All Laws Are Local  ## Document Notes ## Highlights - **Recording In An Empty London Flat** - Cory explains he's back in his old London flat with minimal possessions and an echoey office. - He attributes the room's sound to hard surfaces and missing soft furnishings. Transcript: Cory Doctorow Through 25th at How the Light Gets In. Now, I sound very echoey today, and I'm very conscious of that fact, and the reason I sound echoey is because, as previously mentioned, my wife has moved back to London, and I am spending As much time as possible in London with her. And we're back in our old flat and I have a little office set up in what used to be our daughter's bedroom. And we have very few possessions at this point, at least on this side of the Atlantic. So if I sound like I'm sitting in an empty room, it's because yes, I am sitting in an empty room. Barely have any books, barely have any art, barely have any soft furnishings. It is a big room full of hard surfaces, as you can hear. But I'm really enjoying being in London. I've been back for a couple of days. ([Time 0:01:01](https://share.snipd.com/snip/e78322e4-5312-4062-956a-8eb4f9a00751)) - **Family Visit And New Book Deal** - Cory visited Santa Cruz for his daughter Posie's 18th birthday and enjoyed the time with family. - He also reports his publisher made a formal offer for his next book, likely publishable in 2027. Transcript: Cory Doctorow Just before I came to London, I was in Santa Cruz, California for my daughter Posie's 18th birthday and had just a wonderful time there. So happy to see her growing up and becoming such a confident and great young woman. My other news this week, well two bits of news. One is that my publisher has formally made an offer on my next book, The Post-American Internet. If you follow my newsletter you may have seen the word count ticking up as I work through that book, hoping to have a first draft in the can by the end of March. ([Time 0:02:06](https://share.snipd.com/snip/1eff8e49-129a-48f8-bd3b-659b884de18d)) - **Eternal Rules Are Often Recent** - Longstanding social rules can become perceived as eternal even when recently invented. - Piketty's primogeniture example shows widely held 'natural' norms often have specific historical causes. Transcript: Cory Doctorow About halfway through Thomas Piketty's 2013 barnstorming capital in the 21st century, Piketty tosses off a little insight that skewered me on the spot and never let me go. The notion that any societal condition that endures beyond a generation becomes eternal in the popular consciousness. Piketty was referring then to primogenitor, the ancient practice of automatically passing on the family fortune to the eldest son, or if no son was available, the eldest nephew. Primogenitor did important work by keeping dynastic fortunes intact rather than dividing them up among all children of some baron or lord or other guillotinable monster. Primogenitor persisted until the age of colonization, when Europe's great powers stole the rest of the world. In that moment, the size of Europe's great fortunes expanded by orders of magnitude. This vast increase in the wealth of Europe's most murderous, remorseless looters made primogenitor obsolete. There was so much blood-soaked money available to the nobility that every son could found a great house. After a couple generations worth of this, the colonies were exhausted. There were no more lands to conquer, which meant that every son could no longer expect to found his own fortune. ([Time 0:04:07](https://share.snipd.com/snip/cae3a7b0-a716-4e1f-b821-478e500c7228)) - **How Age Shapes What Feels Natural** - Cultural expectations depend heavily on the era you grow up in and feel arbitrary to later generations. - Douglas Adams' rule explains why innovations feel natural to some ages and alien to others. Transcript: Cory Doctorow In other words, things that seem eternal and innate to the human condition to you are apt to have been invented 10 minutes before you started to notice the world around you and might seem Utterly alien to your children. Or as Douglas Adams put it, Anything that is in the world when you're born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works. Anything that's invented between when you're 15 and 35 is new and exciting and revolutionary, and you can probably get a career in it. ([Time 0:07:26](https://share.snipd.com/snip/5cd69cdf-924d-4856-bec6-fdc53f8b7a64)) - **Crisis Can Rapidly Reorder Power** - Rapid shocks can reorder political and economic realities far faster than expected. - Europe's pivot from gas dependence to massive solar deployment shows entrenched interests can collapse quickly. Transcript: Cory Doctorow Europe went from 15 years behind on its climate goals to 10 years ahead of schedule after the supply of Russian gas dried up and Europeans found themselves shivering in the dark. The massive leap in EU solar means that the seemingly all-powerful fossil fuel lobby has absolutely comprehensively eaten shit, something that was unthinkable just a few years ago. ([Time 0:08:16](https://share.snipd.com/snip/5bfa384f-2291-4536-9bcf-0a329e1caf9c)) - **Monitor Pain To Find Change** - Track how chronic pain changes to learn that it can ebb and flow. - Use that observation to hold hope for improvement and to inform treatment strategies. Transcript: Cory Doctorow The point is that if pain changes, that means that it can change. It feels eternal, but it comes and goes. Maybe someday it will go altogether, and even if it doesn't, it may improve. It probably will, at least for a while. ([Time 0:10:50](https://share.snipd.com/snip/0774b78e-3a13-4bec-ae22-409223bdb4d8)) - **Public Pressure, Not Saints, Drives Change** - Major political transformations happen when leaders fear their base more than elite money. - The New Deal emerged because politicians answered public pressure, not superior virtue. Transcript: Cory Doctorow The question isn't merely, how do we elect better leaders? It's, how do we make our leaders follow us? Today's Democrats are unserious quizlings who keep bringing a squirt gun to a mass casualty assault rifle spree shooting. How do we terrorize those cowards into rising to the moment? If we want congressional Democrats to form a Nuremberg caucus and start holding hearings on who they're going to put in the dock when the Trump regime collapses, we're going to have To drive them to it. And we can. The Democrats who gave us the New Deal weren't braver or more moral than the self-dealing millionaires in Congress today. They were more afraid of their base. ([Time 0:12:20](https://share.snipd.com/snip/e2006839-e73e-4080-8da1-b1d9a57401ab)) - **Don't Accept Remotely Alterable Devices** - Refuse to normalize products that can be altered remotely by manufacturers with DRM. - Advocate for consumer standards that exclude devices controllable by vendors after purchase. Transcript: Cory Doctorow They didn't take me up on this suggestion, obviously. They made the seemingly reasonable point that people bought Consumer Reports to find out what to buy, not to be told that they shouldn't buy anything. Every product in many key categories came with DRM, meaning their recommendation would have had to be, just don't buy any of it. But today, consumer review sites do sometimes recommend nothing. ([Time 0:13:28](https://share.snipd.com/snip/8062ae45-2786-411f-a374-45595f70264d)) - **Institutions Are Not Immutable** - Institutional arrangements we treat as permanent are often recent constructs. - Examples include the nine-justice Supreme Court and preferential capital gains tax rates. Transcript: Cory Doctorow Today, every car has a seatbelt, and they'd continue to do so even if we did away with regulations requiring seatbelts. Driving a car without a seatbelt would be as weird and terrible as using a radium suppository. Things change. The nine-justice Supreme Court isn't an eternal verity. It didn't come down off a mountain on two stone tablets. It's about 10 seconds old. Tomorrow, it will be different. Our eternals are all ephemerals. ([Time 0:14:22](https://share.snipd.com/snip/e43bedf0-3966-42ce-bf19-476f59d43473))