this post was submitted on 23 Jun 2024
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Big brain tech dude got yet another clueless take over at HackerNews etc? Here's the place to vent. Orange site, VC foolishness, all welcome.
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I've been disappointed to see Doctrow's reaction to the AI industry, to say the least. He's spent so much time relentlessly campaigning against intellectual property that he apparently cannot imagine anything worse than intellectual property winning anything ever. I don't think he's a big picture guy, I think the internet just really likes him because at the end of the day he was popular on slashdot and he tells people that piracy is awesome.
Doctorow's had some pretty bad takes, honestly, for all I agree with him on some things. His review of Naomi Klein's Doppleganger -- a book which explores conspiracy theories and how they capture people -- reduces the entire book, incorrectly, to his own political soapbox:
This is, frankly, juvenile. Not every bad thing in the world can be mapped on to one's particular soapboxes. Treating GenAI as Good because Copyright is Bad is exactly in character for him.
(Also Cory gets smug about releasing his novels CC, as if all working writers can do that, but I'm sure it helps the family finances that his wife is an executive at Disney. It's great to use money from one of copyright's biggest monsters to act self-righteous about other people trying to make a living.)
Wait. What? Holy shit, every good goddamn thing he's ever released regarding copyright and intellectual property needs a big bold disclaimer about that in front then.
Fucker's talking out both sides of his mouth.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alice_Taylor_%28businesswoman%29
I'm sorry, in non-executive speak, doesn't that heavily imply that she at least oversees some work on DRM? Any content distribution method Disney touches with a 40-foot pole is going to have DRM methodology.
Motherfucker.
so should he have divorced her in 2017 to prove his ideological purity?
(waves to the local chapter of the leftist circular firing squad)
To be clear, I was critiquing his smug intolerance to be people who don’t meet his standards of so-called leftist perfection, when he, himself, is as complex as anyone else. I was not critiquing his being married or his living under capitalism.
fwiw i was mostly annoyed by the “his wife is doing what” in the comment i was answering directly – going after him just because of his wife would be like going after varoufakis just because his wife is supposedly the heroine of blur's “common people”.
and i happily agree that doctorow could dispense with his privilege, tone down the smugness and try for less shallow takes once in a while.
(if we were to question bonafides of leftist intellectuals[^1] just because they are supported by someone belonging to the moneyed class, or come from the moneyed class themselves, we'd need to start with certain mr. marx, comrades. and numerous others.)
[^1]: however you value doctorow's qualities as an intellectual.
One of my fav Marx anecdotes is no matter how tough economically the family had it, they never dispensed with the maid. Tbf maid wages were prolly really low, and the maid probably made Mrs Marx' life easier, but I also don't think Marx ever thought of the maid's work as Labor.
Marx (who to be fair was operating in a very different global economy) explicitly excluded servants and other service labor from the proletariat, because he had an extremely industrial (cough gendered) definition of “productive labour.” That being said, he was friends, intellectual collaborators, and possibly lovers with the housekeeper.
Disclaimer: I am no marx historian; my knowledge of marxist theory tends toward literary analysis. I may be simplifying to the point of wrong.