If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/02/the-lost-cause/#the-first-generation-that-doesnt-fear-the-future

2/

That's a lot to unpack, I know. So many questions! Including this one: "How is it that I have *another* book out in 2023?" Because this is my *third* book this year. Short answer: I write when I'm anxious, so I came out of lockdown with *nine* books. Nine!

3/

Hope and writing are closely related activities. Hope (the belief that you can make things better) is nothing so cheap and fatalistic as optimism (the belief that things will improve no matter what you do). *The Lost Cause* is full of people who are full of hope.

4/

The action begins a full generation after the Hail Mary passage of the #GreenNewDeal, and the people who grew up fighting the climate emergency (rather than sitting hopelessly by while the powers that be insisted that nothing could or should be done) have a name for themselves: they call themselves "the first generation in a century that doesn't fear the future."

5/

I fear the future. Unchecked corporate power has us barreling over a cliff's edge and all the one-percent has to say is, "Well, it's too late to swerve now, what if the bus rolls and someone breaks a leg? Don't worry, we'll just keep speeding up and leap the gorge":

https://locusmag.com/2022/07/cory-doctorow-the-swerve/

6/

That unchecked corporate power has no better avatar than Amazon, one of the tech #monopolies that has converted the old, good internet into "five giant websites, each filled with screenshots of the other four":

https://twitter.com/tveastman/status/1069674780826071040

7/

Amazon maintains a near-total grip over print and ebooks, but when it comes to audiobooks, that control is *total*. The company's #Audible division has captured more than 90% of the market, and it abuses that dominance to cram #DigitalRightsManagement onto every book it sells, even if the author doesn't want it:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/07/25/can-you-hear-me-now/#acx-ripoff

8/

I wrote a whole-ass book about this and it came out less than a month ago; it's called #TheInternetCon and it lays out an audacious plan to halt the internet's #enshittification and throw it into reverse:

http://www.seizethemeansofcomputation.org/

The tldr is this: when an audiobook is wrapped in Amazon's DRM, only Amazon can legally remove it.

9/

That means that every book I sell you on Audible is a book you have to throw away if you ever break up with Amazon, and Amazon can use the fact that it's hold *you* hostage to screw *me* - and every other author - over.

As I said last time this came up:

Fuck that sideways.

With a brick.

10/

My books are sold without DRM, so you can play them in any app and do anything copyright permits, and that means Amazon won't carry them, and that means my publishers don't want to pay to produce them, and that means *I* produce them myself, and then I make the (significant) costs back by selling them on Kickstarter.

And you know what? It *works*. Readers don't want DRM. I mean, duh.

11/

No one woke up this morning and said, "Dammit, why won't someone sell me a product that lets me do *less* with my books?" I sell *boatloads" of books through these crowdfunding campaigns. I sold so many copies of my last book, *The Internet Con*, that they sold out the initial print run in *two weeks* (don't worry, they held back stock for my upcoming events).

12/

But beyond that, I think there's another reason my readers keep coming back, even though I wrote a genuinely stupid number of books while working through lockdown anxiety while the wildfires raged and ashes sifted down out of the sky and settled on my laptop as I lay in my backyard hammock, pounding my keyboard.

13/

(I went through *two* keyboards during lockdown. Thankfully, I bought a user-serviceable laptop from #Framework and fixed it myself both times, in a matter of minutes. No, no one pays me to mention this, but hot *damn* is it cool.)

https://pluralistic.net/2022/11/13/graceful-failure/#frame

The reason readers come back to my books is that they're full of *hope*.

14/

In the same way that writing lets me feel like I'm not a passenger in life, but rather, someone with a say in my destination, the books that I write are full of practical ways and dramatic scenes in which other people seize the means of computation, the reins of power or their own destinies.

15/

The protagonist of *The Lost Cause* is Brooks Palazzo, a high-school senior in Burbank whose parents were part of the original cohort of volunteers who kicked off the global transformation, and left him an orphan when they succumbed to one of the zoonotic plagues that arise every time another habitat is destroyed.

Brooks grew up knowing what his life would be: the work of repair and care, which millions of young people are doing.

16/

Relocating entire cities off endangered coastlines and floodplains, or out of fire-zones. Fighting floods and fires. Caring for millions of refugees for whom the change came too late.

But with every revolution comes a counter-revolution. The losers of a just war don't dig holes, climb inside and pull the dirt on top of themselves. Two groups of reactionaries - seagoing anarcho-capitalist billionaire wreckers and seething white nationalist militias - have formed an alliance.

17/

They've already gotten their champion into the White House. Next up: dismantling every cause for hope Brooks and his friends have, and bringing back the fear.

That's the setup for a novel about solidarity, care, #LibrarySocialism, and snatching victory from defeat's jaws. Writing it help keep me sane during the lockdown, and when it came time to record the audiobook, I spent a lot of time thinking about who could read it.

18/