This Los Angeles Review of Books interview, conducted in 2021 around the publication of attack-surface, is one of the more substantive long-form conversations with Doctorow on record. The interview covers territory that his shorter journalistic appearances rarely reach: his view of tech worker responsibility and complicity, his analysis of surveillance capitalism as a structural rather than ethical failure, and the relationship between his fiction and his nonfiction arguments.
The title's claim — that technology and politics are inseparable — captures a position Doctorow has held throughout his career but articulates here more directly than in most public statements. The interview is valuable for the attack-surface context: that novel focuses on a security contractor protagonist who must reckon with the harm her work enables, and the LARB conversation draws out Doctorow's thinking about tech workers who build surveillance infrastructure for governments and corporations. This connects to his longstanding engagement with electronic-frontier-foundation work on civil liberties and surveillance.
The interview also touches on digital-rights-management-critique and the broader question of how technical choices embed political values — a theme running from his earliest EFF work through to the enshittification framework. For a KB tracking Doctorow's intellectual development, this source captures his thinking at a transitional moment: after the Boing Boing era but before the enshittification concept crystallized in 2023, when his focus was shifting from DRM and copyright toward the structural analysis of platform power.
The LARB's readership — literary intellectuals and academics — makes this interview a useful document of how Doctorow positioned his work for an audience that comes to him primarily through fiction rather than through the tech-policy world.