Nov 27, 2019 · 1h 12m · y-combinator
Cory Doctorow and Joe Betts-Lacroix on Adversarial Interoperability · Y Combinator
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In this Y Combinator podcast episode, author and activist Cory Doctorow joins host Joe Betts-Lacroix to discuss how adversarial interoperability, copyright reform, and antitrust enforcement can dismantle Big Tech monopolies and empower startup innovation.
How this conversation actually went
Every chapter scored 0–10 on four independent dynamics. Hover any point for the reasoning behind the score. How this is scored →
The partners as informed peer 3.2 Guest teaching 6.4 Guest disagreement 2.3 The partners pushing back 1.4
speaking balance: gold is the partners, purple is the guest (3 minute bins)
Sharpest disagreement ▶ 37:30 Doctorow dismisses algorithmic mind control as junk science
Doctorow rejects conventional media alarmism around Cambridge Analytica, dismissing their claims of microtargeted mind control as small sample size junk science and modern phrenology.
Hardest push from the partners ▶ 49:00 Joe Betts-Lacroix challenges Doctorow with New York Times studyJoe directly challenges Doctorow's claim that conspiracy theories are rising by citing an academic study showing a drop in conspiratorial letters to the editor over past decades.
Biggest teaching moment ▶ 16:50 Doctorow explains internet streaming mechanics versus copyright lawDoctorow educates the room on how streaming is legally and technically just downloading without a save button, demonstrating why old physical-copy copyright frameworks are obsolete.
The partners hold their own ▶ 48:00 Host connects immigration policies to personal experienceThe host provides concrete real-world grounding by sharing how going through the green card process with his Dutch wife confirmed Trump's transactional immigration comments have always mirrored reality.
the scores for every segment, with the reasoning behind each
| Chapter | Topic | The partners as informed peer | Guest teaching | Guest disagreement | The partners pushing back | Why |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Legal Thickets and the Four Forces of Regulation | 2 | 6 | 3 | 1 | Cory Doctorow answers Joe Betts-Lacroix's question by laying out Lawrence Lessig's four forces of regulation (code, law, markets, norms) to explain why current legal thickets protecting tech monopolies are unsustainable. The hosts mostly listen as Doctorow illustrates how normative shifts precede legislative change. | |
| Reassessing Copyright Law in the Digital Era | 4 | 7 | 2 | 2 | The host asks how copyright views evolve for a creative, prompting Doctorow to deconstruct copyright law's flawed application of industrial-era tests to ordinary internet users. The host offers an accredited investor analogy, but Doctorow drives the point home by explaining how digital copying happens constantly before breakfast. | |
| Industrial versus Cultural Use and Modernizing Fair Use | 3 | 6 | 1 | 1 | Doctorow distinguishes between cultural and industrial use cases, citing legal precedents like The Wind Done Gone and transformative sampling in hip-hop. The host asks clarifying questions about defining profit and remixing without pushing back against Doctorow's legal framing. | |
| Corporate Monopolies, Regulatory Capture, and Historical Precedents | 3 | 7 | 2 | 1 | Doctorow draws historical parallels between modern tech giants demanding regulation and AT&T's Bell system monopolistic arguments over Hush-A-Phone. The hosts agree with the framing, contributing examples like congressional ignorance during hearings and Amazon's police surveillance partnerships. | |
| Startup Strategies for Disruption and Interoperable Tools | 3 | 6 | 2 | 1 | Doctorow provides practical strategic advice for founders, explaining how startup tools can execute adversarial interoperability on platforms like Facebook by leveraging one-in-a-million niche use cases. The host participates casually by clarifying user count calculations. | |
| Ad Targeting Correlates versus the Myth of Algorithmic Mind Control | 3 | 7 | 4 | 2 | Doctorow challenges popular narratives about algorithmic mind control and Cambridge Analytica, arguing that advertising algorithms merely match correlates rather than brainwash people. The host notes fringe communities and YouTube algorithmic funnels, prompting Doctorow to dismiss psychological manipulation claims as modern phrenology. | |
| Institutional Corruption, Conspiratorial Thinking, and Epistemological Crisis | 4 | 7 | 3 | 3 | Doctorow explains conspiratorial thinking as an epistemological crisis caused by real institutional corruption, citing Dow Chemical in West Virginia and Silicon Valley non-compete agreements. Joe Betts-Lacroix pushes back citing a study on declining conspiracy letters in the New York Times, which Doctorow attributes to editorial selection rather than public belief. | |
| Speculative Fiction as a Blueprint for Technological Innovation | 3 | 5 | 2 | 1 | The conversation shifts to speculative fiction, with Joe Betts-Lacroix describing science fiction novels as a menu of technological options for founders. Doctorow clarifies that science fiction does not predict the future but reflects societal hopes and fears while inspiring technological direction. | |
| Peak Indifference, Resilient Systems, and Legal Victory for Scraping | 4 | 7 | 2 | 1 | Doctorow presents his peak indifference model, disaster sociology, and the landmark Ninth Circuit HiQ v. LinkedIn decision protecting web scraping. The hosts engage with curiosity on legal and startup implications as Doctorow urges founders to build pro-competitive tools without fear. |
Statements from this episode (23)
Doctorow: Reverse-engineering iOS for cross-platform compatibility triggers legal thickets
“So today, if you were to try and do this, like say you were to try and make Android devices first class citizens in on iOS environment, and in order to do so, you wanted to reverse engineer iOS and allow yourself to sideload in apps into iOS and also to suppor…”
Doctorow: Legal frameworks create 'kill zones' protecting Big Tech monopolies
“And in the years since we have created these legal tools that allow firms not just to dominate, but to maintain their dominance, not by making better products, but by establishing a kill zone around their products where it becomes so legally fraught to make co…”
Betts-Lacroix: Mint scaled by scraping bank websites using voluntarily submitted credentials
“So a friend of mine, Aaron Patzer, created something called Mint and ended up taking a bunch of eyeballs from big banks and other financial companies by hacking, essentially going, doing adversarial interoperability with their websites by scraping, which is so…”
Doctorow: Legally fraught startups with beloved products drive normative legal reform
“If you have a business that is doing something that is legally fraught, but that business is doing something that people love, That you are creating a constituency for a normative shift in how we think about this stuff, and that you are also creating surplus c…”
Doctorow: There will never be another Facebook
“The big, big upsides are not creating another Facebook because there won't be another Facebook. The big, big upside is creating the thing that happens once Facebook has been torn down.”
Doctorow: Streaming is functionally downloading without a save button
“Streaming is just downloading without a save button. Streaming is I'm sending, I'm letting you download this thing, and I think the client you're using doesn't have a save button.”
Doctorow: Copyright law should exempt consumers outside the entertainment industry
“There are a bunch of rules that I would like for copyright, but the most important copyright reform, the thing that gets lost whenever we talk about copyright reform, Is that we should just stop asking people who aren't in the entertainment industry to give a …”
Doctorow: Copyright should combine European statutory exceptions with US fair use principles
“I think we could combine the European fair dealing approach where they have enumerated exceptions with the American fair use approach where they have principles that are applied to get a kind of best of both worlds where we might say, okay, here are a bunch of…”
Doctorow: Dismantling the Bell System was essential for modern internet technologies
“And, you know, it held back modems. It held back the internet. It held back you know, early Usenet. It was only the dismantling of the Bell system that enabled the next generation to emerge.”
Doctorow: Big Tech's calls for regulation are bids for state monopoly
“And, you know, Facebook is positioning itself to become a state monopoly like the Bell system was, as is Google, as is Apple, right? All of these companies, they want to be, when they say, please regulate us, right? When they say, please make rules to tell us …”
Betts-Lacroix: Amazon's surveillance monopoly will be entrenched by police partnerships
“Or Amazon is now involved in video surveillance on the, at the behest, as you were saying, of police forces all over the country. And that's a situation where they have this creeping, growing monopoly power but it's going to be likely enshrined or ennobled, as…”
Doctorow: Comprehensive content moderation mandates entrench Big Tech monopolies
“If we fix the tech companies, if we say in order to operate a social network, you have to make sure That you are policing hate speech, copyright infringement, terrorism, and every other kind of bad act, then what you're really saying is that you can only have …”
Doctorow: Facebook allowed non-members to scrape group membership lists
“She discovered that you could enumerate the membership of any Facebook group. Even if you weren't a member of it. And when she reported it to Facebook, they said that is a feature request, not a bug report. We will send it off to the product team. And when she…”
Doctorow: Facebook targets behavioral correlates, not mind control
“What Facebook is mostly good at is finding people. You know, if you're a refrigerator salesman, you know, you've had this conundrum all your life, as have all your forebears since the dawn of refrigeration, because the median person buys one or fewer refrigera…”
Doctorow: Cambridge Analytica mobilized existing racists rather than converting normal people
“Cambridge Analytica's failure to exploit any of the things that you could actually get super rich from if you could control people's minds tells you that probably what they were doing was finding racists And convincing them that Trump was someone to vote for. …”
Doctorow: Big Tech and entertainment companies secretly colluded on anti-poaching agreements
“In California, we have no enforceable non-competes, so the big tech companies all got together in secret with the big entertainment companies and agreed that they wouldn't hire each other's employees, top employees.”
Doctorow: Market concentration makes corporate collusion and conspiracies structurally possible
“Those conspiracies are necessarily a function of market concentration, because the collective action problem becomes insoluble when you have too many people who have to be inside the conspiracy.”
Doctorow: Science fiction shapes the future rather than predicting it
“I don't think science fiction does predict the future. I think it can make the future, which is exciting. But I think that the idea that the future is predictable is itself horrifically fatalistic, right?”
Betts-Lacroix: Y Combinator accepts fantastic founders with terrible ideas
“A lot of founders come into the YC with terrible ideas but they're like, sometimes when they're fantastic founders, they're like, let's just accept them anyway, because I know that The, when they're exposed to the richness of this network and the community her…”
Doctorow: Disrupting Big Tech platforms will win public and regulatory backing
“Our willingness to trust that big firms have our interests at heart and that the processes that regulate them Are on the side of the public interest and not the side of the firm's parochial interest. That, that is coming to an end. And so if you want to be whe…”
Doctorow: Ninth Circuit ruled LinkedIn cannot use CFAA to block scrapers
“HiQ was scraping LinkedIn to produce employer analytics. LinkedIn turned a blind eye to it until they launched their own analytics product. Then they tried to block them out and sue them under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. Not only is hiQ won in court and …”
Doctorow: Cable TV originated via adversarial signal retransmission in rural Pennsylvania
“Cable TV came from slurping, slurping down broadcast signals on a big antenna in rural Pennsylvania that was too far for anyone with a TV to reach either Philly or Pittsburgh, and then charging money to retransmit them over wires to people who own televisions …”
Doctorow: Disruptive entrants succeed by bridging users rather than forcing disjoint leaps
“Every industry has an incumbent disrupted by a new entrant, not by making a thing that is totally disjoint from the new entrant, not by asking people to leap the chasm from one to the other, to let go of the vine they're holding on before they've got a secure …”