Midway through a recent exegesis on civil liberties, whistleblower Edward Snowden’s Google Hangouts session cut out. “Oh! There’s the NSA,” said author Cory Doctorow, who had been talking remotely with Snowden from the New York Public Library. As NYPL tech support got the stream back up, Doctorow turned to the audience. “Edward said this would happen, and said that we should just make a joke about the NSA and wait for it to come back.”

The ready quip was a reminder of just how long Snowden has been appearing remotely at events like “Dystopia, Apocalypse, and other Sunny Futures,” part of the LIVE from the NYPL event series. (The talk can now be viewed online in its entirety.) A lot has changed over the four years that Snowden has been in exile, including the realization that NSA overreach is one of the biggest governmental crises. But after several months of public conversation dominated by a sense of apocalyptic millenarianism, the dialogue felt like an oddly reassuring return to normal. Even when the world is going wrong in all sorts of new ways, Snowden and Doctorow reminded the audience that we’re still fighting a lot of old battles.

Last night’s talk was part of a tour for Doctorow’s newly released novel Walkaway, which is set in a future where a groundswell of high-tech nomad “walkaway” communities fight oligarchs to subvert the status quo and develop a form of immortality. Snowden pointed out that the book is a mirror version of Atlas Shrugged: instead of a few ubermensch bringing down a misguidedly egalitarian society by leaving, it’s about a mass movement of the disenfranchised threatening a society controlled by the vastly wealthy. Or, as Doctorow put it, “This is the novel about all the people who, when Atlas shrugged, said 'Good riddance!'"

Walkaway imagines a future shaped by the same problems and possibilities Doctorow’s been playing with for years: the threat of ubiquitous surveillance and artificial scarcity, and the promise that almost any technology can be repurposed and turned against its creator.

“This is the novel about all the people who, when Atlas shrugged, said 'Good riddance!'"

Back in the real world, it’s true that even in the midst of a populist movement, wealthy cosmopolitans are pursuing the same old goals of power and longevity — like billionaire Peter Thiel “desperately sucking on the veins of the world's teenagers, like a kind of upmarket Dracula,” as Snowden vividly put it. And in a long extemporaneous speech during Snowden’s outage, Doctorow exhorted the audience to keep an eye on old fights that may now feel mundane, including threats to the open internet, restrictive copyright rules, and government surveillance.

“There's a shield of boringness to so much of this surveillance that it's hard to remain really engaged with the debate,” Doctorow said, referencing the recent debate over renewing Section 702 of the FISA Amendments Act. “Especially when you have flamboyant people promising to do things that are less likely but arguably more harmful — like repealing the First Amendment to make it easier to sue journalists, which is a grotesque thing to say, but also a terrible bit of pulp plotting that has very little plausibility.”

While the talk did cover dystopia and apocalypse, the last part of its title wasn’t a joke: both Snowden and Doctorow expressed cautious hopefulness about changing the world for the better. “One of the central struggles that we all face is not ‘can we save the world?’” Snowden said. “But ‘can we lay down a brick, a foundation upon which other people can place their brick, and together we can build a home?’”

“That story of humanity's barbarism in moments of extremis, it doesn't actually line up well with reality.”

To that end, one of Doctorow’s core themes in Walkaway is subverting what he described as the popular “man against man against nature” pulp plot. “That story of humanity's barbarism in moments of extremis, it doesn't actually line up well with reality,” he said. “When you really talk to people who've lived through crises, the stories that spring to mind for them are stories of people rising to the occasion in spectacular ways.” But if the darker story is our go-to scenario in times of crisis, we’ll preemptively react to others with hostility, instead of working together to rebuild.

And this extends to more recent, topical conversations, like those around xenophobia and Trump. “There are two possible theories about what just happened in 2016. One is that secretly, tens of millions of people were absolute bastards waiting for an opportunity to vote for an absolute bastard,” said Doctorow. “The other is that people have complicated natures.”

If the second scenario is true, then there’s room to shift the conversation and find common ground with people you disagree with. “You're not changing what's in their mind, you're changing what they do about it,” said Doctorow. “You're changing whether when they lose their temper, they take a deep breath or punch the guy in the nose. When they feel that the system is unfair, they blame their neighbor, or they tell themselves that it can't be their neighbor's fault — it's a wider problem.”