Picks and Shovels Chapter One (Part 4)
Electronic needles, digital haystacks.
Picks and Shovels is a new, standalone technothriller starring Marty Hench, my two-fisted, hard-fighting, tech-scam-busting forensic accountant. You can pre-order it on my latest Kickstarter, which features a brilliant audiobook read by Wil Wheaton.
This month, I’m serializing the first chapter of my next novel, Picks and Shovels, a standalone Martin Hench novel that drops on Feb 17:
https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865908/picksandshovels
The book is up for presale on a Kickstarter that features the whole series as print books (with the option of personalized inscriptions), DRM-free ebooks, and a DRM-free audiobook read by Wil Wheaton:
It’s a story of how the first seeds of enshittification were planted in Silicon Valley, just as the first PCs were being born.
Here’s part one:
https://pluralistic.net/2025/01/09/the-reverend-sirs/#fidelity-computing
Part two:
https://pluralistic.net/2025/01/10/smoke-filled-room-where-it-happens/#computing-freedom
Part three:
https://pluralistic.net/2025/01/11/socialism-for-the-rich/#a-lighter-shade-of-mauve
And now, onto part four!
The San Antonio girl — the daughter of a local real-estate broker — had no idea what floppy disks the president was talking about, so he showed her the catalog and she immediately called the rep in Colma. The receptionist was on the ball and passed the call on to Shlomo, who immediately grasped the catalog’s significance and approved an expensive Federal Express courier.
“Our general counsel advised us to seek an injunction and file a suit,” Bishop Clarke said.
“It would have been better to talk, of course,” the rabbi said. “Nobody wanted to drag those three little girls into court. They’re like family, even though they left.”
Up until then, they’d all been telling the same story, but something about what Rabbi Finkel said stopped its momentum. I’d been practicing my listening, trying to be like Lucille, listening with my eyes and my ears. The rabbi’s statement jolted the other two. Now we’re coming to the crux, I thought. This is the part where I come in.
“They were good at their jobs,” Bishop Clarke said, almost wistful.
“They surprised us,” Father Marek said.
“Perhaps we could find an accommodation,” the rabbi said. The three men looked at each other. How long had they been in business together, in each other’s pockets, maybe at each other’s throats? The story of interfaith harmony was such a juicy one, the stuff of magazine cover stories. Was it true, though?
“They just need convincing,” Bishop Clarke said. His smile flickered on and off. He must have had dental work. The standard-issue teeth just didn’t come that way: shining, white, perfect symmetry. On, off. Maybe he practiced it in front of a mirror.
Discovery is the part of a lawsuit where the parties can demand relevant documents from one another: memos, contracts, correspondence.
Tortious interference is the legal offense of stepping between two contracting parties in a way that induces one of them to violate their contractual obligations. Suing for tortious interference is the commercial version of a jilted wife confronting her erstwhile husband’s lover, as though his infidelity was her fault.
Fidelity’s lawyers — an outside firm with a reputation for aggression and a roster of blue-chip clients and high-profile cases, including IBM’s ongoing troubles with the Department of Justice over its alleged antitrust violations — had drawn up a complaint asserting that CF had induced Fidelity’s suppliers to violate their confidentiality and exclusivity agreements, while simultaneously inducing the company’s best customers to forgo their contractual obligations (and semireligious duty) to buy their supplies from Fidelity and its sales agents in their congregations.
These sweeping allegations gave Fidelity’s lawyers sweeping discovery powers: all documents and accounts related to CF’s manufacturing, promotion, and sales, right down to the printers who supplied their catalogs.
CF wasn’t powerless in the face of this onslaught. Their lawyers — a much cheaper and hungrier firm of lawyers, without the pedigree or track record of their opposing counsel — had secured the right to redact irrelevant, sensitive material from the documents they turned over, and, more crucially, they had convinced the judge to let them do something novel.
The bishop hoisted a banker’s box onto the table and set it down with a thud. He lifted the lid like a conjurer’s trick and brought out two thick binders of paperwork, bristling with dividers. “This is the hardcopy,” he said. “It’s almost nothing. Photocopies of handwritten memos, mostly.”
He reached back in and produced a mauve box of floppy disks, the five — and — a — quarter — inch kind that already seemed slightly quaint, compared to the small, rigid three — and — a — half — inch floppies that all the new computers were using. He produced a second box. A third. A fourth. A fifth. The pile grew.
“Ten boxes of floppy disks,” the bishop said. “No one had ever asked such a thing of our judge, but he said that two computer companies should be able to accept electronic submissions from one another. He said it was obvious that this was the future of discovery, and that we were the perfect litigants to start with, since our dispute was about their piracy of our formats and disks, so of course we’d have compatible systems.
“Somewhere in here is the evidence that they are going to fail in court, the evidence that will force them to come back to the table and negotiate, to talk, the way they should have in the first place. They’ve found some good ways of doing things, and we’re interested in that. We want to work with them, not ruin them. We could arrange a sale of their little company to Fidelity, on preferable terms, but with something in there to recognize their clever little inventions and innovations. They’d get something, rather than nothing.” The bishop spread his hands, patted the air. It’s only reasonable, his hands said.
“Better they get the money than the lawyers,” the rabbi said.
“Something is always better than nothing,” Father Marek said. “Even an idiot should be able to see that.” The other two shot him looks. He scowled at them.
“We need someone who can make sense of all this.” The bishop pointed at his precarious tower of floppy disks. “They thought that they’d overwhelm us with electronic records. That our lawyers were so conservative that they wouldn’t be able to sort through them. It’s true, they’re not set up for this. No one is, but someone could be. We think that for the right kind of person, someone who understands accounting and computers, these records will be easier to handle.”
There it was. They looked at me, three worried sets of eyes. This wasn’t how they normally operated. They were taking a risk. I wondered whose idea this was. Not Father Marek: he wanted vengeance. He’d be happy to smash CF, make an example of them. Rabbi Finkel? Perhaps. I could see that he was a thinker, someone who looked around corners. The bishop? He’d done most of the talking. But I got the impression he always did most of the talking: a Mormon bishop, after all, didn’t wear a dog collar or a beard and yarmulke. Mormon bishops are laypeople, after all. They look secular.
Check out my Kickstarter to pre-order copies of my next novel, Picks and Shovels!
If you’d like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here’s a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
https://pluralistic.net/2025/01/13/wanting-it-badly/#discovering-e-discovery
