Cory Doctorow has made me wait almost a year to read Homeland, the much-anticipated sequel to Little Brother, his opus on civil rights and protest in the digital age. With not one but two Doctorow novels, Pirate Cinema and Rapture of the Nerds (which was co-authored with Charles Stross), already on the release schedule for 2012, Homeland has had to loiter in the wings for a 2013 publication date. But the wait has been well worth it. Homeland is a beyond worthy successor to Little Brother.The highly prophetic novel, which was first published in 2007, is now regarded as a contemporary classic. As such, Little Brother is required reading in many of our more progressive schools, and has even been turned into a must see stage play hence Homeland has quite a legacy to live up to.When I last sat down with Doctorow for an interview specifically about Little Brother on January 4th, 2012, Obama had just signed the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) for Fiscal Year 2012 into law. With the stroke of our Presidents pen, yet another of the central themes of Little Brother unlimited military detention without trial had become fact rather than fiction.In Homeland (which Doctorow had finished writing a few days prior to our first meeting), we return to the Little Brother universe a year and a half after the last novel left off. In the intervening months, austerity has choked the life and soul out of America, and our hacktivist hero Marcus Yallow has quit his studies, having been forced out of university by financial pressures and burgeoning student debt.The action kicks off at Burning Man, where Marcus has an unexpected encounter with his sometime ally Masha, and their nemesis Carrie Johnstone. Masha, who is on the run from just about every law enforcement agency you can name (and a few that you cant), hands Marcus an insurance policy in the form of a key to an encrypted torrent file which contains a treasure drove of highly sensitive data. Her subsequent disappearance prompts Marcus to set up a WikiLeaks-like site, an endeavor which is made all the more complicated by conflicts of interests that arise from his new job as a tech guru for an independent political candidate.Meanwhile Johnstone has given up her position in the military for a lucrative job in the private sector with a Halliburton type entity that has tentacles embedded in the government, military, and the increasingly lucrative (and corrupt) student loan market. Its therefore no surprise that Johnstone and her corporation, Zyz, are the subject of much of Mashas leaked data, and a cat & mouse game ensues involving lawful interception, rootkits, and drones. Its not all doom and gloom though, and at one point during the breakneck-paced plot, Marcus (and Doctorow vicariously through him) gets to sit down and have a Mini Dungeon adventure with Electronic Frontier Foundation founders John Perry Barlow, John Gilmore and Mitch Kapor, with uber geek Wil Wheaton acting as Dungeon Master.Having read an advance copy of Homeland, I met up with Doctorow at his North London workspace to question him about it. As I make myself comfortable on his couch and set up my digital recorder on the coffee table next to his well-thumbed copy of the RAND Corporations 1955 book, the Canadian-born writer and Boing Boing editor does something quintessentially English by offering me a cup of tea. Normally this would be more than acceptable, but having been tempted by the delights of cold-brew coffee Marcus hi-octane beverage of choice which fuels much of Homeland I cant help feeling a little disappointed that Doctorow didnt have a batch on the goSo no cold-brew coffee?No, not in the winter.Because you were so specific in the book with regards to the cold-brew.Thats my cold dripper over there. I run it in the summer.That looks like some serious drug paraphernalia.Yes, its very meth lab-ie. Alice gave that me. Its a Kyoto dripper. Basically it does the same thing as a mason jar and a piece of cheesecloth does except that its a lot easier to clean up and looks good.Yes, it looks really, really cool. You went into such detail about the cold-brew, and kept going back to it, so I could tell it was a personal passion.At Burning Man, I definitely make cold-brew because its the best thing. You dont want hot coffee at Burning Man and its just fucking awesome. Especially in an environment where you want a jolt to wake you up at 6:00 PM as opposed to where you want to winding down your day at 6:00 PM. Its nice to have a big fucking jar of very, very strong coffee in the fridge.You chose the start the book at Burning Man, I take it youre a Burner?Only recently. When I lived in California I didnt go. I was always going to the World Science Fiction Convention instead. My wife talked me into it a couple of years ago for our 40th birthday. We went for a joint 40th party. It was more complicated because we had to rent an RV. If Id have lived in California it would have been a lot simpler. But it was so much fun. We camped with a group of friends, the Liminals who are people Ive known from The Well , which is an online service in California that Ive been on since I lived in Toronto in the early 90s, so people Ive known for a really long time. Theyre really good and very fun people, and they have a very established camp with big art cars. Weve got a storage locker in Reno with a smoker in it, and sofas and sunshades. Its a really good camp to be in. For the last few years weve been really lucky, weve had very good placement right in the middle.Thats actually the sign of a serious Burner, when you have a storage locker in Reno.Yes, absolutely. Its not ours but were lucky that were a part of the group that has it. I was totally blown away by how good it was. I thought that it was on the one hand going to be very doctrinarian. I thought it was going to full of people explaining to you that youre not doing it the Burning Man way, and also that it would be pretty austereIn fact it was just the opposite of that. Even when people were quoting chapter and verse The 10 Principles of Burning Man at you, they were always rolling their eyes while they did it. It was never taken very seriouslyTheyre not like commandments, theyre more like a social contract. And people just go all out. Stuff that you would just never fucking imagine out there. This year there was someone who was serving white linen fine dining meals to anyone who rocked up for free, with multi-courses and wineIts just amazing, it really is.In California, because its on the doorstep, everyone is a little jaded. I always hear people complaining that its not as good as it was back in the day. There seems to be more pure excitement about Burning Man in the UK.That might be so. Certainly you dont meet as many people who go over here as you do there. But people have been telling me that things were better in the old days since I was born. So Im totally skeptical of anyone who claims that things used to be better in the old days. I mean presumably one of the things that used to be better in the old days, when people tell you this, is that they were younger. It didnt hurt as much in all the places that you start to hurt as you get older. And that it was novel, and that the novelty has worn off some.I mentioned The Well before; From the day I got on The Well people were telling me how much better it used to be in the olden days. Every protest movement Ive been a part of used to be better in the olden days. Everything used to be better in the olden days. And I just think its bullshit. I think that things go through cyclesI think people who insist that their personal recollection of things means that it was always better in the old times show a remarkable lack of self-awareness and are just generally giant spoil sports. What a shitty thing to do. Because its generally the younger people right? Theyre the people who show up later. What a shitty thing to do to younger people to insist that nothing that they do will ever be as good as it was, because it was the old daysTheres a strain of Orthodox Judaism that says that no Rabbi can ever overturn a Rabbi who came in a generation before, because by definition every generation is further from the Garden and further from Gods perfection than the generation that came before. So every Rabbi knows less than the generation of Rabbis that came before him. Its such a poisonous idea. Its literally the opposite of the enlightenment. The idea of the enlightenment is that things get better. That you stand on the shoulders of giants. I think that there is a temptation to believe that things used to be better, because of course in our own experience we can remember that when we were younger, we were more flexible and things didnt hurt and the colors are more vibrant and the flavors are more flavorsome and the novelties were newer and the people of your preferred gender were more aesthetically pleasing and all the rest of it. But thats your own relationship with entropy, and not the worlds actual counter entropic trend. We as a species are running counter entropically. Yes, we push a lot of chaos out into the wider universe because entropy cant be destroyed, but we as a species make this pocket of non-entropy, this counter entropic pocket that builds on itself where each generation has access to more tools, and more procedures for being even better at being counter entropic.That being said though, with a lot of the issues that you address in the book, it does seem like were living for the first time in recent memory in an era where politically and socially things are regressing rather than progressing.Regress and progress are not uniform. There are areas of social liberalism that are further ahead now than theyve been in a very long time and things that people say with a straight face now that you never would have heard back then...There are parts of social liberalism that are much more widely accepted now. I mean, if you turn on the radio here youll hear pretty straight-laced mainstream commentators talking about the Church of England shooting itself in the foot by insisting that women cant become bishops or insisting that they need not consecrate gay marriage. Imagine 15 years ago someone on [BBC] Radio 4, the announcer and the guest on a morning radio show commiserating with one another about how ridiculous it is. Neither of them feeling the need to play devils advocate and say well of course we know that homosexuality is evil and God hates it. Both of them saying this is just terrible. How could this have happened? How could this have come to pass? Thats pretty amazing.There are other elements where, of course, its gotten much worse. I mean we really do live in an era where individuals who find themselves even tangentially involved with drugs in the United States have their houses taken away. Even if theyve done nothing willful, they just had stolen property or drugs on their property, they lose their houses, they lose their cars, they lose their jobs, and they lose their liberty. Whereas HSBC can launder billions of dollars in drug money knowingly and merely be fined five weeks income and have their executive suite defer some of their bonuses for a brief period. That is in some ways without precedent. But then, on the other hand, we know about it and we have the access to the organizing tools now that we didnt have access to when I was younger.Ive said this many times, when I was an activist in the 1980s, 98% of my job was stuffing envelopes and 2% was figuring out what to put in the envelopes. Today we get the envelopes for free and the address books for free. Thats just a giant qualitative change and it does make it possible for us to do things that we werent able to do before.One of the issues that you explore in Homeland is student debt. This again goes to this idea of things getting worse rather than better.Thats very true.This is the first time in history where students in England and America have a disincentive to get educated . In America now, because of rising college fees and falling wages, economically its arguable that youd actually be better off investing the money you spent on education and working straight out of school.Its not arguable, its true. Apart from a few Ivy League degrees, the rate of return on an investment in tertiary education, in most fields, in most universities in America is lower than the rate of return on gilts. Literally just buy bonds and youll get more money out of the system then you would on borrowing to get a university degree over the long run.So we have a situation now on both sides of the Atlantic where theres a disincentive to get educated Well, they share a certain common heritage. You mentioned for the first time theres a disincentive to get an education, but what you dont mention about the UK situation is that for the first time poor people have been given access to tertiary education. Its not a coincidence that when tertiary education ceased to be the exclusive province of people who had a lot of political influence, that education ceased to be untouchable as an area for defunding by government. In other words, when universities were the exclusive province of rich people who were in close contact with the political classes, nobody took seriously the idea of defunding free education in this country. But when it became more broadly democratized, you could start talking about education as almost like a market proposition.Right, it is a class issue. After having a fairly egalitarian system for three decades in the UK , with means tested grants being replaced by student loans 1998 , we now have a situation where poor people are once again excluded from places like Cambridge.Well, not just thatOne of the reasons to let poor people into university was in the name of social mobility. So when we start talking about universities particularly Im not talking about apprenticeships, Im not talking about trade schools and Im not talking about polytechnics when we start talking about universities as vocational programs that exist, not primary because of an interest in scholarship but because of a positive return on investment in the employment world, and also because of the perception that the best jobs leave you out if you havent gone through university...Im leaving aside for the moment here a few parts of the university which are the tracks that lead into the professions, medicine, law and a couple of others. When you say the reason to go and get a double first in English and German at UCL is because having a double first degree is itself a ladder into not the professions but a better job, a white collar job, then it starts to become a market proposition. You are not funding the university because you value scholarship.Scholarship is inherently not a market activity. You fund scholarships for the same reason you fund basic research. You could call scholarship basic research. It does have a positive return to the economy, but that return isnt possible to recoup through normal investment. No rational market actor invests in pure research. No one wants to fund a super collider , and yet, super colliders actually do produce more money for the whole economy than they cost because of all the spin offs that come out of it. Thats why we fund scholarship. Thats why we fund basic research. The two of them are very closely related. But once you start funding it because it gets people better jobs, then all of a sudden you can talk about them returning a piece of their better job back to the economy.When it was just rich people going, it wasnt about just getting a better job, because you were already rich, you already had the entr into the better job. You could already do unfunded apprenticeships and your parents friends were the people offering you the unfunded apprenticeships. You had a good five ways within the system. But now its a market transaction, and once its a market transaction we start applying cost benefit analysis to it. We start saying, well if the university degree earns you so many pounds, then it makes sense to start talking about you paying so many pounds. And if the objective here is to take people whose lifetime income expectancy was so many pounds, and make it a little bit higher which is what we call social mobility then why shouldnt that be a virtuous cycle and they pay back into it. That way the university can expand the number of students they take on and all the rest of it, right?The problem with that is that its become a Ponzi scheme, especially in America. We havent quite gotten there here. But in America, you have this crazy thing where it is somewhat true and its also universally received as true, that you cant get a good job without a university degree. Its also the case that universities, including many state colleges that are actually owned by the public can act as loan originators, which is to say they lend you the money but where those loans are then backed by the federal government. They can lend you any amount of money because theres no risk to them because the government will take the loan off their hands. Those loans are then further secured by the federal government when they float them as bonds. So you have this weird perverse incentive where the universities, the more they charge the more they get which is a bit weird right? Because in real market economies, the more you charge the more you get up to a point, and then people start going, wait a second, thats not worth it anymore, and they stop paying in. But if I tell you that you cant get a job unless you get a degree, and then I tell you that no matter how much the degree costs I can get you a loan for that much, all of a sudden you start getting takers for those crazy propositions and that starts to look like a bubble, like a pyramid scheme.Then you get the bond traders who actually buy these loans and securitize them and turn them into bonds and float them around. Those people actually have it in their interest to keep tuition high and to keep the economy in such a state that indeed unless you have a degree you cant get a good job, because that brings more people into the system who take out more loans. Those loans get bigger, that turns into more bonds, those bonds produce more coupons and those coupons continue to fund the private equity funds and whoever else is buying those bonds. And again, the federal government guarantees those bonds, and to the extent that the federal government is there guaranteeing the bonds, theres a lot of money to be spent on lobbying the federal government to continue guaranteeing those bonds.Also, the federal government can be successfully lobbied to do what theyve done now over the last 10 years, which is make student debt the only kind of debt you cant be relieved from in bankruptcy, and the only kind of debt that can be taken out of social security . This is a perfect storm of awful, where in order to get any kind of a good job you have to take a loan out for a hyper inflated university degree and that loan is then visited upon you forever.You cant be relieved of that debt through bankruptcy, even if it turns out you made the wrong decision, and the debt collection practices are set up so theres almost no limits on them and they can impose arbitrary fees and penalties on you. Whatever your student loan was, you actually can never escape it because if you miss a single payment or even if a payment goes astray, suddenly you have these ballooning charges that could double or triple your student debt and those keep recurring through the life of your student debt, such that it becomes almost a form of indenture.People also who carry a lot of debt are much more beholden to their employers. Especially a kind of debt where if you miss a payment you have ballooning charges and penalties, because you cant afford to be made redundant, you cant afford to be taken off the job, you certainly cant afford to risk being fired. Those people become a more pliant workforce. So you have, again, this perfect storm of awfulness where all of these awful interests are aligned into making people indebted and unhappy and unable to fulfill their lives, fulfill their potential.For one thing, people dont start businesses if they cant afford to quit their jobs. So all of that economic creativity that America has often benefited fromI mean, for all that America is a nation of military adventurism and conquest, its also a nation of entrepreneurship and an enormous amount of its economic mite has been driven not just by resource extraction from foreign economies, but also from the exporting of entrepreneurial ventures. You know, inventing stuff that other people in the world want a buy, that entrepreneurial zeal is increasingly locked up behind people who struggle with debt and cant afford to quit their jobs to do something cool. This is why you have dot com millionaires who are actually offering cash prizes to people who have good grades not to go to university . They want those people unlocked from debt so they can go off and invent cool things and make jobs and unlock new economic growth for the country.On the night of the Strike Debt launch [Strike Debt is an Occupy Wall Street affinity group which buys debt and forgives it order to raise awareness for the true cost of debt] I hosted a discussion via the SuicideGirls Twitter account using the Strike Debt hashtag. I just asked people about how debt had impacted their lives . Within the SuicideGirls demographic, Id say 90% of the debt that people were talking about was student loans . And the worst thing is that Strike Debt cant even buy student loans . Its the one class of debt that they cant purchase. The good guys cant even buy the debt to clear it. And one of the most worrying sentiments that was coming through that night was that because people had no hope of ever paying their student loans off especially amongst those where the penalties were already accruing they were like, whats the point of getting a job? Im never going to get out from under my student debt . Theres literally a whole class of people who have a very real disincentive to find work because of the crippling weight of their student loans.Yeah, this is a real problem , and so fictionalizing it was very easy. And one of the things about debt is its a bubbleWhen interest rates are lower than inflation, you need to do something with your money otherwise you lose money every day you leave it in the bank. Ordinary people have increasingly found themselves becoming speculators and one of the things theyre speculating on is debt. There has been this bubble of buying and selling debt in a way that has exposed ordinary people to bond markets who have never been exposed before, never would have had that direct experience. You now have this interest in people being indebted, which has been identified as an ill since biblical times. I mean, this is in all of the Abrahamic traditions, warnings about the danger or debt. You probably saw David Graebers book,, that came out last year, a magnificent book about debt that also influenced my thinking on this. It was really easy for me to imagine dirty tricks being there to keep the bubble inflated because every bubble has dirty tricks. Bubbles attract dirty tricksters, and its often the same people.There was a good book I read last year,, about the Lehman Brothers bankruptcy. One of the things that the author pointed out is the mortgage salesmen who sold the shitty mortgages that Lehman was laundering were literally the same people working out of the same boiler rooms as had been used to pump and duck the S&L crisis. Literally the same fraudsters moved from one fraud to the next fraud to the next. They take the same skill set; Its highly transferable, from one fraud to the next, and they bring it along with them. So I found it real easy to imagine the same corporate crooks who gave us the subprime crisis, giving us an educational bond crisis in the same way and exercising undue influence in the halls of power in the same way.