Cory Doctorow discusses the noir side of tech companies in his new novel Red Team Blues
CBC Books | Posted: April 28, 2023 7:17 PM | Last Updated: July 10, 2023
Writer Cory Doctorow draws on his observations of the tech world in his new sci-fi thriller Red Team Blues.
Doctorow is a Canadian science fiction writer, activist and journalist currently based in Los Angeles. Among his many novels are notable titles such as Walkaway and Little Brother. His novel Radicalized was a finalist on Canada Reads in 2020.
Red Team Blues follows 67-year-old forensic accountant Martin Hench living in California. Martin knows all the secret histories of Silicon Valley's tech giants and quickly becomes enmeshed in a dangerous job that will require his lifelong skills.
Red Team Blues is on the CBC Books summer reading list.
Doctorow spoke with Rogers about the dark and complex world in Red Team Blues.
So many noirs are set in California. Is there something about California that lends itself to those kinds of stories, do you think?
California's story, the story of the West, is the story of get rich quick hustles, expropriation and broken dreams. I mean think about the literature, right?
Think about the songs. This is a place that people came to tell themselves the lie that they would be self-made people and it's really a stolen place where the people who welcome you in to sell the picks and shovels to go into the mountains and mine the gold are the only people who get rich.
The way that they get rich is by selling you defective shovels, defective picks and then charging your poor family back home to go and recover your corpse at the end of it.
So there is something very noir about this place, especially contrasted with the blue skies, the palm trees, the ocean, the incredible pastoral vistas. It's those contradictions that really make this place so ultra noir.
I find Martin really interesting. He's complicated. He's witnessed a lot of stuff, he's respectful in his relationships with women. He's almost courtly at times, conversant in all manners of hardware, software, social media and then there's this kind of world weariness from the changes that he's seen in Silicon Valley. How do you see this combination of traits in your protagonist?
I think Marty is someone who has the praxis. He understands the nuts and bolts of how technology works. He's watched people who shared both his trepidation and his enthusiasm. He's watched them talk themselves into the most ghastly compromises and he's seen the people who didn't.
It's easy to be very high minded when no one's offering you a million dollars to sell out your principles. - Cory Doctorow
It's easy to be very high minded when no one's offering you a million dollars to sell out your principles. Especially if they're only asking you for a little compromise which is followed by another and another.
The next thing you know, you're declaring that everybody is going to spend their future as legless, sexless, low polygon cartoon characters in a virtual world named after the metaverse from a dystopian science fiction novel.
Just one little choice at a time.
He is someone who lived 67 years, made a bunch of dumb mistakes about women, about friends, about how he perceived gender and did what we ask of people in that situation, which is to listen, learn and do better.
In this moment of reckoning there is that one thing that I think is in short supply — if not missing — the sense that people who got stuff wrong, not people who enacted horrible harms, but people who got stuff wrong in terms of their unconscious beliefs or reflexive reactions, who then heard their critics and changed the way that they act in the world.
That those people did what we want of people: not to be born perfect, but to listen carefully and to never give offence, at least unintentionally.
I'm happy to offend people, just not by accident.
He lives for a little while as an unhoused person in San Francisco. What did you want to look at here through the experience of Martin?
Partly, I think that there is the invisibility of people without homes, even though they're so omnipresent in our lives. That obscurity leads to great cruelty.
It allows us to do things like condition access to social assistance, to food help and to admission to various programs on the assumption that if you're just sort of homeless you're just sitting around. Whatever time you're not spending panhandling, you're just staring vacantly into space.
And of course one of the hardest jobs in our society right now is being homeless. It's a lot of work being poor, and the poorer you are, the more work you have to do. But I also really wanted to dig into the phenomenon of the enormous wealth in San Francisco, specifically in the heart of the tech sector.
"There is the invisibility of people without homes, even though they're so omnipresent in our lives. That obscurity leads to great cruelty. - Cory Doctorow
The incredible poverty and the failure of technology itself, to actually address that profound moral injury that is your lot — if you live in San Francisco or indeed in other cities here in Los Angeles
To have Marty's reckoning with what his life is meant to be, be reflected in a wider reckoning of this poison in our society right now. The failure to do one of the most basic things that a society should test itself on is whether or not it shelters the people who live in it.
Cory Doctorow's comments have been edited for length and clarity.