the, uh, complexity because you could manage the complexity by just turning the form over and adding some more details on the back of it, you know, and, and you just, there’s no way to do that with a computer. And so now you have people making demands, right? Saying, I require you to refactor the entire federal government’s IT system so I can have a different, uh, gender marker. And you can sort of understand why that feels unreasonable, but the only reason that that demand has to be made at all is we’ve created a system with these like extremely brittle binaries that, you know, don’t have any way to account for all of the things that just happen. Like, you know, Canada’s got whatever, 40 million people. So there’s going to be like 41 in a million instances every year. And so just like the instance in which someone is intersex and was misgendered at birth, or there was just a typo or, you know, what are all these different reasons that you might have to have flexibility in the gender markers, you know, are just going to come up like periodically anyway. And so these things that seem simple are just brittle. That’s, I guess that’s what I’m trying to say. Digitization, it incinerates nuance and complexity, and then it does math on the kind of dubious residue that’s at the bottom of the incinerator and assumes that all the stuff that it burned off was unimportant.
[00:46:46] Ian: I have a little list of, of like policy concepts that were presented in the book. So I would love to do like a rapid fire of like, how important do you think each one is for our future? And also how likely do you think it is that we will achieve them? All right. So a jobs guarantee, green new deal stuff.
[00:47:05] Cory: 100% maximum importance. We have, I love the idea of a UBI, but honestly we have full employment for every human being alive and yet to be born for 300 years on climate remediation. Automatic transit upgrades when an area reaches a certain population density. That was a more local, I think, city level. Are you talking about like a bus being upgraded to like a rail or something like that? Yeah. So in policy, we sometimes have these things called automatic stabilizers. Congress will tie its own hands and say when X happens, Y happens without any extra congressional action. So a good example would be unemployment insurance. When more people are unemployed, Congress doesn’t need to make an appropriation. I think this makes total sense in the case of population density. You could see how it could backfire because it would become a weapon used by NIMBYs.
[00:48:04] Ian: I don’t want transit, so I don’t want to have the density.
[00:48:07] Cory: Right, right. But they already say that. If anything, the way that you deflate NIMBYism is by making it so that you automatically get more transit when population density increases such that people accept it as just kind of the norm. It’s like, oh, I guess they’re putting in the bus lanes now. Thank goodness, because the traffic has sucked.
[00:48:35] Parker: The People’s Airbnb Internally Displaced Persons Act.
[00:48:39] Cory: So I think a housing guarantee is really important. The People’s Airbnb is sort of just a kind of more of a spitball idea. I mean, Airbnb was supposed to be the people’s Airbnb. I was at South by Southwest when it launched. It was cool. It was the idea that like people would put each other. It was, it was, um, it was an upgrade.
[00:48:58] Parker: Yes, but does it make enough money?
[00:49:00] Cory: Well, yeah, so it didn’t have any of that growth potential, but it was an upgrade on a thing called Couchsurfing.net or Couchsurfing.com. Uh, that was just people putting each other up and it had a little reputation network and so on. You know, I, I was inspired in part cause I, I, I was a Londoner for 13 years before I moved to Burbank and the British housing crisis, I don’t know. It makes everyone else’s housing crisis look like nothing. Cause it’s also, it’s a nation of aspiring landlords. Um, they have the craziest housing policies imaginable. So they have like property taxes paid by tenants, not landlords. And if you don’t have tenants, you don’t know property tax.
[00:49:35] Parker: What?
[00:49:37] Cory: Yeah. Yeah. And they’ve changed that now. There’s so their business, there’s some, there’s some narrow instances where you do have to pay tax on a vacant property. Uh, if you live in a multi-unit dwelling, like I do, uh, there’s a hereditary Lord or someone who sold it to who owns the ground underneath it and you pay ground rent to them. And then they make unilateral decisions about like upgrades to the skin of the building. And if you can’t pay for it, you lose your home, even though you own it.
[00:50:05] Ian: It’s like, it’s like reverse land value tax.
[00:50:08] Cory: Yeah, no, absolutely. And so, uh, there’s very good book, uh, about housing policy in the UK that pointed out that it’s not just a housing shortage. It’s also a gross misallocation of housing. The number of empty bedrooms per capita is higher than it’s ever been. And it’s this gross misallocation of housing for lots of reasons. Like people don’t sell their houses when they get old because it’s their only asset. It’s the same thing that you have in the U S but on steroids. And so this idea of like misallocation and resolving misallocation, finding uses for those empty rooms, those empty beds, you know, it’s just very weird that you have people sleeping three to a room or sleeping on the street. And then you have someone else who’s also poor living in a house with six empty bedrooms. And so you, we need something to resolve that. I don’t know what it is, but yeah.
[00:50:57] Ian: Taking away quote, all the guns. Yeah, yeah. Well, very aspirational. I, it must be said, uh, as a, but you know, the Australians managed it. Right. And not withstanding this one terrible mass shooting that they just had, it’s one, then one terrible mass shooting in how many years, right.
[00:51:20] Parker: I think it’s over 20.
[00:51:21] Cory: Yeah. And Australia, like we think of it as like, uh, you know, hot Canadians, but, uh, Australia, like if you visited enough, you will meet people from or if you hang around with Australians enough, you’ll meet people who say, oh, I come from such and such a state. It’s the Texas of Australia. And if you pay attention, you realize that half of them are the Texas of Australia, right? Like in the sense that Texas is like a, it’s a resource extraction, uh, territory, which is to say it’s a hole in the ground surrounded by guns with no need to educate or care for its population, Australia’s got a lot of those. Uh, and so despite having all of that and like, you know, everyone’s seen that documentary, uh, Mad Max, uh, we know what it’s like there. Uh, and despite all that, they managed to take away everyone’s guns.
[00:52:11] Parker: Yeah.
[00:52:12] Cory: And so the NRA, like back to things that are more than 10 minutes old or eternal, the NRA in living memory was like, we should have fewer guns and only responsible gun owners should own them. And they should be trained and licensed. That was their like official position. So, you know, I know it can feel very, uh, intractable and eternal and like it’s baked into the American character, but it’s just not, uh, it’s like, it’s a relatively recent, uh, I don’t want to call it an innovation, but a relatively recent change.
[00:52:41] Ian: Yeah. Um, related while I was reading this book, I did have the thought. If any gun that’s introduced in the first act is not melted down into plows, it must, it must be fired by the third.
[00:52:53] Cory: That’s right. Yeah.
[00:52:55] Parker: And the last one is YouTube, Google, et cetera, getting split up.
[00:53:00] Cory: Yeah. A hundred percent. Yeah. Just, just break them up. They have what Brandeis calls the curse of bigness. They are, uh, places where good ideas go to die. You know, one thing I’ve been saying in Canada lately, I just gave a couple of talks there about how we could repeal what’s called anti circumvention law. That is the law that bans you from like jailbreaking and modding these tools. And which would let you raid their margins, right? Like Canada could just like jailbreak iPhones and make kits that let you run an independent app store and offer a 90% discount and still make $10 billion a year.
[00:53:33] Parker: Yeah. I’m for it.
[00:53:35] Ian: Let’s talk about the ending of the book. Um, so for listeners who have, uh, are going to read the book who have not yet gotten to it, uh, hit pause now.
[00:53:43] Cory: They wake up and it’s all a dream!
[00:53:46] Ian: So like we we’ve got this, you know, building to the climax, the right wingers have taken everybody hostage in the house that they just built. And, you know, we, we go and get the guns. We decided that we don’t need the guns. We get the cops involved. The cops are finally actually doing something useful. Um, and then all of a sudden we find out that the fires are, you know, approaching this, uh, this chemical plant and, and Burbank is now going to be uninhabitable for everybody and everybody has to move away, which like. You know, when I, when I first read it, I was like, that was really disheartening.
[00:54:19] Cory: I thought the epilogue was, good though.
[00:54:21] Ian: Right. Yes.
[00:54:22] Cory: Yes. Right.
[00:54:24] Ian: But also it’s like, you know, thinking about it as a Minneapolis and being like, yeah, you know, like we live in this climate refuge, like, you know, it’s going to be more habitable than most other places in the U S you know, going in, in the future, um, and like, if that kind of thing happened to, you know, a densely built community that we are actively trying to make into a place where people can move to, it’s like, wow, that’s dire, but also I get that it’s like, okay. The, like the lifeboat mentality only works as long as your lifeboat doesn’t produce a leak.
[00:55:01] Cory: Yeah.
[00:55:01] Ian: You know, if you want other people to be willing to rescue you, you should probably be willing to rescue other people. So like, you know, there, there’s a, there’s a lot going on there. There’s a give and take.
[00:55:12] Cory: Yeah. I think you’ve just very well summed that up. You know, the climate emergency is going to do some very unpredictable things. We’re going to have big fires. We’re going to have big floods. We’re going to have more zoonotic plagues. That part’s going to be really bad. Uh, we’re going to have to get incredibly good at dealing with trauma, fires with floods. For me, that’s what hope looks like. Hope isn’t that we avert those things. Uh, I don’t think we’re going to avert those things. Hope is that we get really good at dealing with them in the same way. Like we watch you guys out, you know, on the general strike and whatever that was minus 20 weather and just like dealing with it, right? Like you just deal with it, you get good at it and you have a rich life that involves coping with these, um, sudden intense shifts and it’ll involve a lot of taking care of each other. Like the one thing that all of these places and all of these situations that are good at dealing with this stuff have in common is they’re not places where you live in a single family home and don’t know your neighbors, right? Like we’re going to have to become a lot better at under, you know, being library socialists, right. Having a lot of things in common, you know.
[00:56:21] Ian: Uh, yeah, but social cohesion. Yeah.
[00:56:25] Cory: Yeah. Which, you know, again, you folks have, uh, really demonstrated for the nation and the world. You know, I, I, from the outside, like you are our beacon right now. We look at what you’ve done and we say like, this is what we aspire to do. And this is how we will survive when it comes for us.
[00:56:44] Ian: Yeah. And, and I’ve been telling our friends, like we’re, we’re the tanks of the, uh, Dungeons and Dragon party right now, right? We’re, we’re taking all the agro, uh, so that other cities don’t have to deal with it right now.
[00:56:57] Cory: Yeah. You’re definitely the paladins and maybe the berserkers, the Vikings. Anyways.
[00:57:02] Parker: Yeah. Well, thank you. That that’s very kind of you to say means a lot, but any inspiring thoughts you have for readers or listeners right now, anything you want to close on?
[00:57:13] Cory: I mean, in, in finance, they have this thing, Stein’s law, anything that can’t go on forever eventually stops. Like we are, we are. Whatever we do in the decades that come, it will not be this. It could be something terrible, right? It really could be, but it doesn’t have to be all the stuff that we think of as eternal verities are 10 minutes old. Nothing is fixed. Nothing’s graven in stone. The great forces of history are just human choices in aggregate. And you are human and you’re making choices. You never know what’s going to tip things.
[00:57:46] Parker: Well, thank you very much, Cory, for coming onto the podcast and making time for us.
[00:57:50] Cory: Yeah, no, I appreciate it. Thank you.
[00:57:53] Parker: I’ll make this, uh, take this moment here to say, uh, thank you, listener for reading Lost Cause by Cory Doctorow. The next book will be Life After Cars by the War on Cars folks.
[00:58:07] Cory: I’ve got a copy of that on my shelf here. It’s one of the like four books that I had in my TBR pile that I brought to London. So that’s great.
[00:58:14] Parker: But also if all goes according to plan on the book club episode about Life After Cars will be the War on Cars folks joining us for the recording.
[00:58:23] Cory: Say hi to them for me. They made a sticker with a thing that I said. They made a sticker that said geometry hates cars.
[00:58:31] Parker: Ah, nice. Well, once again, thank you very much for coming onto the podcast, Corey.
[00:58:36] Cory: Yeah. Thanks guys.
[00:58:38] Ian: And thank you for joining us for this episode of the Streets.mn Podcast. The show is released under a creative commons attribution, non-commercial, non-derivative license. So feel free to republish the episode as long as you are not altering it and you are not profiting from it. The music in this episode is by Erik Brandt and the Urban Hillbilly Quartet. This episode was produced and transcribed by Parker Seaman, aka Strongthany, and was hosted and edited by me, Ian R Buck. We’re always looking to feature new voices on the Streets.mn Podcast. So if you have ideas for future episodes, drop us a line at [[email protected]]. Streets.mn is a community publication and relies on contributions from audience members like you. If you can make a one time or recurring donation, you can find more information about doing so at [https://streets.mn/donate]. Find other listeners and discuss this episode on your favorite social media platform using the hashtag #StreetsMNPodcast. Until next time, take care.