Today’s links Inkjump Linkdump: A long weekend’s supply of miscellany. This day in history: 2004, 2009, 2014, 2019 Upcoming appearances: Where to find me. Recent appearances: Where I’ve been. Latest books: You keep readin’ em, I’ll keep writin’ ’em. Upcoming books: Like I said, I’ll keep writin’ ’em. Colophon: All the rest. Inkjump Linkdump (permalink) It’s the start of a long weekend and I’ve found myself with a backlog of links, so it’s time for another linkdump – the eighteenth in the (occasional) series. Here’s the previous installments: https://pluralistic.net/tag/linkdump/ Kicking off this week’s backlog is a piece of epic lawyer-snark, which is something I always love, but what makes this snark total catnip for me is that it’s snark about copyfraud: false copyright claims made to censor online speech. Yes please and a second portion, thank you very much! This starts with the Cola Corporation, a radical LA-based design store that makes lefty t-shirts, stickers and the like. Cola made a t-shirt that remixed the LA Lakers logo to read "Fuck the LAPD." In response, the LAPD’s private foundation sent a nonsense copyright takedown letter. Cola’s lawyer, Mike Dunford, sent them a chef’s-kiss-perfect reply, just two words long: "LOL, no": https://www.techdirt.com/2024/04/19/apparel-company-gives-perfect-response-to-lapds-nonsense-ip-threat-letter-over-fuck-the-lapd-shirt/ But that’s not the lawyer snark I’m writing about today. Dunford also sent a letter to IMG Worldwide, whose lawyers sent the initial threat, demanding an explanation for this outrageous threat, which was – as the physicists say – "not even wrong": https://www.loweringthebar.net/2024/05/lol-no-explained.html Every part of the legal threat is dissected here, with lavish, caustic footnotes, mercilessly picking apart the legal defects, including legally actionable copyfraud under DMCA 512(f), which provides for penalties for wrongful copyright threats. To my delight, Dunford cited Lenz here, which is the infamous "Dancing Baby" case that EFF successfully litigated on behalf of Stephanie Lenz, whose video of her adorable (then-)toddler dancing to a few seconds of Prince’s "Let’s Go Crazy" was censored by Universal Music Group: https://www.eff.org/cases/lenz-v-universal Dunford’s towering rage is leavened with incredulous demands for explanations: how on Earth could a lawyer knowingly send such a defective, illegal threat? Why shouldn’t Dunford seek recovery of his costs from IMG and its client, the LA Police Foundation, for such lawless bullying? It is a sparkling – incandescent, even! – piece of lawyerly writing. If only all legal correspondence was this entertaining! Every 1L should study this. Meanwhile, Cola has sold out of everything, thanks to that viral "LOL, no." initial response letter. They’re taking orders for their next resupply, shipping on June 1. Gotta love that Streisand Effect! https://www.thecolacorporation.com/ I’m generally skeptical of political activism that takes the form of buying things or refusing to do so. "Voting with your wallet" is a pretty difficult trick to pull off. After all, the people with the thickest wallets get the most votes, and generally, the monopoly party wins. But as the Cola Company’s example shows, there’s times when shopping can be a political act. But that’s because it’s a collective act. Lots of us went and bought stuff from Cola, to send a message to the LAPD about legal bullying. That kind of collective action is hard to pull off, especially when it comes to purchase-decisions. Often, this kind of thing descends into a kind of parody of political action, where you substitute shopping for ideology. This is where Matt Bors’s Mr Gotcha comes in: "ooh, you want to make things better, but you bought a product from a tainted company, I guess you’re not really sincere, gotcha!" https://thenib.com/mister-gotcha/ There’s a great example of this in Zephyr Teachout’s brilliant 2020 book Break ’Em Up: if you miss the pro-union demonstration at the Amazon warehouse because you spent two hours driving around looking for an indie stationer to buy the cardboard to make your protest sign rather than buying it from Amazon, Amazon wins: https://pluralistic.net/2020/07/29/break-em-up/#break-em-up So yeah, I’m pretty skeptical of consumerism as a framework for political activism. It’s very hard to pull off an effective boycott, especially of a monopolist. But if you can pull it off, well… Canada is one of the most monopoly-friendly countries in the world. Hell, the Competition Act doesn’t even have an "abuse of dominance" standard! That’s like a criminal code that doesn’t have a section prohibiting "murder." (The Trudeau government has promised to fix this.) https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/editorials/article-an-overhauled-competition-act-will-light-a-fire-in-the-stolid-world-of/ There’s stiff competition for Most Guillotineable Canadian Billionaire. There’s the entire Irving family, who basically own the province of New Bruinswick: https://www.canadaland.com/podcast/dynasties-2-the-irvings/ There’s Ted Rogers, the trumpy billionaire telecoms monopolist, whose serial acquire-and-loot approach to media has devastated Canadian TV and publishing: https://www.canadaland.com/podcast/canadaland-725-the-rogers-family-compact/ But then there’s Galen Fucking Weston, the nepobaby who inherited the family grocery business (including Loblaw), bought out all his competitors (including Shopper’s Drug Mart), and then engaged in a criminal price-fixing conspiracy to rig the price of bread, the most Les-Miz-ass crime imaginable: https://www.blogto.com/eat_drink/2023/06/what-should-happened-galen-weston-price-fixing/ Weston has made himself the face of the family business, appearing in TV ads in a cardigan to deliver dead-eyed avuncular paeans to his sprawling empire, even as he colludes with competitors to rig the price of his workers’ wages: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-06-12/a-supermarket-billionaire-steps-into-trouble-over-pandemic-wages For Canadians, Weston is the face of greedflation, the man whose nickle-and-diming knows no shame. This is the man who decided that the discount on nearly-spoiled produce would be slashed from 50% to 30%, who racked up record profits even as his prices skyrocketed. It’s impossible to overstate how loathed Galen Weston is at this moment. There’s a very good episode of the excellent new podcast Lately, hosted by Canadian competition expert Vass Bednar and Katrina Onstad that gives you a sense of the national outrage: https://www.theglobeandmail.com/podcasts/lately/article-boycotting-the-loblawpoly/ All of this has led to a national boycott of Loblaw, kicked off by members of the r/loblawsisoutofcontrol, and it’s working. Writing for Jacobin, Jeremy Appel gives us a snapshot of a nation in revolt: https://jacobin.com/2024/05/loblaw-grocery-price-gouge-boycott/ Appel points out the boycott’s problems – there’s lots of places, particularly in the north, where Loblaw’s is the only game in town, or where the sole competitor is the equally odious Walmart. But he also talks about the beneficial effect the boycott is having for independent grocers and co-ops who deal more fairly with their suppliers and their customers. He also platforms the boycott’s call for a national system of price controls on certain staples. This is something that neoliberal economists despise, and it’s always fun to watch them lose their minds when the subject is raised. Meanwhile, economists like Isabella M Weber continue to publish careful research explaining how and why price controls can work, and represent our best weapon against "seller’s inflation": https://scholarworks.umass.edu/econ_workingpaper/343/ Antimonopoly sentiment is having a minute, obviously, and the news comes at you fast. This week, the DoJ filed a lawsuit to break up Ticketmaster/Live Nation, one of the country’s most notorious monopolists, who have aroused the ire of every kind of fan, but especially the Swifties (don’t fuck with Swifties). In announcing the suit, DoJ Antitrust Division boss Jonathan Kanter coined the term "Ticketmaster tax" to describe the junk fees that Ticketmaster uses to pick all our pockets. In response, Ticketmaster has mobilized its own Loblaw-like shill army, who insist that all the anti-monopoly activism is misguided populism, and "anti-business." In his BIG newsletter, Matt Stoller tears these claims apart, and provides one of the clearest explanations of how Ticketmaster rips us all off that I’ve ever seen, leaning heavily on Ticketmaster’s own statements to their investors and the business-press: https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/antitrust-enforcers-to-break-up-ticketmaster Ticketmaster has a complicated "flywheel" that it uses to corner the market on live events, mixing low-margin businesses that are deliberately kept unprofitable (to prevent competitors from gaining a foothold) in order to capture the high-margin businesses that are its real prize. All this complexity can make your eyes glaze over, and that’s to Ticketmaster’s benefit, keeping normies from looking too closely at how this bizarre self-licking ice-cream cone really works. But for industry insiders, those workings are all too clear. When Rebecca Giblin and I were working on our book Chokepoint Capitalism, we talked to insiders from every corner of the entertainment-industrial complex, and there was always at least one expert who’d go on record about the scams inside everything from news monopolies to streaming video to publishing and the record industry: https://chokepointcapitalism.com/ The sole exception was Ticketmaster/Live Nation. When we talked to club owners, promoters and other victims of TM’s scam, they universally refused to go on the record. They were palpably terrified of retaliation from Ticketmaster’s enforcers. They acted like mafia informants seeking witness protection. Not without reason, mind you: back when the TM monopoly was just getting started, Pearl Jam – then one of the most powerful acts in American music – took a stand against them. Ticketmaster destroyed them. That was when TM was a mere hatchling, with a bare fraction of the terrifying power it wields today. TM is a great example of the problem with boycotts. If a club or an act refuses to work with TM/LN, they’re destroyed. If a fan refuses to buy tickets from TM or see a Live Nation show, they basically can’t go to any shows. The TM monopoly isn’t a problem of bad individual choices – it’s a systemic problem that needs a systemic response. That’s what makes antitrust responses so timely. Federal enforcers have wide-ranging powers, and can seek remedies that consumerism can never attain – there’s no way a boycott could result in a breakup of Ticketmaster/Live Nation, but a DoJ lawsuit can absolutely get there. Every federal agency has wide-ranging antimonopoly powers at its disposal. These are laid out very well in Tim Wu’s 2020 White House Executive Order on competition, which identifies 72 ways the agencies can act against monopoly without having to wait for Congress: https://pluralistic.net/2021/08/13/post-bork-era/#manne-down But of course, the majority of antimonopoly power is vested in the FTC, the agency created to police corporate power. Section 5 of the FTC Act grants the agency the power to act to prevent "unfair and deceptive methods of competition": https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/10/the-courage-to-govern/#whos-in-charge This clause has lain largely dormant since the Reagan era, but FTC chair Lina Khan has revived it, using it to create muscular privacy rights for Americans, and to ban noncompete agreements that bind American workers to dead-end jobs: https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/25/capri-v-tapestry/#aiming-at-dollars-not-men The FTC’s power to ban activity because it’s "unfair and deceptive" is exciting, because it promises American internet users a way to solve their problems beyond copyright law. Copyright law is basically the only law that survived the digital transition, even as privacy, labor and consumer protection rights went into hibernation. The last time Congress gave us a federal consumer privacy law was 1988, and it’s a law that bans video store clerks from telling the newspapers which VHS cassettes you rented: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_Privacy_Protection_Act That’s left internet users desperately trying to contort copyright to solve every problem they have – like someone trying to build a house using nothing but chainsaw. For example, I once found someone impersonating me on a dating site, luring strangers into private spaces. Alarmed, I contacted the dating site, who told me that their only fix for this was for me to file a copyright claim against the impersonator to make them remove the profile photo. Now, that photo was Creative Commons licensed, so any takedown notice would have been a "LOL, no." grade act of copyfraud: https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/21/the-internets-original-sin/ The unsuitability of copyright for solving complex labor and privacy problems hasn’t stopped people who experience these problems from trying to use copyright to solve them. They’ve got nothing else, after all. That’s why everyone who’s worried about the absolutely legitimate and urgent concerns over AI and labor and privacy has latched onto copyright as the best tool for resolving these questions, despite copyright’s total unsuitability for this purpose, and the strong likelihood that this will make these problems worse: https://pluralistic.net/2024/05/13/spooky-action-at-a-close-up/#invisible-hand Enter FTC Chair Lina Khan, who has just announced that her agency will be reviewing AI model training as an "unfair and deceptive method of competition": https://thehill.com/policy/technology/4682461-ftc-chair-ai-models-could-violate-antitrust-laws/ If the agency can establish this fact, they will have sweeping powers to craft rules prohibiting the destructive and unfair uses of AI, without endangering beneficial activities like scraping, mathematical analysis, and the creation of automated systems that help with everything from adding archival metadata to exonerating wrongly convicted people rotting in prison: https://hrdag.org/tech-notes/large-language-models-IPNO.html I love this so much. Khan’s announcement accomplishes the seemingly impossible: affirming that there are real problems and insisting that we employ tactics that can actually fix those problems, rather than just doing something because inaction is so frustrating. That’s something we could use a lot more of, especially in platform regulation. The other big tech news about Big Tech last week was the progress of a bill that would repeal Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act at the end of 2025, without any plans to replace it with something else. Section 230 is the most maligned, least understood internet law, and that’s saying something: https://www.techdirt.com/2020/06/23/hello-youve-been-referred-here-because-youre-wrong-about-section-230-communications-decency-act/ Its critics wrongly accuse the law – which makes internet users liable for bad speech acts, not the platforms that carry that speech – of being a gift to Big Tech. That’s totally wrong. Without Section 230, platforms could be named to lawsuits arising from their users’ actions. We know how that would play out. Back in 2018, Congress took a big chunk out of 230 when they passed SESTA/FOSTA, a law that makes platforms liable for any sex trafficking that is facilitated by their platforms. Now, this may sound like a narrowly targeted, beneficial law that aims at a deplorable, unconscionable crime. But here’s how it played out: the platforms decided that it was too much trouble to distinguish sex trafficking from any sex-work, including consensual sex work and adjacent activities. The result? Consensual sex-work became infinitely more dangerous and precarious, while trafficking was largely unaffected: https://www.gao.gov/assets/gao-21-385.pdf Eliminating 230 would be incredibly reckless under any circumstances, but after the SESTA/FOSTA experience, it’s unforgivable. The Big Tech platforms will greet this development by indiscriminately wiping out any kind of controversial speech from marginalized groups (think #MeToo or Black Lives Matter). Meanwhile, the rich and powerful will get a new tool – far more powerful than copyfraud – to make inconvenient speech disappear. The war-criminals, rapists, murderers and rip-off artists who currently make do with bogus copyright claims to "manage their reputations" will be able to use pretextual legal threats to make their critics just disappear: https://www.qurium.org/forensics/dark-ops-undercovered-episode-i-eliminalia/ In a post-230 world, Cola Corporation’s lawyers wouldn’t get a chance to reply to the LAPD’s bullying lawyers – those lawyers would send their letter to Cola’s hosting provider, who would weigh the possibility of being named in a lawsuit against the small-dollar monthly payment they get from Cola, and poof, no more Cola. The legal bullies could do the same for Cola’s email provider, their payment processor, their anti-DoS provider. This week on EFF’s Deeplinks blog, I published a piece making the connection between abolishing Section 230 and reinforcing Big Tech monopolies: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2024/05/wanna-make-big-tech-monopolies-even-worse-kill-section-230 The Big Tech platforms really do suck, and the solution to their systemic, persistent moderation failures won’t come from making them liable for users’ speech. The platforms have correctly assessed that they alone have the legal and moderation staff to do the kinds of mass-deletions of controversial speech that could survive a post-230 world. That’s why tech billionaires like Mark Zuckerberg love the idea of getting rid of 230: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/03/facebooks-pitch-congress-section-230-me-not-thee But for small tech providers – individuals, co-ops, nonprofits and startups that host fediverse servers, standalone group chats and BBSes – a post-230 world is a mass-extinction event. Ever had a friend demand that you take sides in an interpersonal dispute ("if you invite her to the party, I’m not coming!"). Imagine if your refusal to take sides in a dispute among your friends – and their friends, and their friends – could result in you being named to a suit that could cost hundreds of thousands of dollars to settle: https://www.engine.is/news/primer/section230costs It’s one thing to hope for a more humane internet run by people who want to make hospitable forums for online communities to form. It’s another to ask them to take on an uninsurable risk that could result in the loss of their home, their retirement account, and their life’s savings. A post-230 world is one in which Big Tech must delete first and ask questions later. Yes, Big Tech platforms have many sins to answer for, but making them jointly liable for their users’ speech will flush out treasure-hunters seeking a quick settlement and a quick buck. Again, this isn’t speculative – it’s inevitable. Consider FTX: yes, the disgraced cryptocurrency exchange was a festering hive of fraud – but there’s no way that fraud added up to the 23.6 quintillion dollars in claims that have been laid against it: https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/US-v-SBF-Alameda-Research-Victim-Impact-Statement-3-20-2024.pdf Without 230, Big Tech will shut down anything controversial – and small tech will disappear. It’s the worst of all possible worlds, a gift to tech monopolists and the bullies and crooks who have turned our online communities into shooting galleries. One of the reasons I love working for EFF is our ability to propose technologically informed, sound policy solutions to the very real problems that tech creates, such as our work on interoperability as a way to make it easier for users to escape Big Tech: https://www.eff.org/interoperablefacebook Every year, EFF recognizes the best, bravest and brightest contributors to a better internet and a better technological future, with our annual EFF Awards. Nominations just opened for this year’s awards – if you know someone who fits the bill, here’s the form: https://www.eff.org/nominations-open-2024-eff-awards It’s nearly time for me to sign off on this weekend’s linkdump. For one thing, I have to vacate my backyard hammock, because we’ve got contractors who need to access the side of the house to install our brand new heat-pump (one of two things I’m purchasing with my last lump-sum book advance – the other is corrective cataract surgery that will give me lifelong, perfect vision). I’ve been lusting after a heat-pump for years, and they just keep getting better – though you might not know it, thanks to the fossil-fuel industry disinfo campaign that insists that these unbelievably cool gadgets don’t work. This week in Wired, Matt Simon offers a comprehensive debunking of this nonsense, and on the way, explains the nearly magical technology that allows a heat pump to heat a midwestern home in the dead of winter: https://www.wired.com/story/myth-heat-pumps-cold-weather-freezing-subzero/ As heat pumps become more common, their applications will continue to proliferate. On Bloomberg, Feargus O’Sullivan describes one such application: the Japanese yokushitsu kansouki – a sealed bathroom with its own heat-pump that can perfectly dry all your clothes while you’re out at work: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-05-22/laundry-lessons-from-japanese-bathroom-technology This is amazing stuff – it uses less energy than a clothes-dryer, leaves your clothes wrinkle-free, prevents the rapid deterioration caused by high heat and mechanical agitation, and prevents the microfiber pollution that lowers our air-quality. This is the most solarpunk thing I’ve read all week, and it makes me insanely jealous of Japanese people. The second-most solarpunk thing I’ve read this week came from The New Republic, where Aaron Regunberg and Donald Braman discuss the possibility of using civil asset forfeiture laws – lately expanded to farcical levels by the Supreme Court in Culley – to force the fossil fuel industry to pay for the energy transition: https://newrepublic.com/article/181721/fossil-fuels-civil-forefeiture-pipeline-climate They point out that the fossil fuel industry has committed a string of undisputed crimes, including fraud, and that the Supremes’ new standard for asset forfeiture could comfortably accommodate state AGs and other enforcers who seek billions from Big Oil on this basis. Of course, Big Oil has more resources to fight civil asset forfeiture than the median disputant in these cases ("a low- or moderate-income person of color [with] a suspected connection to drugs"). But it’s an exciting idea! All right, the heat-pump guys really need me to vacate the hammock, so here’s one last quickie for you: Barath Raghavan and Bruce Schneier’s new paper, "Seeing Like a Data Structure": https://www.belfercenter.org/publication/seeing-data-structure This is a masterful riff on James C Scott’s classic Seeing Like a State, and it describes how digitalization forces us into computable categories, and counts the real costs of doing so. It’s a gnarly and thoughtful piece, and it’s been on my mind continuously since Schneier sent it to me yesterday. Something suitably chewy for you to masticate over the long weekend! This day in history (permalink) #20yrsago AT&T: the hollow phone company https://web.archive.org/web/20040605001440/https://werbach.com/blog/2004/05/24.html#a1485 #15yrsago Kid keeping a lending library of banned books in her locker https://web.archive.org/web/20090525190940/http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20090305151758AA7dWwd #10yrsago Scratch-built Mold-a-Rama machine https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2P7MaZUrSQQ #5yrsago Real estate title insurance company exposed 885,000,000 customers’ records, going back 16 years: bank statements, drivers’ licenses, SSNs, and tax records https://krebsonsecurity.com/2019/05/first-american-financial-corp-leaked-hundreds-of-millions-of-title-insurance-records/ #5yrsago Germany demands an end to working cryptography https://memex.craphound.com/2019/05/24/germany-demands-an-end-to-working-cryptography/ #5yrsago Comcast fights shareholder call for lobbying transparency, saying that it would be “burdensome” to reveal how much it spends lobbying states https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2019/05/comcast-does-so-much-lobbying-that-it-says-disclosing-it-all-is-too-hard/ Upcoming appearances (permalink) Media Ecology Association keynote (Amherst, NY), Jun 6-9 https://media-ecology.org/convention HOPE XV, Jul 14 (Queens, NY) https://www.hope.net/talks.html American Association of Law Libraries keynote (Chicago), Jul 21 https://www.aallnet.org/conference/agenda/keynote-speaker/ Recent appearances (permalink) RISD Debates in AI keynote: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IdSEcmplaDs Author’s Alliance 10th Anniversary (at 1:55:00) https://archive.org/details/authors-alliance-10th-anniversary-presentation Upstream podcast https://podscripts.co/podcasts/upstream/the-big-tech-con-w-cory-doctorow Latest books (permalink) The Bezzle: a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about prison-tech and other grifts, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2024 (the-bezzle.org). Signed, personalized copies at Dark Delicacies (https://www.darkdel.com/store/p3062/Available_Feb_20th%3A_The_Bezzle_HB.html#/). "The Lost Cause:" a solarpunk novel of hope in the climate emergency, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), November 2023 (http://lost-cause.org). Signed, personalized copies at Dark Delicacies (https://www.darkdel.com/store/p3007/Pre-Order_Signed_Copies%3A_The_Lost_Cause_HB.html#/) "The Internet Con": A nonfiction book about interoperability and Big Tech (Verso) September 2023 (http://seizethemeansofcomputation.org). Signed copies at Book Soup (https://www.booksoup.com/book/9781804291245). "Red Team Blues": "A grabby, compulsive thriller that will leave you knowing more about how the world works than you did before." Tor Books http://redteamblues.com. Signed copies at Dark Delicacies (US): and Forbidden Planet (UK): https://forbiddenplanet.com/385004-red-team-blues-signed-edition-hardcover/. "Chokepoint Capitalism: How to Beat Big Tech, Tame Big Content, and Get Artists Paid, with Rebecca Giblin", on how to unrig the markets for creative labor, Beacon Press/Scribe 2022 https://chokepointcapitalism.com "Attack Surface": The third Little Brother novel, a standalone technothriller for adults. The Washington Post called it "a political cyberthriller, vigorous, bold and savvy about the limits of revolution and resistance." Order signed, personalized copies from Dark Delicacies https://www.darkdel.com/store/p1840/Available_Now%3A_Attack_Surface.html "How to Destroy Surveillance Capitalism": an anti-monopoly pamphlet analyzing the true harms of surveillance capitalism and proposing a solution. https://onezero.medium.com/how-to-destroy-surveillance-capitalism-8135e6744d59?sk=f6cd10e54e20a07d4c6d0f3ac011af6b) (signed copies: https://www.darkdel.com/store/p2024/Available_Now%3A__How_to_Destroy_Surveillance_Capitalism.html) "Little Brother/Homeland": A reissue omnibus edition with a new introduction by Edward Snowden: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250774583; personalized/signed copies here: https://www.darkdel.com/store/p1750/July%3A__Little_Brother_%26_Homeland.html "Poesy the Monster Slayer" a picture book about monsters, bedtime, gender, and kicking ass. Order here: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781626723627. Get a personalized, signed copy here: https://www.darkdel.com/store/p2682/Corey_Doctorow%3A_Poesy_the_Monster_Slayer_HB.html#/. Upcoming books (permalink) Picks and Shovels: a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about the heroic era of the PC, Tor Books, February 2025 Unauthorized Bread: a graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, 2025 Colophon (permalink) Today’s top sources: Slashdot (https://slashdot.org), Bruce Schneier (https://www.schneier.com/). Currently writing: A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING Picks and Shovels, a Martin Hench noir thriller about the heroic era of the PC. FORTHCOMING TOR BOOKS JAN 2025 Vigilant, Little Brother short story about remote invigilation. FORTHCOMING ON TOR.COM Spill, a Little Brother short story about pipeline protests. FORTHCOMING ON TOR.COM Latest podcast: No One Is the Enshittifier of Their Own Story https://craphound.com/news/2024/05/19/no-one-is-the-enshittifier-of-their-own-story/ This work – excluding any serialized fiction – is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. That means you can use it any way you like, including commercially, provided that you attribute it to me, Cory Doctorow, and include a link to pluralistic.net. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ Quotations and images are not included in this license; they are included either under a limitation or exception to copyright, or on the basis of a separate license. Please exercise caution. How to get Pluralistic: Blog (no ads, tracking, or data-collection): Pluralistic.net Newsletter (no ads, tracking, or data-collection): https://pluralistic.net/plura-list Mastodon (no ads, tracking, or data-collection): https://mamot.fr/@pluralistic Medium (no ads, paywalled): https://doctorow.medium.com/ Twitter (mass-scale, unrestricted, third-party surveillance and advertising): https://twitter.com/doctorow Tumblr (mass-scale, unrestricted, third-party surveillance and advertising): https://mostlysignssomeportents.tumblr.com/tagged/pluralistic "When life gives you SARS, you make sarsaparilla" -Joey "Accordion Guy" DeVilla
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Today’s links They brick you because they can: Samsung and Spotify are too big to care (and that’s just the ’S’es). Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. This day in history: 2014, 2019 Upcoming appearances: Where to find me. Recent appearances: Where I’ve been. Latest books: You keep readin’ em, I’ll keep writin’ ’em. Upcoming books: Like I said, I’ll keep writin’ ’em. Colophon: All the rest. They brick you because they can (permalink) In "The Scorpion and the Frog," a trusting frog gives a scorpion a ride across a brook, only to be stung to death by his passenger upon arrival. The dying frog gasps "why?" and the scorpion replies, "I am sorry, but I couldn’t resist the urge. It’s my character": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Scorpion_and_the_Frog Capitalism’s philosophers had an answer to this conundrum: if the ambition that drives people to enter the business world comes from a "self-interest" that is indistinguishable from sociopathy, just construct a system where it’s in a business’s best interest to make others better off. Adding the constraints of competition and regulation to markets powered by greed produces an alchemical reaction, transforming selfish acts into altruistic outcomes. 40 years ago, these moral sentiments were conveniently set aside by pro-monopoly economists, who developed the "consumer welfare" theory of antitrust enforcement. Under this theory, monopolies were treated as evidence of "efficiency": any time you saw a monopoly in the wild, it meant that you’d found a business that was so good, everyone chose to patronize them to the exclusion of all others. Whether or not you believe this to be true, it doesn’t matter. A business motivated by selfishness, constrained by competition and regulation, may produce things that the public loves above all else, but once it no longer has competitors, what remains is unconstrained selfishness. Even if you think a monopoly arose out of greatness, without competition it will rapidly decay as the business owner claws value away from workers and customers ("I couldn’t resist the urge. It’s in my nature." -A. Scorpion). Enshittification – platform decay – is the result of a collapse in constraints: https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/24/naming-names/#prabhakar-raghavan Digital companies that capture their markets go on to capture their regulators: https://pluralistic.net/2022/06/05/regulatory-capture/ They get to flout privacy, labor and consumer protection law, using digital platforms that can be instantaneously, continuously reconfigured to shift value from business customers and end-users to themselves: https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/19/twiddler/ They lobby for ever-expanding IP rights, which lets them shut down competitors who might reverse-engineer and improve their services: https://locusmag.com/2020/09/cory-doctorow-ip/ And they gain the whip-hand over their workers, with the power to fire any techie who refuses to carry out their enshittificatory plans: https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/10/the-proletarianization-of-tech-workers/ They become too big to fail. They become too big to jail. They become too big to care: https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/04/teach-me-how-to-shruggie/#kagi They enshittify because they can. It’s in their nature. Without competition to discipline their enshittificatory urges, they can’t resist them. Digital is different, though. Analog companies can raise their prices, or worsen next year’s model of their products. Digital businesses can travel back in time and raise the price of something you already own, but need to pay a "subscription" fee for. They can reach back in time and remove features you’ve already paid for. They can even go back in time and take away things you already own. The omniflexible, omnipresent digital tether between a device and its manufacturer creates so many urges that they can’t resist: https://pluralistic.net/2023/12/08/playstationed/#tyler-james-hill Are you one of 4,000,000 people who built "smart home" products from Wink into your walls, ceiling and foundation slab at any time since they started shipping in 2014? Surprise! Now you have to pay a "subscription" for all of those gadgets or they’ll brick your fucking house: https://pluralistic.net/2020/05/07/just-look-at-it/#wink Did you buy a "Mellow Sous Vide" gadget? Surprise, it now costs $48/year to use that gadget! https://pluralistic.net/2020/07/29/break-em-up/#mellow-brown Did you buy an Exogen ultrasound device to stimulate bone growth after a fracture? Surprise, it bricks itself after you’ve used it 343 times! Enjoy your e-waste, Hopalong! https://pluralistic.net/2020/07/31/hall-of-famer/#bricked-exogen Did you buy a Ferrari performance sports-car? Surprise, it bricks itself if it detects "tampering" – and the only way to un-brick it is to connect it to the internet, so you’d better hope it doesn’t brick itself deep in an underground parking garage. Oops! https://pluralistic.net/2020/10/15/expect-the-unexpected/#drm Did you buy a Peloton treadmill? Surprise, your $3,000 "smart" treadmill no longer works in standalone mode – unless you pay $480/year, that treadmill is now a clothes-drying rack: https://pluralistic.net/2021/06/22/vapescreen/#jane-get-me-off-this-crazy-thing Did you buy an Epson printer? Surprise! It will brick itself after you print a certain number of pages, for your own good, because otherwise its ink-sponges might leak: https://pluralistic.net/2022/08/07/inky-wretches/#epson-salty Did you get – no, wait for it – did you get a neural implant? Surprise. The company’s new owners don’t want to continue supporting your implant, and they won’t let anyone else do so either. So now, part of your brain has been bricked: https://pluralistic.net/2022/12/12/unsafe-at-any-speed/#this-is-literally-your-brain-on-capitalism This is like a lifetime money-back guarantee – for companies. Any company that experiences seller’s remorse can cancel or alter the transaction, retroactively. It’s as if Darth Vader opened an MBA program whose only lesson was *I am altering the deal. Pray I don’t alter it further": https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/26/hit-with-a-brick/#graceful-failure Darth Vader has the Force. Corporate enshittifiers have something even more powerful: IP law. Companies can cleverly arrange overlapping layers of IP – anticircumvention, trademark, patent, trade secrecy, terms of service, cybersecurity law, contracts – to criminalize otherwise legal activity, like reverse-engineering, jailbreaking, creating alternative clients or third-party parts: https://pluralistic.net/2022/05/22/apples-cement-overshoes/ That means that companies know that they can enshittify to their heart’s content without fearing a competitor’s disenshittification products. Raise the price of ink all you want, because you’ve figured out how to criminalize generic ink cartridges: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/11/ink-stained-wretches-battle-soul-digital-freedom-taking-place-inside-your-printer That’s a lesson Spotify took to heart. Aaaallll the way back in 2022, Spotify started selling $90 "Car Thing" tablets – little car-vent-mounted gadgets that made it slightly easier to connect your car stereo to your Spotify account. Now that a suitable interval has gone by, Spotify has decided to remotely brick every one of these solid-state devices, no later than December of 2024: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/05/pleas-for-open-sourcing-refunds-as-spotify-plans-to-brick-car-thing-devices/ Now, this may seem like a loss to all those Car Thing owners, who are out $90. But consider this: our descendants are gaining thousands of pieces of immortal, infinitely toxic e-waste. So there’s that. Then there’s this: Jason Koebler just published a breakdown of a leaked sSamsung repair contract on 404 Media, revealing how Samsung requires its "independent" repair partners to trick you, abuse you, spy on you, and literally destroy your phone: https://www.404media.co/samsung-requires-independent-repair-shops-to-share-customer-data-snitch-on-people-who-use-aftermarket-parts-leaked-contract-shows/ First: every time you bring a phone to an independent Samsung repair shop, the company has 24 hours to notify Samsung, providing your name, email, phone number, address, the IMEI of your phone, your warranty status and complaint. Then, the technician is required to inspect your device for any evidence that you have had it serviced by unauthorized technicians or fixed with third-party replacement parts. If they believe you have failed to act in accord with Samsung’s shareholders’ interests, the technician is required to immediately destroy your phone and notify Samsung. (This is radioactively illegal, and has been since 1975, when Congress passed the Magnuson-Moss Warranty Act, which protects your right to use third-party parts:) https://www.vice.com/en/article/gv5ddm/warranty-void-if-removed-stickers-are-illegal Why does Samsung do this? They can’t help themselves. It’s in their nature. Without regulatory constraint, Samsung can eliminate competition and free itself of that constraint, too. They no longer have to worry about the altruism that is said to emerge from selfishness under constraint. They can operate with unconstrained selfishness. They are literally too big to care. That’s why state Right to Repair bills – like the groundbreaking law just passed in Oregon – are so important. They restore discipline to companies like Samsung and Spotify, by protecting the right to reverse-engineer their products and keep them running after the manufacturer has decided to "alter the deal": https://pirg.org/oregon/updates/governor-kotek-signs-the-right-to-repair-act-into-law/ Yesterday, iFixit announced that it was ending its partnership with Samsung, through which Samsung provided it with parts and manuals that it could pass on to customers who wanted to fix their Samsung gadgets: https://www.ifixit.com/News/96162/were-ending-our-samsung-collaboration According to iFixit, the breakup was precipitated by Samsung’s increasing hostility to repair. That’s not surprising. It’s in Samsung’s nature. They can’t help themselves. We we can help ourselves. In states with muscular Right to Repair laws, we don’t need Samsung’s permission to keep our phones out of the landfill. Technicians no longer need to be "authorized" to access parts and diagnostics. Samsung may be a prisoner of its enshittificatory impulses, but with the right regulations and competition, we no longer have to tolerate them. Hey look at this (permalink) &udm=14 | the disenshittification Konami code https://udm14.com/ 50 Billionaire Clans Have Poured $600 Million Into ‘Family Business’ of Buying Candidates https://4taxfairness.substack.com/p/50-billionaire-clans-have-poured Drivers Are Rising Up Against Uber’s ‘Opaque’ Pay System https://www.wired.com/story/drivers-are-rising-up-against-ubers-opaque-pay-system/ This day in history (permalink) #10yrsago Star Wars with Chinese characteristics https://www.mcgreene.org/archives/296 #10yrsago North Korean science fiction and the Maoist road to Mars https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/journal-of-asian-studies/article/abs/comment-on-lets-go-to-the-moon/51BE6920B1AAC3C8148188A2BC7EDBD6 #10yrsago Did GCHQ reveal secrets about computer insecurity when it exorcised the Snowden leaks from the Guardian’s laptops? https://web.archive.org/web/20150216192440/https://www.privacyinternational.org/?q=node/456 #5yrsago Study attributes mysterious rise in CFC emissions to eastern Chinese manufacturing https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-48353341 #5yrsago Big Tech: “If the USA enforces antitrust laws against us, it means China will win!” https://www.wired.com/story/big-tech-breaking-will-only-help-china/ #5yrsago Federal lawsuit calls college textbook/ebook packages a “scam” https://www.vice.com/en/article/pajze9/people-are-finally-fighting-back-against-the-college-textbook-industrys-scam #5yrsago To chase out low-waged workers, Mountain View is banning overnight RV and van parking https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2019-05-21/silicon-valley-s-shame-living-in-a-van-in-google-s-backyard #5yrsago The Oliver Twist workhouse is becoming a block of luxury flats with a “poor door” https://web.archive.org/web/20170726143443/https://www.homesandproperty.co.uk/property-news/controversial-separate-entrance-planned-for-affordable-homes-at-oliver-twist-workhouse-luxury-flat-a112431.html #5yrsago The Reality Bubble: how humanity’s collective blindspots render us incapable of seeing danger until it’s too late (and what to do about it) https://memex.craphound.com/2019/05/23/the-reality-bubble-how-humanitys-collective-blindspots-render-us-incapable-of-seeing-danger-until-its-too-late-and-what-to-do-about-it/ Upcoming appearances (permalink) Media Ecology Association keynote (Amherst, NY), Jun 6-9 https://media-ecology.org/convention HOPE XV, Jul 14 (Queens, NY) https://www.hope.net/talks.html American Association of Law Libraries keynote (Chicago), Jul 21 https://www.aallnet.org/conference/agenda/keynote-speaker/ Recent appearances (permalink) Author’s Alliance 10th Anniversary (at 1:55:00) https://archive.org/details/authors-alliance-10th-anniversary-presentation Upstream podcast https://podscripts.co/podcasts/upstream/the-big-tech-con-w-cory-doctorow Libraries in Response https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IUQZPn9ffSs Latest books (permalink) The Bezzle: a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about prison-tech and other grifts, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2024 (the-bezzle.org). Signed, personalized copies at Dark Delicacies (https://www.darkdel.com/store/p3062/Available_Feb_20th%3A_The_Bezzle_HB.html#/). "The Lost Cause:" a solarpunk novel of hope in the climate emergency, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), November 2023 (http://lost-cause.org). Signed, personalized copies at Dark Delicacies (https://www.darkdel.com/store/p3007/Pre-Order_Signed_Copies%3A_The_Lost_Cause_HB.html#/) "The Internet Con": A nonfiction book about interoperability and Big Tech (Verso) September 2023 (http://seizethemeansofcomputation.org). Signed copies at Book Soup (https://www.booksoup.com/book/9781804291245). "Red Team Blues": "A grabby, compulsive thriller that will leave you knowing more about how the world works than you did before." Tor Books http://redteamblues.com. Signed copies at Dark Delicacies (US): and Forbidden Planet (UK): https://forbiddenplanet.com/385004-red-team-blues-signed-edition-hardcover/. "Chokepoint Capitalism: How to Beat Big Tech, Tame Big Content, and Get Artists Paid, with Rebecca Giblin", on how to unrig the markets for creative labor, Beacon Press/Scribe 2022 https://chokepointcapitalism.com "Attack Surface": The third Little Brother novel, a standalone technothriller for adults. The Washington Post called it "a political cyberthriller, vigorous, bold and savvy about the limits of revolution and resistance." Order signed, personalized copies from Dark Delicacies https://www.darkdel.com/store/p1840/Available_Now%3A_Attack_Surface.html "How to Destroy Surveillance Capitalism": an anti-monopoly pamphlet analyzing the true harms of surveillance capitalism and proposing a solution. https://onezero.medium.com/how-to-destroy-surveillance-capitalism-8135e6744d59?sk=f6cd10e54e20a07d4c6d0f3ac011af6b) (signed copies: https://www.darkdel.com/store/p2024/Available_Now%3A__How_to_Destroy_Surveillance_Capitalism.html) "Little Brother/Homeland": A reissue omnibus edition with a new introduction by Edward Snowden: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250774583; personalized/signed copies here: https://www.darkdel.com/store/p1750/July%3A__Little_Brother_%26_Homeland.html "Poesy the Monster Slayer" a picture book about monsters, bedtime, gender, and kicking ass. Order here: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781626723627. Get a personalized, signed copy here: https://www.darkdel.com/store/p2682/Corey_Doctorow%3A_Poesy_the_Monster_Slayer_HB.html#/. Upcoming books (permalink) Picks and Shovels: a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about the heroic era of the PC, Tor Books, February 2025 Unauthorized Bread: a graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, 2025 Colophon (permalink) Today’s top sources: Currently writing: A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING Picks and Shovels, a Martin Hench noir thriller about the heroic era of the PC. FORTHCOMING TOR BOOKS JAN 2025 Vigilant, Little Brother short story about remote invigilation. FORTHCOMING ON TOR.COM Spill, a Little Brother short story about pipeline protests. FORTHCOMING ON TOR.COM Latest podcast: No One Is the Enshittifier of Their Own Story https://craphound.com/news/2024/05/19/no-one-is-the-enshittifier-of-their-own-story/ This work – excluding any serialized fiction – is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. That means you can use it any way you like, including commercially, provided that you attribute it to me, Cory Doctorow, and include a link to pluralistic.net. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ Quotations and images are not included in this license; they are included either under a limitation or exception to copyright, or on the basis of a separate license. Please exercise caution. How to get Pluralistic: Blog (no ads, tracking, or data-collection): Pluralistic.net Newsletter (no ads, tracking, or data-collection): https://pluralistic.net/plura-list Mastodon (no ads, tracking, or data-collection): https://mamot.fr/@pluralistic Medium (no ads, paywalled): https://doctorow.medium.com/ Twitter (mass-scale, unrestricted, third-party surveillance and advertising): https://twitter.com/doctorow Tumblr (mass-scale, unrestricted, third-party surveillance and advertising): https://mostlysignssomeportents.tumblr.com/tagged/pluralistic "When life gives you SARS, you make sarsaparilla" -Joey "Accordion Guy" DeVilla
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Today’s links Red Lobster was killed by private equity, not Endless Shrimp: Using class warfare as cover for looting. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. This day in history: 2009, 2014, 2019, 2023 Upcoming appearances: Where to find me. Recent appearances: Where I’ve been. Latest books: You keep readin’ em, I’ll keep writin’ ’em. Upcoming books: Like I said, I’ll keep writin’ ’em. Colophon: All the rest. Red Lobster was killed by private equity, not Endless Shrimp (permalink) A decade ago, a hedge fund had an improbable viral comedy hit: a 294-page slide deck explaining why Olive Garden was going out of business, blaming the failure on too many breadsticks and insufficiently salted pasta-water: https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/940944/000092189514002031/ex991dfan14a06297125_091114.pdf Everyone loved this story. As David Dayen wrote for Salon, it let readers "mock that silly chain restaurant they remember from their childhoods in the suburbs" and laugh at "the silly hedge fund that took the time to write the world’s worst review": https://www.salon.com/2014/09/17/the_real_olive_garden_scandal_why_greedy_hedge_funders_suddenly_care_so_much_about_breadsticks/ But – as Dayen wrote at the time, the hedge fund that produced that slide deck, Starboard Value, was not motivated by dissatisfaction with bread-sticks. They were "activist investors" (finspeak for "rapacious assholes") with a giant stake in Darden Restaurants, Olive Garden’s parent company. They wanted Darden to liquidate all of Olive Garden’s real-estate holdings and declare a one-off dividend that would net investors a billion dollars, while literally yanking the floor out from beneath Olive Garden, converting it from owner to tenant, subject to rent-shocks and other nasty surprises. They wanted to asset-strip the company, in other words ("asset strip" is what they call it in hedge-fund land; the mafia calls it a "bust-out," famous to anyone who watched the twenty-third episode of The Sopranos): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bust_Out Starboard didn’t have enough money to force the sale, but they had recently engineered the CEO’s ouster. The giant slide-deck making fun of Olive Garden’s food was just a PR campaign to help it sell the bust-out by creating a narrative that they were being activists* to save this badly managed disaster of a restaurant chain. *assholes Starboard was bent on eviscerating Darden like a couple of entrail-maddened dogs in an elk carcass: https://web.archive.org/web/20051220005944/http://alumni.media.mit.edu/~solan/dogsinelk/ They had forced Darden to sell off another of its holdings, Red Lobster, to a hedge-fund called Golden Gate Capital. Golden Gate flogged all of Red Lobster’s real estate holdings for $2.1 billion the same day, then pissed it all away on dividends to its shareholders, including Starboard. The new landlords, a Real Estate Investment Trust, proceeded to charge so much for rent on those buildings Red Lobster just flogged that the company’s net earnings immediately dropped by half. Dayen ends his piece with these prophetic words: Olive Garden and Red Lobster may not be destinations for hipster Internet journalists, and they have seen revenue declines amid stagnant middle-class wages and increased competition. But they are still profitable businesses. Thousands of Americans work there. Why should they be bled dry by predatory investors in the name of “shareholder value”? What of the value of worker productivity instead of the financial engineers? Flash forward a decade. Today, Dayen is editor-in-chief of The American Prospect, one of the best sources of news about private equity looting in the world. Writing for the Prospect, Luke Goldstein picks up Dayen’s story, ten years on: https://prospect.org/economy/2024-05-22-raiding-red-lobster/ It’s not pretty. Ten years of being bled out on rents and flipped from one hedge fund to another has killed Red Lobster. It just shuttered 50 restaurants and declared Chapter 11 bankruptcy. Ten years hasn’t changed much; the same kind of snark that was deployed at the news of Olive Garden’s imminent demise is now being hurled at Red Lobster. Instead of dunking on free bread-sticks, Red Lobster’s grave-dancers are jeering at "Endless Shrimp," a promotional deal that works exactly how it sounds like it would work. Endless Shrimp cost the chain $11m. Which raises a question: why did Red Lobster make this money-losing offer? Are they just good-hearted slobs? Can’t they do math? Or, you know, was it another hedge-fund, bust-out scam? Here’s a hint. The supplier who provided Red Lobster with all that shrimp is Thai Union. Thai Union also owns Red Lobster. They bought the chain from Golden Gate Capital, last seen in 2014, holding a flash-sale on all of Red Lobster’s buildings, pocketing billions, and cutting Red Lobster’s earnings in half. Red Lobster rose to success – 700 restaurants nationwide at its peak – by combining no-frills dining with powerful buying power, which it used to force discounts from seafood suppliers. In response, the seafood industry consolidated through a wave of mergers, turning into a cozy cartel that could resist the buyer power of Red Lobster and other major customers. This was facilitated by conservation efforts that limited the total volume of biomass that fishers were allowed to extract, and allocated quotas to existing companies and individual fishermen. The costs of complying with this "catch management" system were high, punishingly so for small independents, bearably so for large conglomerates. Competition from overseas fisheries drove consolidation further, as countries in the global south were blocked from implementing their own conservation efforts. US fisheries merged further, seeking economies of scale that would let them compete, largely by shafting fishermen and other suppliers. Today’s Alaskan crab fishery is dominated by a four-company cartel; in the Pacific Northwest, most fish goes through a single intermediary, Pacific Seafood. These dominant actors entered into illegal collusive arrangements with one another to rig their markets and further immiserate their suppliers, who filed antitrust suits accusing the companies of operating a monopsony (a market with a powerful buyer, akin to a monopoly, which is a market with a powerful seller): https://www.classaction.org/news/pacific-seafood-under-fire-for-allegedly-fixing-prices-paid-to-dungeness-crabbers-in-pacific-northwest Golden Gate bought Red Lobster in the midst of these fish wars, promising to right its ship. As Goldstein points out, that’s the same promise they made when they bought Payless shoes, just before they destroyed the company and flogged it off to Alden Capital, the hedge fund that bought and destroyed dozens of America’s most beloved newspapers: https://pluralistic.net/2021/10/16/sociopathic-monsters/#all-the-news-thats-fit-to-print Under Golden Gate’s management, Red Lobster saw its staffing levels slashed, so diners endured longer wait times to be seated and served. Then, in 2020, they sold the company to Thai Union, the company’s largest supplier (a transaction Goldstein likens to a Walmart buyout of Procter and Gamble). Thai Union continued to bleed Red Lobster, imposing more cuts and loading it up with more debts financed by yet another private equity giant, Fortress Investment Group. That brings us to today, with Thai Union having moved a gigantic amount of its own product through a failing, debt-loaded subsidiary, even as it lobbies for deregulation of American fisheries, which would let it and its lobbying partners drain American waters of the last of its depleted fish stocks. Dayen’s 2020 must-read book Monopolized describes the way that monopolies proliferate, using the US health care industry as a case-study: https://pluralistic.net/2021/01/29/fractal-bullshit/#dayenu After deregulation allowed the pharma sector to consolidate, it acquired pricing power of hospitals, who found themselves gouged to the edge of bankruptcy on drug prices. Hospitals then merged into regional monopolies, which allowed them to resist pharma pricing power – and gouge health insurance companies, who saw the price of routine care explode. So the insurance companies gobbled each other up, too, leaving most of us with two or fewer choices for health insurance – even as insurance prices skyrocketed, and our benefits shrank. Today, Americans pay more for worse healthcare, which is delivered by health workers who get paid less and work under worse conditions. That’s because, lacking a regulator to consolidate patients’ interests, and strong unions to consolidate workers’ interests, patients and workers are easy pickings for those consolidated links in the health supply-chain. That’s a pretty good model for understanding what’s happened to Red Lobster: monopoly power and monopsony power begat more monopolies and monoposonies in the supply chain. Everything that hasn’t consolidated is defenseless: diners, restaurant workers, fishermen, and the environment. We’re all fucked. Decent, no-frills family restaurant are good. Great, even. I’m not the world’s greatest fan of chain restaurants, but I’m also comfortably middle-class and not struggling to afford to give my family a nice night out at a place with good food, friendly staff and reasonable prices. These places are easy pickings for looters because the people who patronize them have little power in our society – and because those of us with more power are easily tricked into sneering at these places’ failures as a kind of comeuppance that’s all that’s due to tacky joints that serve the working class. Hey look at this (permalink) ‘My songs spread like herpes’: why did satirical genius Tom Lehrer swap worldwide fame for obscurity? https://www.theguardian.com/music/article/2024/may/22/my-songs-spread-like-herpes-why-did-satirical-genius-tom-lehrer-swap-worldwide-fame-for-obscurity (h/t Metafilter) The last XOXO https://2024.xoxofest.com/ The great rewiring: is social media really behind an epidemic of teenage mental illness? https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-024-00902-2 This day in history (permalink) #15yrsago LA cop union buys stake in newspaper, demands critical writers be fired https://web.archive.org/web/20090523133759/http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/lanow/2009/05/la-police-union-wants-san-diego-newspaper-writers-fired.html #15yrsago UK towns move to extend abusive license plate surveillance grid https://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/whos_watching_you/8064333.stm #15yrsago BA getting rid of first class in new planes https://www.theguardian.com/business/2009/may/22/british-airways-first-class-loss #15yrsago English schoolkids go on strike until CCTVs are removed from classes https://www.guardian-series.co.uk/news/4377621.LOUGHTON__Pupils_walk_out_of_lessons_in_protest_against_Big_Brother_cameras/ #15yrsago Obamabot to be installed at Disney World, will robotically cover up torture, suspend habeas corpus https://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/22/us/politics/22obamatron.html #15yrsago Obama promises to suspend Habeas Corpus https://web.archive.org/web/20090524000332/http://open.salon.com/blog/behind_blue_eyes/2009/05/22/obama_proposes_indefinite_preventive_detention_without_trial #15yrsago Verizon to cops: we won’t help you track down sick, possibly dying man unless you pay his $20 phone bill https://web.archive.org/web/20090524071613/https://www.timesreporter.com/homepage/x862899385/Unconscious-Carroll-man-found-after-11-hour-search #15yrsago T-Minus: graphic novel tells the history of the space race https://memex.craphound.com/2009/05/22/t-minus-graphic-novel-tells-the-history-of-the-space-race/ #10yrsago Brandalists replace 365 outdoor ads in 10 UK cities with hand-printed works of art https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lKRmVwqhEdE #10yrsago Glorious juvenile moment of Dragon’s Lair heroism https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XQ9cqaVjufo #10yrsago Edward Snowden hosted a cryptoparty and ran a Tor exit node https://www.wired.com/2014/05/snowden-cryptoparty/ #10yrsago Substitute fine old rums for bourbon and save https://web.archive.org/web/20140523092132/http://www.theawl.com/2014/05/how-to-shut-up-about-the-whiskey-shortage #10yrsago House leaders gut NSA-curbing USA FREEDOM Act https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2014/05/eff-dismayed-houses-gutted-usa-freedom-act #5yrsago Exploitation of workers becomes more socially acceptable if the workers are perceived as “passionate” about their jobs https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30998042/ #5yrsago The “Uber of Live Music” will charge you $1100-1600 to book a house show, pay musicians $100 https://www.jwz.org/blog/2019/05/the-uber-of-live-music/ #5yrsago Trump’s stealth attack on Social Security: “Chained CPI” https://www.commondreams.org/views/2019/05/21/beware-trumps-sneak-attack-social-security #5yrsago In less than one second, a malicious web-page can uniquely fingerprint an Iphone, Pixel 2 or Pixel 3 without any explicit user interaction https://www.ieee-security.org/TC/SP2019/papers/405.pdf #5yrsago Americans believe that they should own the mountains of data produced by their cars, but they don’t https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/20/opinion/car-repair-data-privacy.html #5yrsago A self-appointed wing of the American judicial system is about to make it much harder to fight terms of service https://www.vice.com/en/article/a3x79a/new-proposal-would-let-companies-further-screw-you-over-with-terms-of-service #1yrago Justice Warriors https://pluralistic.net/2023/05/22/libras-assemble/#the-uz Upcoming appearances (permalink) Media Ecology Association keynote (Amherst, NY), Jun 6-9 https://media-ecology.org/convention HOPE XV, Jul 14 (Queens, NY) https://www.hope.net/talks.html American Association of Law Libraries keynote (Chicago), Jul 21 https://www.aallnet.org/conference/agenda/keynote-speaker/ Recent appearances (permalink) Upstream podcast https://podscripts.co/podcasts/upstream/the-big-tech-con-w-cory-doctorow Libraries in Response https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IUQZPn9ffSs Suur Futuroloogiline Kongress https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6hITj793htg&t=398s Latest books (permalink) The Bezzle: a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about prison-tech and other grifts, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2024 (the-bezzle.org). Signed, personalized copies at Dark Delicacies (https://www.darkdel.com/store/p3062/Available_Feb_20th%3A_The_Bezzle_HB.html#/). "The Lost Cause:" a solarpunk novel of hope in the climate emergency, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), November 2023 (http://lost-cause.org). Signed, personalized copies at Dark Delicacies (https://www.darkdel.com/store/p3007/Pre-Order_Signed_Copies%3A_The_Lost_Cause_HB.html#/) "The Internet Con": A nonfiction book about interoperability and Big Tech (Verso) September 2023 (http://seizethemeansofcomputation.org). Signed copies at Book Soup (https://www.booksoup.com/book/9781804291245). "Red Team Blues": "A grabby, compulsive thriller that will leave you knowing more about how the world works than you did before." Tor Books http://redteamblues.com. Signed copies at Dark Delicacies (US): and Forbidden Planet (UK): https://forbiddenplanet.com/385004-red-team-blues-signed-edition-hardcover/. "Chokepoint Capitalism: How to Beat Big Tech, Tame Big Content, and Get Artists Paid, with Rebecca Giblin", on how to unrig the markets for creative labor, Beacon Press/Scribe 2022 https://chokepointcapitalism.com "Attack Surface": The third Little Brother novel, a standalone technothriller for adults. The Washington Post called it "a political cyberthriller, vigorous, bold and savvy about the limits of revolution and resistance." Order signed, personalized copies from Dark Delicacies https://www.darkdel.com/store/p1840/Available_Now%3A_Attack_Surface.html "How to Destroy Surveillance Capitalism": an anti-monopoly pamphlet analyzing the true harms of surveillance capitalism and proposing a solution. https://onezero.medium.com/how-to-destroy-surveillance-capitalism-8135e6744d59?sk=f6cd10e54e20a07d4c6d0f3ac011af6b) (signed copies: https://www.darkdel.com/store/p2024/Available_Now%3A__How_to_Destroy_Surveillance_Capitalism.html) "Little Brother/Homeland": A reissue omnibus edition with a new introduction by Edward Snowden: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250774583; personalized/signed copies here: https://www.darkdel.com/store/p1750/July%3A__Little_Brother_%26_Homeland.html "Poesy the Monster Slayer" a picture book about monsters, bedtime, gender, and kicking ass. Order here: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781626723627. Get a personalized, signed copy here: https://www.darkdel.com/store/p2682/Corey_Doctorow%3A_Poesy_the_Monster_Slayer_HB.html#/. Upcoming books (permalink) Picks and Shovels: a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about the heroic era of the PC, Tor Books, February 2025 Unauthorized Bread: a graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, 2025 Colophon (permalink) Today’s top sources: Currently writing: A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING Picks and Shovels, a Martin Hench noir thriller about the heroic era of the PC. FORTHCOMING TOR BOOKS JAN 2025 Vigilant, Little Brother short story about remote invigilation. FORTHCOMING ON TOR.COM Spill, a Little Brother short story about pipeline protests. FORTHCOMING ON TOR.COM Latest podcast: No One Is the Enshittifier of Their Own Story https://craphound.com/news/2024/05/19/no-one-is-the-enshittifier-of-their-own-story/ This work – excluding any serialized fiction – is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. That means you can use it any way you like, including commercially, provided that you attribute it to me, Cory Doctorow, and include a link to pluralistic.net. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ Quotations and images are not included in this license; they are included either under a limitation or exception to copyright, or on the basis of a separate license. Please exercise caution. How to get Pluralistic: Blog (no ads, tracking, or data-collection): Pluralistic.net Newsletter (no ads, tracking, or data-collection): https://pluralistic.net/plura-list Mastodon (no ads, tracking, or data-collection): https://mamot.fr/@pluralistic Medium (no ads, paywalled): https://doctorow.medium.com/ Twitter (mass-scale, unrestricted, third-party surveillance and advertising): https://twitter.com/doctorow Tumblr (mass-scale, unrestricted, third-party surveillance and advertising): https://mostlysignssomeportents.tumblr.com/tagged/pluralistic "When life gives you SARS, you make sarsaparilla" -Joey "Accordion Guy" DeVilla
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Today’s links How finfluencers destroyed the housing and lives of thousands of people: The real estate speculator bezzle has a very ugly third act. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. This day in history: 2004, 2009, 2014, 2019, 2024 Upcoming appearances: Where to find me. Recent appearances: Where I’ve been. Latest books: You keep readin’ em, I’ll keep writin’ ’em. Upcoming books: Like I said, I’ll keep writin’ ’em. Colophon: All the rest. How finfluencers destroyed the housing and lives of thousands of people (permalink) The crash of 2008 imparted many lessons to those of us who were only dimly aware of finance, especially the problems of complexity as a way of disguising fraud and recklessness. That was really the first lesson of 2008: "financial engineering" is mostly a way of obscuring crime behind a screen of technical jargon. This is a vital principle to keep in mind, because obscenely well-resourced "financial engineers" are on a tireless, perennial search for opportunities to disguise fraud as innovation. As Riley Quinn says, "Any time you hear ’fintech,’ substitute ’unlicensed bank’": https://pluralistic.net/2023/05/01/usury/#tech-exceptionalism But there’s another important lesson to learn from the 2008 disaster, a lesson that’s as old as the South Seas Bubble: "leverage" (that is, debt) is a force multiplier for fraud. Easy credit for financial speculation turns local scams into regional crime waves; it turns regional crime into national crises; it turns national crises into destabilizing global meltdowns. When financial speculators have easy access to credit, they "lever up" their wagers. A speculator buys your house and uses it for collateral for a loan to buy another house, then they make a bet using that house as collateral and buy a third house, and so on. This is an obviously terrible practice and lenders who extend credit on this basis end up riddling the real economy with rot – a single default in the chain can ripple up and down it and take down a whole neighborhood, town or city. Any time you see this behavior in debt markets, you should batten your hatches for the coming collapse. Unsurprisingly, this is very common in crypto speculation, where it’s obscured behind the bland, unpronounceable euphemism of "re-hypothecation": https://www.coindesk.com/consensus-magazine/2023/05/10/rehypothecation-may-be-common-in-traditional-finance-but-it-will-never-work-with-bitcoin/ Loose credit markets often originate with central banks. The dogma that holds that the only role the government has to play in tuning the economy is in setting interest rates at the Fed means the answer to a cooling economy is cranking down the prime rate, meaning that everyone earns less money on their savings and are therefore incentivized to go and risk their retirement playing at Wall Street’s casino. The "zero interest rate policy" shows what happens when this tactic is carried out for long enough. When the economy is built upon mountains of low-interest debt, when every business, every stick of physical plant, every car and every home is leveraged to the brim and cross-collateralized with one another, central bankers have to keep interest rates low. Raising them, even a little, could trigger waves of defaults and blow up the whole economy. Holding interest rates at zero – or even flipping them to negative, so that your savings lose value every day you refuse to flush them into the finance casino – results in still more reckless betting, and that results in even more risk, which makes it even harder to put interest rates back up again. This is a morally and economically complicated phenomenon. On the one hand, when the government provides risk-free bonds to investors (that is, when the Fed rate is over 0%), they’re providing "universal basic income for people with money." If you have money, you can park it in T-Bills (Treasury bonds) and the US government will give you more money: https://realprogressives.org/mmp-blog-34-responses/ On the other hand, while T-Bills exist and are foundational to the borrowing picture for speculators, ZIRP creates free debt for people with money – it allows for ever-greater, ever-deadlier forms of leverage, with ever-worsening consequences for turning off the tap. As 2008 forcibly reminded us, the vast mountains of complex derivatives and other forms of exotic debt only seems like an abstraction. In reality, these exotic financial instruments are directly tethered to real things in the real economy, and when the faery gold disappears, it takes down your home, your job, your community center, your schools, and your whole country’s access to cancer medication: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2012/jun/08/greek-drug-shortage-worsens Being a billionaire automatically lowers your IQ by 30 points, as you are insulated from the consequences of your follies, lapses, prejudices and superstitions. As @pixelpusher220@dmv.community says, Elon Musk is what Howard Hughes would have turned into if he hadn’t been a recluse: https://mamot.fr/@pixelpusher220@dmv.community/112457199729198644 The same goes for financiers during periods of loose credit. Loose Fed money created an "everything bubble" that saw the prices of every asset explode, from housing to stocks, from wine to baseball cards. When every bet pays off, you win the game by betting on everything: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Everything_bubble That meant that the ZIRPocene was an era in which ever-stupider people were given ever-larger sums of money to gamble with. This was the golden age of the "finfluencer" – a Tiktok dolt with a surefire way for you to get rich by making reckless bets that endanger the livelihoods, homes and wellbeing of your neighbors. Finfluencers are dolts, but they’re also dangerous. Writing for The American Prospect, the always-amazing Maureen Tkacik describes how a small clutch of passive-income-brainworm gurus created a financial weapon of mass destruction, buying swathes of apartment buildings and then destroying them, ruining the lives of their tenants, and their investors: https://prospect.org/infrastructure/housing/2024-05-22-hell-underwater-landlord/ Tcacik’s main characters are Matt Picheny, Brent Ritchie and Koteswar “Jay” Gajavelli, who ran a scheme to flip apartment buildings, primarily in Houston, America’s fastest growing metro, which also boasts some of America’s weakest protections for tenants. These finance bros worked through Gajavelli’s company Applesway Investment Group, which levered up his investors’ money with massive loans from Arbor Realty Trust, who also originated loans to many other speculators and flippers. For investors, the scheme was a classic heads-I-win/tails-you-lose: Gajavelli paid himself a percentage of the price of every building he bought, a percentage of monthly rental income, and a percentage of the resale price. This is typical of the "syndicating" sector, which raised $111 billion on this basis: https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-housing-bust-comes-for-thousands-of-small-time-investors-3934beb3 Gajavelli and co bought up whole swathes of Houston and other cities, apartment blocks both modest and luxurious, including buildings that had already been looted by previous speculators. As interest rates crept up and the payments for the adjustable-rate loans supporting these investments exploded, Gajavell’s Applesway and its subsidiary LLCs started to stiff their suppliers. Garbage collection dwindled, then ceased. Water outages became common – first weekly, then daily. Community rooms and pools shuttered. Lawns grew to waist-high gardens of weeds, fouled with mounds of fossil dogshit. Crime ran rampant, including murders. Buildings filled with rats and bedbugs. Ceilings caved in. Toilets backed up. Hallways filled with raw sewage: https://pluralistic.net/timberridge Meanwhile, the value of these buildings was plummeting, and not just because of their terrible condition – the whole market was cooling off, in part thanks to those same interest-rate hikes. Because the loans were daisy-chained, problems with a single building threatened every building in the portfolio – and there were problems with a lot more than one building. This ruination wasn’t limited to Gajavelli’s holdings. Arbor lent to multiple finfluencer grifters, providing the leverage for every Tiktok dolt to ruin a neighborhood of their choosing. Arbor’s founder, the "flamboyant" Ivan Kaufman, is associated with a long list of bizarre pop-culture and financial freak incidents. These have somehow eclipsed his scandals, involving – you guessed it – buying up apartment buildings and turning them into dangerous slums. Two of his buildings in Hyattsville, MD accumulated 2,162 violations in less than three years. Arbor graduated from owning slums to creating them, lending out money to grifters via a "crowdfunding" platform that rooked retail investors into the scam, taking advantage of Obama-era deregulation of "qualified investor" restrictions to sucker unsophisticated savers into handing over money that was funneled to dolts like Gajavelli. Arbor ran the loosest book in town, originating mortgages that wouldn’t pass the (relatively lax) criteria of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. This created an ever-enlarging pool of apartments run by dolts, without the benefit of federal insurance. As one short-seller’s report on Arbor put it, they were the origin of an epidemic of "Slumlord Millionaires": https://viceroyresearch.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/Arbor-Slumlord-Millionaires-Jan-8-2023.pdf The private equity grift is hard to understand from the outside, because it appears that a bunch of sober-sided, responsible institutions lose out big when PE firms default on their loans. But the story of the Slumlord Millionaires shows how such a scam could be durable over such long timescales: remember that the "syndicating" sector pays itself giant amounts of money whether it wins or loses. The consider that they finance this with investor capital from "crowdfunding" platforms that rope in naive investors. The owners of these crowdfunding platforms are conduits for the money to make the loans to make the bets – but it’s not their money. Quite the contrary: they get a fee on every loan they originate, and a share of the interest payments, but they’re not on the hook for loans that default. Heads they win, tails we lose. In other words, these crooks are intermediaries – they’re platforms. When you’re on the customer side of the platform, it’s easy to think that your misery benefits the sellers on the platform’s other side. For example, it’s easy to believe that as your Facebook feed becomes enshittified with ads, that advertisers are the beneficiaries of this enshittification. But the reason you’re seeing so many ads in your feed is that Facebook is also ripping off advertisers: charging them more, spending less to police ad-fraud, being sloppier with ad-targeting. If you’re not paying for the product, you’re the product. But if you are paying for the product? You’re still the product: https://pluralistic.net/2021/01/04/how-to-truth/#adfraud In the same way: the private equity slumlord who raises your rent, loads up on junk fees, and lets your building disintegrate into a crime-riddled, sewage-tainted, rat-infested literal pile of garbage is absolutely fucking you over. But they’re also fucking over their investors. They didn’t buy the building with their own money, so their not on the hook when it’s condemned or when there’s a forced sale. They got a share of the initial sale price, they get a percentage of your rental payments, so any upside they miss out on from a successful sale is just a little extra they’re not getting. If they squeeze you hard enough, they can probably make up the difference. The fact that this criminal playbook has wormed its way into every corner of the housing market makes it especially urgent and visible. Housing – shelter – is a human right, and no person can thrive without a stable home. The conversion of housing, from human right to speculative asset, has been a catastrophe: https://pluralistic.net/2021/06/06/the-rents-too-damned-high/ Of course, that’s not the only "asset class" that has been enshittified by private equity looters. They love any kind of business that you must patronize. Capitalists hate capitalism, so they love a captive audience, which is why PE took over your local nursing home and murdered your gran: https://pluralistic.net/2021/02/23/acceptable-losses/#disposable-olds Homes are the last asset of the middle class, and the grifter class know it, so they’re coming for your house. Willie Sutton robbed banks because "that’s where the money is" and We Buy Ugly Houses defrauds your parents out of their family home because that’s where their money is: https://pluralistic.net/2023/05/11/ugly-houses-ugly-truth/#homevestor The plague of housing speculation isn’t a US-only phenomenon. We have allies in Spain who are fighting our Wall Street landlords: https://pluralistic.net/2021/11/24/no-puedo-pagar-no-pagara/#fuckin-aardvarks Also in Berlin: https://pluralistic.net/2021/08/16/die-miete-ist-zu-hoch/#assets-v-human-rights The fight for decent housing is the fight for a decent world. That’s why unions have joined the fight for better, de-financialized housing. When a union member spends two hours commuting every day from a black-mold-filled apartment that costs 50% of their paycheck, they suffer just as surely as if their boss cut their wage: https://pluralistic.net/2023/12/13/i-want-a-roof-over-my-head/#and-bread-on-the-table The solutions to our housing crises aren’t all that complicated – they just run counter to the interests of speculators and the ruling class. Rent control, which neoliberal economists have long dismissed as an impossible, inevitable disaster, actually works very well: https://pluralistic.net/2023/05/16/mortgages-are-rent-control/#housing-is-a-human-right-not-an-asset As does public housing: https://jacobin.com/2023/10/red-vienna-public-affordable-housing-homelessness-matthew-yglesias There are ways to have a decent home and a decent life without being burdened with debt, and without being a pawn in someone else’s highly leveraged casino bet. (Image: Boy G/Google Maps, modified) Hey look at this (permalink) I Debunked Evolutionary Psychology https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=31e0RcImReY How “dark money” groups help private ISPs lobby against municipal broadband https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2024/05/how-dark-money-groups-help-private-isps-lobby-against-municipal-broadband/ What Will You Do If the Election Is Stolen? https://www.hamiltonnolan.com/p/what-will-you-do-if-the-election This day in history (permalink) #20yrsago Matt Jones: refactor the UI https://web.archive.org/web/20040527124940/http://www.diepunyhumans.com/archives/000346.html #15yrsago US corporations fighting to keep poor countries from getting patent-free access to green tech https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/cifamerica/2009/may/19/wto-climate-change-intellectual-property #15yrsago How digging up expense reports led a journalist to clobber British govt https://www.seattlepi.com/seattlenews/article/former-uw-student-shakes-up-british-government-888589.php?source=rss #10yrsago Surveillance state: the NSA doesn’t stand alone https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2014/05/how-nsa-transforming-law-enforcement #10yrsago Kleargear ruins customers’ credit over online criticism, refuses to honor US judgment https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2014/05/embattled-retailer-kleargear-fights-back-against-online-review-defeat/ #10yrsago Science fiction and the law: free speech, censorship, privacy and surveillance https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2439423 #10yrsago Brussels: Water cannons turned on anti-TTIP protesters fighting the Son of ACTA https://www.techdirt.com/2014/05/16/water-cannons-turned-peaceful-ttip-protestors-brussels-as-public-barred-negotiations/https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/05/should-hackers-fix-cybersecurity-holes-or-exploit-them/371197/ #10yrsago 100 creeps busted in massive voyeurware sweep https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2014/05/more-than-100-arrested-in-global-crackdown-on-peeping-tom-malware/ #5yrsago Massive, careful study finds that social media use is generally neutral for kids’ happiness, and sometimes positive https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1902058116 #5yrsago The government of Baltimore has been taken hostage by ransomware and may remain shut down for weeks https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2019/05/baltimore-ransomware-nightmare-could-last-weeks-more-with-big-consequences/ #5yrsago The empirical impact of Lyft and Uber on cities: congestion (especially downtown, especially during “surges”), overworked drivers https://www.sfgate.com/technology/article/Uber-Lyft-San-Francisco-pros-cons-ride-hailing-13841277.php #5yrsago Facebook’s Dutch Head of Policy lied to the Dutch parliament about election interference https://www.bitsoffreedom.nl/2019/05/21/facebook-lies-to-dutch-parliament-about-election-manipulation/ #5yrsago Rogess: chess with roguelike combat https://pippinbarr.com/rogess/ #1yrago Rich People’s Gain is Worth Less Than Poor People’s Pain https://pluralistic.net/2023/05/21/rich-peoples-gain-is-worth-less-than-poor-peoples-pain/ Upcoming appearances (permalink) Media Ecology Association keynote (Amherst, NY), Jun 6-9 https://media-ecology.org/convention HOPE XV, Jul 14 (Queens, NY) https://www.hope.net/talks.html American Association of Law Libraries keynote (Chicago), Jul 21 https://www.aallnet.org/conference/agenda/keynote-speaker/ Recent appearances (permalink) Upstream podcast https://podscripts.co/podcasts/upstream/the-big-tech-con-w-cory-doctorow Libraries in Response https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IUQZPn9ffSs Suur Futuroloogiline Kongress https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6hITj793htg&t=398s Latest books (permalink) The Bezzle: a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about prison-tech and other grifts, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2024 (the-bezzle.org). Signed, personalized copies at Dark Delicacies (https://www.darkdel.com/store/p3062/Available_Feb_20th%3A_The_Bezzle_HB.html#/). "The Lost Cause:" a solarpunk novel of hope in the climate emergency, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), November 2023 (http://lost-cause.org). Signed, personalized copies at Dark Delicacies (https://www.darkdel.com/store/p3007/Pre-Order_Signed_Copies%3A_The_Lost_Cause_HB.html#/) "The Internet Con": A nonfiction book about interoperability and Big Tech (Verso) September 2023 (http://seizethemeansofcomputation.org). Signed copies at Book Soup (https://www.booksoup.com/book/9781804291245). "Red Team Blues": "A grabby, compulsive thriller that will leave you knowing more about how the world works than you did before." Tor Books http://redteamblues.com. Signed copies at Dark Delicacies (US): and Forbidden Planet (UK): https://forbiddenplanet.com/385004-red-team-blues-signed-edition-hardcover/. "Chokepoint Capitalism: How to Beat Big Tech, Tame Big Content, and Get Artists Paid, with Rebecca Giblin", on how to unrig the markets for creative labor, Beacon Press/Scribe 2022 https://chokepointcapitalism.com "Attack Surface": The third Little Brother novel, a standalone technothriller for adults. The Washington Post called it "a political cyberthriller, vigorous, bold and savvy about the limits of revolution and resistance." Order signed, personalized copies from Dark Delicacies https://www.darkdel.com/store/p1840/Available_Now%3A_Attack_Surface.html "How to Destroy Surveillance Capitalism": an anti-monopoly pamphlet analyzing the true harms of surveillance capitalism and proposing a solution. https://onezero.medium.com/how-to-destroy-surveillance-capitalism-8135e6744d59?sk=f6cd10e54e20a07d4c6d0f3ac011af6b) (signed copies: https://www.darkdel.com/store/p2024/Available_Now%3A__How_to_Destroy_Surveillance_Capitalism.html) "Little Brother/Homeland": A reissue omnibus edition with a new introduction by Edward Snowden: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250774583; personalized/signed copies here: https://www.darkdel.com/store/p1750/July%3A__Little_Brother_%26_Homeland.html "Poesy the Monster Slayer" a picture book about monsters, bedtime, gender, and kicking ass. Order here: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781626723627. Get a personalized, signed copy here: https://www.darkdel.com/store/p2682/Corey_Doctorow%3A_Poesy_the_Monster_Slayer_HB.html#/. Upcoming books (permalink) Picks and Shovels: a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about the heroic era of the PC, Tor Books, February 2025 Unauthorized Bread: a graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, 2025 Colophon (permalink) Today’s top sources: Currently writing: A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING Picks and Shovels, a Martin Hench noir thriller about the heroic era of the PC. FORTHCOMING TOR BOOKS JAN 2025 Vigilant, Little Brother short story about remote invigilation. FORTHCOMING ON TOR.COM Spill, a Little Brother short story about pipeline protests. FORTHCOMING ON TOR.COM Latest podcast: No One Is the Enshittifier of Their Own Story https://craphound.com/news/2024/05/19/no-one-is-the-enshittifier-of-their-own-story/ This work – excluding any serialized fiction – is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. That means you can use it any way you like, including commercially, provided that you attribute it to me, Cory Doctorow, and include a link to pluralistic.net. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ Quotations and images are not included in this license; they are included either under a limitation or exception to copyright, or on the basis of a separate license. Please exercise caution. How to get Pluralistic: Blog (no ads, tracking, or data-collection): Pluralistic.net Newsletter (no ads, tracking, or data-collection): https://pluralistic.net/plura-list Mastodon (no ads, tracking, or data-collection): https://mamot.fr/@pluralistic Medium (no ads, paywalled): https://doctorow.medium.com/ Twitter (mass-scale, unrestricted, third-party surveillance and advertising): https://twitter.com/doctorow Tumblr (mass-scale, unrestricted, third-party surveillance and advertising): https://mostlysignssomeportents.tumblr.com/tagged/pluralistic "When life gives you SARS, you make sarsaparilla" -Joey "Accordion Guy" DeVilla
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Today’s links Linkrot: The internet is a library built on quicksand. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. This day in history: 2009, 2014, 2019, 2023 Upcoming appearances: Where to find me. Recent appearances: Where I’ve been. Latest books: You keep readin’ em, I’ll keep writin’ ’em. Upcoming books: Like I said, I’ll keep writin’ ’em. Colophon: All the rest. Linkrot (permalink) Here’s an underrated cognitive virtue: "object permanence" – that is, remembering how you perceived something previously. As Riley Quinn often reminds us, the left is the ideology of object permanence – to be a leftist is to hate and mistrust the CIA even when they’re tormenting Trump for a brief instant, or to remember that it was once possible for a working person to support their family with their wages: https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/27/six-sells/#youre-holding-it-wrong The thing is, object permanence is hard. Life comes at you quickly. It’s very hard to remember facts, and the order in which those facts arrived – it’s even harder to remember how you felt about those facts in the moment. This is where blogging comes in – for me, at least. Back in 1997, Scott Edelman – editor of Science Fiction Age – asked me to take over the back page of the magazine by writing up ten links of interest for the nascent web. I wrote that column until the spring of 2000, then, in early 2001, Mark Frauenfelder asked me to guest-edit Boing Boing, whereupon the tempo of my web-logging went daily. I kept that up on Boing Boing for more than 19 years, writing about 54,000 posts. In February, 2020, I started Pluralistic.net, my solo project, a kind of blog/newsletter, and in the four-plus years since, I’ve written about 1,200 editions containing between one and twelve posts each. This gigantic corpus of everything I ever considered to be noteworthy is immensely valuable to me. The act of taking notes in public is a powerful discipline: rather than jotting cryptic notes to myself in a commonplace book, I publish those notes for strangers. This imposes a rigor on the note-taking that makes those notes far more useful to me in years to come. Better still: public note-taking is powerfully mnemonic. The things I’ve taken notes on form a kind of supersaturated solution of story ideas, essay ideas, speech ideas, and more, and periodically two or more of these fragments will glom together, nucleate, and a fully-formed work will crystallize out of the solution. Then, the fact that all these fragments are also database entries – contained in the back-end of a WordPress installation that I can run complex queries on – comes into play, letting me swiftly and reliably confirm my memories of these long-gone phenomena. Inevitably, these queries turn up material that I’ve totally forgotten, and these make the result even richer, like adding homemade stock to a stew to bring out a rich and complicated flavor. Better still, many of these posts have been annotated by readers with supplemental materials or vigorous objections. I call this all "The Memex Method" and it lets me write a lot (I wrote nine books during lockdown, as I used work to distract me from anxiety – something I stumbled into through a lifetime of chronic pain management): https://pluralistic.net/2021/05/09/the-memex-method/ Back in 2013, I started a new daily Boing Boing feature: "This Day In Blogging History," wherein I would look at the archive of posts for that day one, five and ten years previously: https://boingboing.net/2013/06/24/this-day-in-blogging-history.html With Pluralistic, I turned this into a daily newsletter feature, now stretching back to twenty, fifteen, ten, five and one year ago. Here’s today’s: https://pluralistic.net/2024/05/21/noway-back-machine/#retro This is a tremendous adjunct to the Memex Method. It’s a structured way to review everything I’ve ever thought about, in five-year increments, every single day. I liken this to working dough, where there’s stuff at the edges getting dried out and crumbly, and so your fold it all back into the middle. All these old fragments naturally slip out of your thoughts and understanding, but you can revive their centrality by briefly paying attention to them for a few minutes every day. This structured daily review is a wonderful way to maintain object permanence, reviewing your attitudes and beliefs over time. It’s also a way to understand the long-forgotten origins of issues that are central to you today. Yesterday, I was reminded that I started thinking about automotive Right to Repair 15 years ago: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2009/05/right-repair-law-pro Given that we’re still fighting over this, that’s some important perspective, a reminder of the likely timescales involved in more recent issues where I feel like little progress is being made. Remember when we all got pissed off because the mustache-twirling evil CEO of Warners, David Zaslav, was shredding highly anticipated TV shows and movies prior to their release to get a tax-credit? Turns out that we started getting angry about this stuff twenty years ago, when Michael Eisner did it to Michael Moore’s "Fahrenheit 911": https://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/05/us/disney-is-blocking-distribution-of-film-that-criticizes-bush.html It’s not just object permanence: this daily spelunk through my old records is also a way to continuously and methodically sound the web for linkrot: when old links go bad. Over the past five years, I’ve noticed a very sharp increase in linkrot, and even worse, in the odious practice of spammers taking over my dead friends’ former blogs and turning them into AI spam-farms: https://www.wired.com/story/confessions-of-an-ai-clickbait-kingpin/ The good people at the Pew Research Center have just released a careful, quantitative study of linkrot that confirms – and exceeds – my worst suspicions about the decay of the web: https://www.pewresearch.org/data-labs/2024/05/17/when-online-content-disappears/ The headline finding from "When Online Content Disappears" is that 38% of the web of 2013 is gone today. Wikipedia references are especially hard-hit, with 23% of news links missing and 21% of government websites gone. The majority of Wikipedia entries have at least one broken link in their reference sections. Twitter is another industrial-scale oubliette: a fifth of English tweets disappear within a matter of months; for Turkish and Arabic tweets, it’s 40%. Thankfully, someone has plugged the web’s memory-hole. Since 2001, the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine has allowed web users to see captures of web-pages, tracking their changes over time. I was at the Wayback Machine’s launch party, and right away, I could see its value. Today, I make extensive use of Wayback Machine captures for my "This Day In History" posts, and when I find dead links on the web. The Wayback Machine went public in 2001, but Archive founder Brewster Kahle started scraping the web in 1996. Today’s post graphic – a modified Yahoo homepage from October 17, 1996 – is the oldest Yahoo capture on the Wayback Machine: https://web.archive.org/web/19960501000000*/yahoo.com Remember that the next time someone tells you that we must stamp out web-scraping for one reason or another. There are plenty of ugly ways to use scraping (looking at you, Clearview AI) that we should ban, but scraping itself is very good: https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/17/how-to-think-about-scraping/ And so is the Internet Archive, which makes the legal threats it faces today all the more frightening. Lawsuits brought by the Big Five publishers and Big Three labels will, if successful, snuff out the Internet Archive altogether, and with it, the Wayback Machine – the only record we have of our ephemeral internet: https://blog.archive.org/2024/04/19/internet-archive-stands-firm-on-library-digital-rights-in-final-brief-of-hachette-v-internet-archive-lawsuit/ Libraries burn. The Internet Archive may seem like a sturdy and eternal repository for our collective object permanence about the internet, but it is very fragile, and could disappear like that. Hey look at this (permalink) Pretendians https://link.chtbl.com/pretendians Sunsetting Section 230 Will Hurt Internet Users, Not Big Tech https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2024/05/sunsetting-section-230-will-hurt-internet-users-not-big-tech The People Deliberately Killing Facebook https://www.wheresyoured.at/killingfacebook/ This day in history (permalink) #15yrsago Got a cell-phone? FCC claims the right to search your house https://www.wired.com/2009/05/fcc-raid/ #15yrsago Infinite Typewriters: Goats webcomic collection is transcendantly silly without being forced https://memex.craphound.com/2009/05/20/infinite-typewriters-goats-webcomic-collection-is-transcendantly-silly-without-being-forced/ #15yrsago Fight terrorism by arresting terrorists, not by looking at our genitals at airports https://edition.cnn.com/2009/TRAVEL/05/18/airport.security.body.scans/ #15yrsago Lessig reviews Helprin’s embarrassing infinite copyright, bloggers-are-stupid, Creative Commons is evil book https://www.huffpost.com/entry/the-solipsist-and-the-int_b_206021 #10yrsago Podcast: Firefox’s adoption of closed-source DRM breaks my heart https://ia802206.us.archive.org/30/items/Cory_Doctorow_Podcast_273_fixed/Cory_Doctorow_Podcast_273_Firefoxs_adoption_of_closed-source_DRM_breaks_my_heart.mp3 #10yrsago Interviews with & portraits of sex-machine makers https://web.archive.org/web/20140903013303/http://designyoutrust.com/2011/08/sex-machines-photographs-and-interviews-by-timothy-archibald/ #10yrsago Steve Wozniak explains Net Neutrality to the FCC https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2010/12/steve-wozniak-to-the-fcc-keep-the-internet-free/68294/ #10yrsago Disneyland’s original prospectus revealed! https://memex.craphound.com/2014/05/20/disneylands-original-prospectus-revealed/ #10yrsago Jo Walton’s “My Real Children”: infinitely wise, sad and uplifting novel https://memex.craphound.com/2014/05/20/jo-waltons-my-real-children-infinitely-wise-sad-and-uplifting-novel/ #5yrsago That billionaire who paid off a graduating class’s student loans also supports the hedge-fundie’s favorite tax loophole https://archive.nytimes.com/dealbook.nytimes.com/2014/04/10/a-private-equity-titan-with-a-narrow-focus-and-broad-aims/ #5yrsago TOSsed out: EFF catalogs the perverse ways that platform moderation policies hurt the people they’re supposed to protect https://www.eff.org/tossedout #5yrsago How Warner Chappell was able to steal revenues from 25% of a popular Minecraft vlogger’s channels https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LZplh8rd-I4 #5yrsago Notorious forum for account-thieves hacked, login and messages stolen and dumped https://krebsonsecurity.com/2019/05/account-hijacking-forum-ogusers-hacked/ #5yrsago A look back at the sales training for Radio Shack’s Model 100, a groundbreaking early laptop https://www.fastcompany.com/90349201/heres-how-radioshack-sold-its-breakthrough-laptop-circa-1983 #5yrsago DRM and terms-of-service have ended true ownership, turning us into “tenants of our own devices” https://www.wired.com/story/right-to-repair-tenants-on-our-own-devices/ #5yrsago Research shows that 2FA and other basic measures are incredibly effective at preventing account hijacking https://security.googleblog.com/2019/05/new-research-how-effective-is-basic.html #5yrsago A deep dive into the internal politics, personalities and social significance of the Googler Uprising https://fortune.com/longform/inside-googles-civil-war/ #1yrago Dumping links like Galileo dumped the orange https://pluralistic.net/2023/05/20/the-missing-links/#plunderphonics Upcoming appearances (permalink) Media Ecology Association keynote (Amherst, NY), Jun 6-9 https://media-ecology.org/convention HOPE XV, Jul 14 (Queens, NY) https://www.hope.net/talks.html American Association of Law Libraries keynote (Chicago), Jul 21 https://www.aallnet.org/conference/agenda/keynote-speaker/ Recent appearances (permalink) Upstream podcast https://podscripts.co/podcasts/upstream/the-big-tech-con-w-cory-doctorow Libraries in Response https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IUQZPn9ffSs Suur Futuroloogiline Kongress https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6hITj793htg&t=398s Latest books (permalink) The Bezzle: a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about prison-tech and other grifts, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2024 (the-bezzle.org). Signed, personalized copies at Dark Delicacies (https://www.darkdel.com/store/p3062/Available_Feb_20th%3A_The_Bezzle_HB.html#/). "The Lost Cause:" a solarpunk novel of hope in the climate emergency, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), November 2023 (http://lost-cause.org). Signed, personalized copies at Dark Delicacies (https://www.darkdel.com/store/p3007/Pre-Order_Signed_Copies%3A_The_Lost_Cause_HB.html#/) "The Internet Con": A nonfiction book about interoperability and Big Tech (Verso) September 2023 (http://seizethemeansofcomputation.org). Signed copies at Book Soup (https://www.booksoup.com/book/9781804291245). "Red Team Blues": "A grabby, compulsive thriller that will leave you knowing more about how the world works than you did before." Tor Books http://redteamblues.com. Signed copies at Dark Delicacies (US): and Forbidden Planet (UK): https://forbiddenplanet.com/385004-red-team-blues-signed-edition-hardcover/. "Chokepoint Capitalism: How to Beat Big Tech, Tame Big Content, and Get Artists Paid, with Rebecca Giblin", on how to unrig the markets for creative labor, Beacon Press/Scribe 2022 https://chokepointcapitalism.com "Attack Surface": The third Little Brother novel, a standalone technothriller for adults. The Washington Post called it "a political cyberthriller, vigorous, bold and savvy about the limits of revolution and resistance." Order signed, personalized copies from Dark Delicacies https://www.darkdel.com/store/p1840/Available_Now%3A_Attack_Surface.html "How to Destroy Surveillance Capitalism": an anti-monopoly pamphlet analyzing the true harms of surveillance capitalism and proposing a solution. https://onezero.medium.com/how-to-destroy-surveillance-capitalism-8135e6744d59?sk=f6cd10e54e20a07d4c6d0f3ac011af6b) (signed copies: https://www.darkdel.com/store/p2024/Available_Now%3A__How_to_Destroy_Surveillance_Capitalism.html) "Little Brother/Homeland": A reissue omnibus edition with a new introduction by Edward Snowden: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250774583; personalized/signed copies here: https://www.darkdel.com/store/p1750/July%3A__Little_Brother_%26_Homeland.html "Poesy the Monster Slayer" a picture book about monsters, bedtime, gender, and kicking ass. Order here: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781626723627. Get a personalized, signed copy here: https://www.darkdel.com/store/p2682/Corey_Doctorow%3A_Poesy_the_Monster_Slayer_HB.html#/. Upcoming books (permalink) Picks and Shovels: a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about the heroic era of the PC, Tor Books, February 2025 Unauthorized Bread: a graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, 2025 Colophon (permalink) Today’s top sources: Michael Dimock. Currently writing: A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING Picks and Shovels, a Martin Hench noir thriller about the heroic era of the PC. FORTHCOMING TOR BOOKS JAN 2025 Vigilant, Little Brother short story about remote invigilation. FORTHCOMING ON TOR.COM Spill, a Little Brother short story about pipeline protests. FORTHCOMING ON TOR.COM Latest podcast: No One Is the Enshittifier of Their Own Story https://craphound.com/news/2024/05/19/no-one-is-the-enshittifier-of-their-own-story/ This work – excluding any serialized fiction – is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. That means you can use it any way you like, including commercially, provided that you attribute it to me, Cory Doctorow, and include a link to pluralistic.net. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ Quotations and images are not included in this license; they are included either under a limitation or exception to copyright, or on the basis of a separate license. Please exercise caution. How to get Pluralistic: Blog (no ads, tracking, or data-collection): Pluralistic.net Newsletter (no ads, tracking, or data-collection): https://pluralistic.net/plura-list Mastodon (no ads, tracking, or data-collection): https://mamot.fr/@pluralistic Medium (no ads, paywalled): https://doctorow.medium.com/ Twitter (mass-scale, unrestricted, third-party surveillance and advertising): https://twitter.com/doctorow Tumblr (mass-scale, unrestricted, third-party surveillance and advertising): https://mostlysignssomeportents.tumblr.com/tagged/pluralistic "When life gives you SARS, you make sarsaparilla" -Joey "Accordion Guy" DeVilla
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Today’s links The new globalism is global labor: The Battle of Seattle’s other shoe drops. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. This day in history: None Upcoming appearances: Where to find me. Recent appearances: Where I’ve been. Latest books: You keep readin’ em, I’ll keep writin’ ’em. Upcoming books: Like I said, I’ll keep writin’ ’em. Colophon: All the rest. The new globalism is global labor (permalink) Depending on how you look at it, I either grew up in the periphery of the labor movement, or atop it, or surrounded by it. For a kid, labor issues don’t really hold a lot of urgency – in places with mature labor movements, kids don’t really have jobs, and the part-time jobs I had as a kid (paper route, cleaning a dance studio) were pretty benign. Ironically, one of the reasons that labor issues barely registered for me as a kid was that my parents were in great, strong unions: Ontario teachers’ unions, which protected teachers from exploitative working conditions and from retaliation when they advocated for their students, striking for better schools as well as better working conditions. Ontario teachers’ unions were strong enough that they could take the lead on workplace organization, to the benefit of teachers at every part of their careers, as well as students and the system as a whole. Back in the early 1980s, Ontario schools faced a demographic crisis. After years of declining enrollment, the number of students entering the system was rapidly increasing. That meant that each level of the system – primary, junior, secondary – was about to go through a whipsaw, in which low numbers of students would be followed by large numbers. For a unionized education workforce, this presented a crisis: normally, a severe contraction in student numbers would trigger layoffs, on a last-in, first-out basis. That meant that layoffs loomed for junior teachers, who would almost certainly end up retraining for another career. When student numbers picked up again, those teachers wouldn’t be in the workforce anymore, and worse, a lot of the senior teachers who got priority during layoffs would be retiring, magnifying the crisis. The teachers’ unions were strong, and they cared about students and teachers, both those at the start of their careers and those who’d given many years of service. They came up with an amazing solution: "self-funded sabbaticals." Teachers with a set number of years of seniority could choose to take four years at 80% salary, and get a fifth year off at 80% salary (actually, they could take their year off any time from the third year on). This allowed Ontario to increase its workforce by about 20%, for free. Senior teachers got a year off to spend with their families, or on continuing education, or for travel. Junior teachers’ jobs were protected. Students coming into the system had adequate classroom staff, in a mix of both senior and junior teachers. This worked great for everyone, including my family. My parents both took their four-over-five year in 1983/84. They rented out our house for six months, charging enough to cover the mortgage. We flew to London, took a ferry to France, and leased a little sedan. For the next six months, we drove around Europe, visiting fourteen countries while my parents homeschooled us on the long highway stretches and in laundromats. We stayed in youth hostels and took a train to Leningrad to visit my family there. We saw Christmas Midnight Mass at the Vatican and walked around the Parthenon. We saw Guernica at the Prado. We visited a computer lab in Paris and I learned to program Logo in French. We hung out with my parents’ teacher pals who were civilian educators at a Canadian Forces Base in Baden-Baden. I bought an amazing hand-carved chess set in Seville with medieval motifs that sung to my D&D playing heart. It was amazing. No, really, it was amazing. Unions and the social contract they bargained for transformed my family’s life chances. My dad came to Canada as a refugee, the son of a teen mother who’d been deeply traumatized by her civil defense service as a child during the Siege of Leningrad. My mother was the eldest child of a man who, at thirteen, had dropped out of school to support his nine brothers and sisters after the death of his father. My parents grew up to not only own a home, but to be able to take their sons on a latter-day version of the Grand Tour that was once the exclusive province of weak-chinned toffs from the uppermost of crusts: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_Tour My parents were active in labor causes and in their unions, of course, but that was just part of their activist lives. My mother was a leader in the fight for legal abortion rights in Canada: https://www.flickr.com/photos/doctorow/8882641733 My dad was active in party politics with the New Democratic Party, and both he and my mother were deeply involved with the fight against nuclear arms proliferation, a major issue in Canada, given our role in supplying radioisotopes to the US, building key components for ICBMs, testing cruise missiles over Labrador, and our participation in NORAD. Abortion rights and nuclear arms proliferation were my own entry into political activism. When I was 13, I organized a large contingent from my school to march on Queen’s Park, the seat of the Provincial Parliament, to demand an end to Ontario’s active and critical participation in the hastening of global nuclear conflagration: https://www.flickr.com/photos/doctorow/53616011737/ When I got a little older, I started helping with clinic defense and counterprotests at the Morgentaler Clinic and other sites in Toronto that provided safe access to women’s health, including abortions: https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/morgentaler-honoured-by-order-of-canada-federal-government-not-involved-1.716775 My teens were a period of deepening involvement in politics. It was hard work, but rewarding and fundamentally hopeful. There, in the shadow of imminent nuclear armageddon, there was a role for me to play, a way to be more than a passive passenger on a runaway train, to participate in the effort to pull the brake lever before we ran over the cliff. In hindsight, though, I can see that even as my activism intensified, it also got harder. We struggled more to find places to meet, to find phones and computers to use, to find people who could explain how to get a permit for a demonstration or to get legal assistance for comrades in jail after a civil disobedience action. What I couldn’t see at the time was that all of this was provided by organized labor. The labor movement had the halls, the photocopiers, the lawyers, the experience – the infrastructure. Even for campaigns that were directly about labor rights – campaigns for abortion rights, or against nuclear annihilation – the labor movement was the material, tangible base for our activities. Look, riding a bicycle around all night wheatpasting posters to telephone poles to turn out people for an upcoming demonstration is hard work, but it’s much harder if you have to pay for xeroxing at Kinko’s rather than getting it for free at the union hall. Worse, the demonstration turnout suffers more because the union phone-trees and newsletters stop bringing out the numbers they once brought out. This was why the neoliberal project took such savage aim at labor: they understood that a strong labor movement was foundation of antiimperialist, antiracist, antisexist struggles for justice. By dismantling labor, the ruling class kicked the legs out from under all the other fights that mattered. Every year, it got harder to fight for any kind of better world. We activist kids grew to our twenties and foundered, spending precious hours searching for a room to hold a meeting, leaving us with fewer hours to spend organizing the thing we were meeting for. But gradually, we rebuilt. We started to stand up our own fragile, brittle, nascent structures that stood in for the mature and solid labor foundation that we’d grown up with. The first time I got an inkling of what was going on came in 1999, with the Battle of Seattle: the mass protests over the WTO. Yes, labor turned out in force for those mass demonstrations, but they weren’t its leaders. The militancy, the leadership, and the organization came out of groups that could loosely be called "post-labor" – not in the sense that they no longer believed in labor causes, but in the sense that they were being organized outside of traditional labor. Labor was in retreat. Five years earlier, organized labor had responded to NAFTA by organizing against Mexican workers, rather than the bosses who wanted to ship jobs to Mexico. It wasn’t unusual to see cars in Ontario with CAW bumper stickers alongside xenophobic stickers taking aim at Mexicans, not bosses. Those were the only workers that organized labor saw as competitors for labor rights: this was also the heyday of "two-tier" contracts, which protected benefits for senior workers while leaving their junior comrades exposed to bosses’ most sadistic practices, while still expecting junior workers to pay dues to a union that wouldn’t protect them: https://pluralistic.net/2021/11/25/strikesgiving/#shed-a-tier Two-tier contracts were the opposite of the solidarity that my parents’ teachers’ union exhibited in the early 1980s; blaming Mexican workers for automakers’ offshoring was the opposite of the solidarity that built transracial and international labor power in the early days of the union movement: https://unionhall.aflcio.org/bloomington-normal-trades-and-labor-assembly/labor-culture/edge-anarchy-first-class-pullman-strike As labor withered under a sustained, multi-decades-long assault on workers’ rights, other movements started to recapitulate the evolution of early labor, shoring up fragile movements that lacked legal protections, weathering setbacks, and building a "progressive" coalition that encompassed numerous issues. And then that movement started to support a new wave of labor organizing, situating labor issues on a continuum of justice questions, from race to gender to predatory college lending. Young workers from every sector joined ossified unions with corrupt, sellout leaders and helped engineer their ouster, turning these dying old unions into engines of successful labor militancy: https://theintercept.com/2023/04/07/deconstructed-union-dhl-teamsters-uaw/ In other words, we’re in the midst of a reversal of the historic role of labor and other social justice movements. Whereas once labor anchored a large collection of smaller, less unified social movements; today those social movements are helping bring back a weakened and fragmented labor movement. One of the key organizing questions for today is whether these two movements can continue to co-evolve and, eventually, merge. For example: there can be no successful climate action without climate justice. The least paid workers in America are also the most racially disfavored. The gender pay-gap exists in all labor markets. For labor, integrating social justice questions isn’t just morally sound, it’s also tactically necessary. One thing such a fusion can produce is a truly international labor movement. Today, social justice movements are transnational: the successful Irish campaign for abortion rights was closely linked to key abortion rights struggles in Argentina and Poland, and today, abortion rights organizers from all over the world are involved in mailing medication abortion pills to America. A global labor movement is necessary, and not just to defeat the divide-and-rule tactics of the NAFTA fight. The WTO’s legacy is a firmly global capitalism: workers all over the world are fighting the same corporations. The strong unions of one country are threatened by weak labor in other countries where their key corporations seek to shift manufacturing or service delivery. But those same strong unions are able to use their power to help their comrades abroad protect their labor rights, depriving their common adversary of an easily exploited workforce. A key recent example is Mercedes, part of the Daimler global octopus. Mercedes’ home turf is Germany, which boasts some of the strongest autoworker unions in the world. In the USA, Mercedes – like other German auto giants – preferentially manufactures its cars in the South, America’s "onshore-offshore" crime havens, where labor laws are both virtually nonexistent and largely unenforced. This allows Mercedes to exploit and endanger a largely Black workforce in a "right to work" territory where unions are nearly impossible to form and sustain. Mercedes just defeated a hard-fought union drive in Vance, Alabama. In part, this was due to admitted tactical blunders from the UAW, who have recently racked up unprecedented victories in Tennessee and North Carolina: https://paydayreport.com/uaw-admits-digital-heavy-organizing-committee-light-approach-failed-them-in-alabama-at-mercedes/ But mostly, this was because Mercedes cheated. They flagrantly violated labor law to sabotage the union vote. That’s where it gets interesting. German workers have successfully lobbied the German parliament for the Supply Chain Act, an anticorruption law that punishes German companies that violate labor law abroad. That means that even though the UAW just lost their election, they might inflict some serious pain on Mercedes, who face a fine of 2% of their global annual revenue, and a ban on selling cars to the German government: https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/10/an-injury-to-one/#is-an-injury-to-all This is another way reversal of the post-neoliberal era. Whereas once the US exported its most rapacious corporate practices all over the world, today, global labor stands a chance of exporting workers’ rights from weak territories to strong ones. Here’s an American analogy: the US’s two most populous states are California and Texas. The policies of these states ripple out over the whole country, and even beyond. When Texas requires textbooks that ban evolution, every pupil in the country is at risk of getting a textbook that embraces Young Earth Creationism. When California enacts strict emission standards, every car in the country gets cleaner tailpipes. The WTO was a Texas-style export: a race to the bottom, all around the world. The moment we’re living through now, as global social movements fuse with global labor, are a California-style export, a race to the top. This is a weird upside to global monopoly capitalism. It’s how antitrust regulators all over the world are taking on corporations whose power rivals global superpowers like the USA and China: because they’re all fighting the same corporations, they can share tactics and even recycle evidence from one-another’s antitrust cases: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2024/05/big-tech-eu-drop-dead Look, the UAW messed up in Alabama. A successful union vote is won before the first ballot is cast. If your ground game isn’t strong enough to know the outcome of the vote before the ballot box opens, you need more organizing, not a vote: https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/23/a-collective-bargain/ But thanks to global labor – and its enemy, global capitalism – the UAW gets another chance. Global capitalism is rich and powerful, but it has key weaknesses. Its drive to "efficiency" makes it terribly vulnerable, and a disruption anywhere in its supply chain can bring the whole global empire to its knees: https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/21/eight-and-skate/#strike-to-rule American workers – especially swing-state workers who swung for Trump and are leaning his way again – overwhelmingly support a pro-labor agenda. They are furious over "price gouging and outrageous corporate profits…wealthy corporate CEOs and billionaires [not] paying what they should in taxes and the top 1% gaming the system": https://www.americanfamilyvoices.org/_files/ugd/d4d64f_6c3dff0c3da74098b07ed3f086705af2.pdf They support universal healthcare, and value Medicare and Social Security, and trust the Democrats to manage both better than Republicans will. They support "abortion rights, affordable child care, and even forgiving student loans": https://prospect.org/politics/2024-05-20-bidens-working-class-slump/ The problem is that these blue-collar voters are atomized. They no longer meet in union halls – they belong to gun clubs affiliated with the NRA. There are enough people who are a) undecided and b) union members in these swing states to defeat Trump. This is why labor power matters, and why a fusion of American labor and social justice movements matters – and why an international fusion of a labor-social justice coalition is our best hope for a habitable planet and a decent lives for our families. Hey look at this (permalink) Mirlo: Directly support musicians. Buy their music. Collectively owned and managed https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/mirlo/mirlo Help Baby Ezaias’ family with medical and therapy expenses https://www.gofundme.com/f/help-baby-ezaias-family-with-medical-and-therapy-expenses (h/t Derryl Murphy) A Tour of the Jevons Paradox: How Energy Efficiency Backfires https://economicsfromthetopdown.com/2024/05/18/a-tour-of-the-jevons-paradox-how-energy-efficiency-backfires/ This day in history (permalink) #15yrsago Congress proposes anti-DRM law for cars https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2009/05/right-repair-law-pro #15yrsago Bush cronies land jobs charging for advice on not getting eaten by the monsters they created https://web.archive.org/web/20090523162034/https://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2009-05-19-newjobs_N.htm?csp=34 #15yrsago Search Engine podcast is back on TVO https://web.archive.org/web/20090522054021/http://www.tvo.org/cfmx/tvoorg/theagendMirlo Directly support musicians. Buy their music. Collectively owned and managed. https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/mirlo/mirloa/index.cfm?page_id=3&action=blog&subaction=viewPost&post_id=10253&blog_id=81 #10yrsago NSA records every cell phone call in the Bahamas https://web.archive.org/web/20140519224819/https://firstlook.org/theintercept/article/2014/05/19/data-pirates-caribbean-nsa-recording-every-cell-phone-call-bahamas/ #10yrsago U of Saskatchewan fires tenured dean for speaking out against cuts https://artssquared.wordpress.com/2014/05/18/canadas-academics-invited-to-sign-on-to-open-letter-to-university-of-saskatchewan-board-chair-ms-susan-milburn/ #10yrsago Nutritionists’ professional events catered by McD’s, sponsored by High Fructose Corn Syrup https://www.motherjones.com/environment/2014/05/my-trip-mcdonalds-sponsored-nutritionist-convention/ #5yrsago Bernie Sanders’ “Thurgood Marshall Plan for Public Education” will desegregate schools, defund charters, pay teachers, end the school-to-prison pipeline https://berniesanders.com/issues/reinvest-in-public-education/ #5yrsago Judge recuses himself from health insurance cancer-denial case because he considers the company “immoral” and “barbaric” https://edition.cnn.com/2019/05/16/health/judge-proton-beam-therapy-recusal-unitedhealthcare/index.html #5yrsago Wil Wheaton’s “Dead Trees Give No Shelter”: terrifying tale, beautifully told https://wilwheaton.net/2017/04/dead-trees-give-no-shelter-audiobook/ #1yrago Venture predation https://pluralistic.net/2023/05/19/fake-it-till-you-make-it/#millennial-lifestyle-subsidy Upcoming appearances (permalink) Media Ecology Association keynote (Amherst, NY), Jun 6-9 https://media-ecology.org/convention HOPE XV, Jul 14 (Queens, NY) https://www.hope.net/talks.html American Association of Law Libraries keynote (Chicago), Jul 21 https://www.aallnet.org/conference/agenda/keynote-speaker/ Recent appearances (permalink) Libraries in Response https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IUQZPn9ffSs Suur Futuroloogiline Kongress https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6hITj793htg&t=398s That Word Chat https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=miwEy_mACEY Latest books (permalink) The Bezzle: a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about prison-tech and other grifts, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2024 (the-bezzle.org). Signed, personalized copies at Dark Delicacies (https://www.darkdel.com/store/p3062/Available_Feb_20th%3A_The_Bezzle_HB.html#/). "The Lost Cause:" a solarpunk novel of hope in the climate emergency, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), November 2023 (http://lost-cause.org). Signed, personalized copies at Dark Delicacies (https://www.darkdel.com/store/p3007/Pre-Order_Signed_Copies%3A_The_Lost_Cause_HB.html#/) "The Internet Con": A nonfiction book about interoperability and Big Tech (Verso) September 2023 (http://seizethemeansofcomputation.org). Signed copies at Book Soup (https://www.booksoup.com/book/9781804291245). "Red Team Blues": "A grabby, compulsive thriller that will leave you knowing more about how the world works than you did before." Tor Books http://redteamblues.com. Signed copies at Dark Delicacies (US): and Forbidden Planet (UK): https://forbiddenplanet.com/385004-red-team-blues-signed-edition-hardcover/. "Chokepoint Capitalism: How to Beat Big Tech, Tame Big Content, and Get Artists Paid, with Rebecca Giblin", on how to unrig the markets for creative labor, Beacon Press/Scribe 2022 https://chokepointcapitalism.com "Attack Surface": The third Little Brother novel, a standalone technothriller for adults. The Washington Post called it "a political cyberthriller, vigorous, bold and savvy about the limits of revolution and resistance." Order signed, personalized copies from Dark Delicacies https://www.darkdel.com/store/p1840/Available_Now%3A_Attack_Surface.html "How to Destroy Surveillance Capitalism": an anti-monopoly pamphlet analyzing the true harms of surveillance capitalism and proposing a solution. https://onezero.medium.com/how-to-destroy-surveillance-capitalism-8135e6744d59?sk=f6cd10e54e20a07d4c6d0f3ac011af6b) (signed copies: https://www.darkdel.com/store/p2024/Available_Now%3A__How_to_Destroy_Surveillance_Capitalism.html) "Little Brother/Homeland": A reissue omnibus edition with a new introduction by Edward Snowden: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250774583; personalized/signed copies here: https://www.darkdel.com/store/p1750/July%3A__Little_Brother_%26_Homeland.html "Poesy the Monster Slayer" a picture book about monsters, bedtime, gender, and kicking ass. Order here: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781626723627. Get a personalized, signed copy here: https://www.darkdel.com/store/p2682/Corey_Doctorow%3A_Poesy_the_Monster_Slayer_HB.html#/. Upcoming books (permalink) Picks and Shovels: a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about the heroic era of the PC, Tor Books, February 2025 Unauthorized Bread: a graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, 2025 Colophon (permalink) Today’s top sources: Currently writing: A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING Picks and Shovels, a Martin Hench noir thriller about the heroic era of the PC. FORTHCOMING TOR BOOKS JAN 2025 Vigilant, Little Brother short story about remote invigilation. FORTHCOMING ON TOR.COM Spill, a Little Brother short story about pipeline protests. FORTHCOMING ON TOR.COM Latest podcast: No One Is the Enshittifier of Their Own Story https://craphound.com/news/2024/05/19/no-one-is-the-enshittifier-of-their-own-story/ This work – excluding any serialized fiction – is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. That means you can use it any way you like, including commercially, provided that you attribute it to me, Cory Doctorow, and include a link to pluralistic.net. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ Quotations and images are not included in this license; they are included either under a limitation or exception to copyright, or on the basis of a separate license. Please exercise caution. How to get Pluralistic: Blog (no ads, tracking, or data-collection): Pluralistic.net Newsletter (no ads, tracking, or data-collection): https://pluralistic.net/plura-list Mastodon (no ads, tracking, or data-collection): https://mamot.fr/@pluralistic Medium (no ads, paywalled): https://doctorow.medium.com/ Twitter (mass-scale, unrestricted, third-party surveillance and advertising): https://twitter.com/doctorow Tumblr (mass-scale, unrestricted, third-party surveillance and advertising): https://mostlysignssomeportents.tumblr.com/tagged/pluralistic "When life gives you SARS, you make sarsaparilla" -Joey "Accordion Guy" DeVilla
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Today’s links Monopoly is capitalism’s gerrymander: Handcuffs for the invisible hand. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. This day in history: 2004, 2009, 2014, 2019, 2023 Upcoming appearances: Where to find me. Recent appearances: Where I’ve been. Latest books: You keep readin’ em, I’ll keep writin’ ’em. Upcoming books: Like I said, I’ll keep writin’ ’em. Colophon: All the rest. Monopoly is capitalism’s gerrymander (permalink) You don’t have to accept the arguments of capitalism’s defenders to take those arguments seriously. When Adam Smith railed against rentiers and elevated the profit motive to a means of converting the intrinsic selfishness of the wealthy into an engine of production, he had a point: https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/28/cloudalists/#cloud-capital Smith – like Marx and Engels in Chapter One of The Communist Manifesto – saw competition as a catalyst that could convert selfishness to the public good: a rich person who craves more riches still will treat their customers, suppliers and workers well, not out of the goodness of their heart, but out of fear of their defection to a rival: https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/19/make-them-afraid/#fear-is-their-mind-killer This starting point is imperfect, but it’s not wrong. The pre-enshittified internet was run by the same people who later came to enshittify it. They didn’t have a change of heart that caused them to wreck the thing they’d worked so hard to build: rather, as they became isolated from the consequences of their enshittificatory impulses, it was easier to yield to them. Once Google captured its market, its regulators and its workforce, it no longer had to worry about being a good search-engine – it could sacrifice quality for profits, without consequence: https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/24/naming-names/#prabhakar-raghavan It could focus on shifting value from its suppliers, its customers and its users to its shareholders: https://pluralistic.net/2024/05/15/they-trust-me-dumb-fucks/#ai-search The thing is, all of this is well understood and predicted by traditional capitalist orthodoxy. It was only after a gnostic cult of conspiratorialists hijacked the practice of antitrust law that capitalists started to view monopolies as compatible with capitalism: https://pluralistic.net/2022/02/20/we-should-not-endure-a-king/ The argument goes like this: companies that attain monopolies might be cheating, but because markets are actually pretty excellent arbiters of quality, it’s far more likely that if we discover that everyone is buying the same product from the same store, that this is the best store, selling the best products. How perverse would it be to shut down the very best stores and halt the sale of the very best products merely to satisfy some doctrinal reflex against big business! To understand the problem with this argument, we should consider another doctrinal reflex: conservatives’ insistence that governments just can’t do anything well or efficiently. There’s a low-information version of this that goes, "Governments are where stupid people who can’t get private sector jobs go. They’re lazy and entitled." (There’s a racial dimension to this, since the federal government has historically led the private sector in hiring and promoting Black workers and workers of color more broadly.) But beyond that racially tinged caricature, there’s a more rigorous version of the argument: government officials are unlikely to face consequences for failure. Appointees and government employees – especially in the unionized federal workforce – are insulated from such consequences by overlapping layers of labor protection and deflection of blame. Elected officials can in theory be fired in the next election, but if they keep their cheating or incompetence below a certain threshold, most of us won’t punish them at the polls. Elected officials can further improve their odds of re-election by cheating some of us and sharing the loot with others, through handouts and programs. Elections themselves have a strong incumbency bias, meaning that once a cheater gets elected, they will likely get re-elected, even if their cheating becomes well-known: https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/congress/gold-bars-featured-bob-menendez-bribery-case-linked-2013-robbery-recor-rcna128006 What’s more, electoral redistricting opens the doors to gerrymandering – designing districts to create safe seats where one party always wins. That way, the real election consists of the official choosing the voters, not the voters choosing the official: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/REDMAP Inter-party elections – primaries and other nomination processes – have fundamental weaknesses that mean they’re no substitute for well-run, democratic elections: https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/30/weak-institutions/ Contrast this with the theory of competitive markets. For capitalism’s "moral philosophers," the physics by which greedy desired led to altruistic outcomes was to be found in the swift retribution of markets. A capitalist, exposed to the possibility of worker and customers defecting to their rival, knows that their greed is best served by playing fair. But just as importantly, capitalists who don’t internalize this lesson are put out of business and superceded by better capitalists. The market’s invisible hand can pat you on the head – but it can also choke you to death. This is where monopoly comes in. Even if you accept the consumer welfare theory that says that monopolies are most often the result of excellence, we should still break up monopolies. Even if someone secures an advantage by being great, that greatness will soon regress to the mean. But if the monopolist can extinguish the possibility of competition, they can maintain their power even after they cease deserving it. In other words, the monopolist is like a politician who wins power – whether through greatness or by deceit – and then gerrymanders their district so that they can do anything and gain re-election. Even the noblest politician, shorn of accountability, will be hard pressed to avoid yielding to temptation. Capitalism’s theory proceeds from the idea that we are driven by our self-interest, and that competition turns self-interest into communal sentiment. Take away the competition, and all that’s left is the self-interest. I think this is broadly true, even though it’s not the main reason I oppose monopolies (I oppose monopolies because they corrupt our democracy and pauperize workers). But even if capitalism’s ability to turn greed into public benefit isn’t the principle that’s uppermost in my mind, it’s what capitalists claim to believe – and treasure. I think that most of the right’s defense of monopolies stems from cynical, bad-faith rationalizations – but there are people who’ve absorbed these rationalizations and find them superficially plausible. It’s worth developing these critiques, for their sake. Hey look at this (permalink) The Real Entitlement Crisis: Good Reporting Is in Short Supply https://prospect.org/economy/2024-05-16-real-entitlement-crisis-good-reporting-social-security/ P = NP? Not exactly, but here are some research questions from the FTC Office of Technology https://www.ftc.gov/policy/advocacy-research/tech-at-ftc/2024/05/p-np-not-exactly-here-are-some-research-questions-office-technology The Monopoly That Gets ’Em When They’re Grieving https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/the-monopoly-that-gets-em-when-theyre This day in history (permalink) #20yrsago Bad writerly advice https://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/archives/005212.html#005212 #20yrsago LotR movies remixed as trenchant Russian political satire https://www.theguardian.com/world/2003/jun/22/film.lordoftheringsfilms #20yrsago First-person account of Massachusetts gay marriage https://web.archive.org/web/20040605123821/http://www.circa75.com/showArticle.php?article=130 #20yrsago PayPal disgraces itself, cuts off FreeNet https://web.archive.org/web/20040604050939/http://freenet.sourceforge.net/ #15yrsago Pinkwater’s EDUCATION OF ROBERT NIFKIN: zany and inspiring tale of taking charge of your own education https://memex.craphound.com/2009/05/18/pinkwaters-education-of-robert-nifkin-zany-and-inspiring-tale-of-taking-charge-of-your-own-education/ #15yrsago Technology Bill of Rights https://web.archive.org/web/20090521124424/http://www.infoworld.com/d/data-management/toward-technology-bill-rights-867 #15yrsago Debt-collectors and credit card companies: the psychologists of predatory lending https://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/17/magazine/17credit-t.html #10yrsago Anti-Net Neutrality Congresscritters made serious bank from the cable companies https://web.archive.org/web/20140520184355/http://maplight.org/Contributions to House Members Lobbying against Net Neutrality from Cable Interests #5yrsago Apple removed a teen’s award-winning anti-Trump game “Bad Hombre” because they can’t tell the difference between apps that criticize racism and racist apps https://memex.craphound.com/2019/05/18/apple-removed-a-teens-award-winning-anti-trump-game-bad-hombre-because-they-cant-tell-the-difference-between-apps-that-criticize-racism-and-racist-apps/ #5yrsago Pangea raised $180m to buy up low-rent Chicago properties “to help poor people,” and then created the most brutally efficient eviction mill in Chicago history https://chicagoreader.com/news-politics/pangea-has-taken-thousands-to-eviction-court-the-story-of-an-apartment-empire/ #5yrsago AOC grills pharma exec about why the HIV-prevention drug Prep costs $8 in Australia costs $1,780 in the USA https://web.archive.org/web/20190628120032/https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/ocasio-cortez-confronts-ceo-for-nearly-2k-price-tag-on-hiv-drug-that-costs-8-in-australia/ar-AABsDP0 #1yrago How to save the news from Big Tech https://pluralistic.net/2023/05/18/stealing-money-not-content/#beyond-link-taxes Upcoming appearances (permalink) Media Ecology Association keynote (Amherst, NY), Jun 6-9 https://media-ecology.org/convention HOPE XV, Jul 14 (Queens, NY) https://www.hope.net/talks.html American Association of Law Libraries keynote (Chicago), Jul 21 https://www.aallnet.org/conference/agenda/keynote-speaker/ Recent appearances (permalink) Libraries in Response https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IUQZPn9ffSs Suur Futuroloogiline Kongress https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6hITj793htg&t=398s That Word Chat https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=miwEy_mACEY Latest books (permalink) The Bezzle: a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about prison-tech and other grifts, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2024 (the-bezzle.org). Signed, personalized copies at Dark Delicacies (https://www.darkdel.com/store/p3062/Available_Feb_20th%3A_The_Bezzle_HB.html#/). "The Lost Cause:" a solarpunk novel of hope in the climate emergency, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), November 2023 (http://lost-cause.org). Signed, personalized copies at Dark Delicacies (https://www.darkdel.com/store/p3007/Pre-Order_Signed_Copies%3A_The_Lost_Cause_HB.html#/) "The Internet Con": A nonfiction book about interoperability and Big Tech (Verso) September 2023 (http://seizethemeansofcomputation.org). Signed copies at Book Soup (https://www.booksoup.com/book/9781804291245). "Red Team Blues": "A grabby, compulsive thriller that will leave you knowing more about how the world works than you did before." Tor Books http://redteamblues.com. Signed copies at Dark Delicacies (US): and Forbidden Planet (UK): https://forbiddenplanet.com/385004-red-team-blues-signed-edition-hardcover/. "Chokepoint Capitalism: How to Beat Big Tech, Tame Big Content, and Get Artists Paid, with Rebecca Giblin", on how to unrig the markets for creative labor, Beacon Press/Scribe 2022 https://chokepointcapitalism.com "Attack Surface": The third Little Brother novel, a standalone technothriller for adults. The Washington Post called it "a political cyberthriller, vigorous, bold and savvy about the limits of revolution and resistance." Order signed, personalized copies from Dark Delicacies https://www.darkdel.com/store/p1840/Available_Now%3A_Attack_Surface.html "How to Destroy Surveillance Capitalism": an anti-monopoly pamphlet analyzing the true harms of surveillance capitalism and proposing a solution. https://onezero.medium.com/how-to-destroy-surveillance-capitalism-8135e6744d59?sk=f6cd10e54e20a07d4c6d0f3ac011af6b) (signed copies: https://www.darkdel.com/store/p2024/Available_Now%3A__How_to_Destroy_Surveillance_Capitalism.html) "Little Brother/Homeland": A reissue omnibus edition with a new introduction by Edward Snowden: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250774583; personalized/signed copies here: https://www.darkdel.com/store/p1750/July%3A__Little_Brother_%26_Homeland.html "Poesy the Monster Slayer" a picture book about monsters, bedtime, gender, and kicking ass. Order here: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781626723627. Get a personalized, signed copy here: https://www.darkdel.com/store/p2682/Corey_Doctorow%3A_Poesy_the_Monster_Slayer_HB.html#/. Upcoming books (permalink) Picks and Shovels: a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about the heroic era of the PC, Tor Books, February 2025 Unauthorized Bread: a graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, 2025 Colophon (permalink) Today’s top sources: Currently writing: A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING Picks and Shovels, a Martin Hench noir thriller about the heroic era of the PC. FORTHCOMING TOR BOOKS JAN 2025 Vigilant, Little Brother short story about remote invigilation. FORTHCOMING ON TOR.COM Spill, a Little Brother short story about pipeline protests. FORTHCOMING ON TOR.COM Latest podcast: Precaratize Bosses https://craphound.com/news/2024/04/28/precaratize-bosses/ This work – excluding any serialized fiction – is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. That means you can use it any way you like, including commercially, provided that you attribute it to me, Cory Doctorow, and include a link to pluralistic.net. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ Quotations and images are not included in this license; they are included either under a limitation or exception to copyright, or on the basis of a separate license. Please exercise caution. How to get Pluralistic: Blog (no ads, tracking, or data-collection): Pluralistic.net Newsletter (no ads, tracking, or data-collection): https://pluralistic.net/plura-list Mastodon (no ads, tracking, or data-collection): https://mamot.fr/@pluralistic Medium (no ads, paywalled): https://doctorow.medium.com/ Twitter (mass-scale, unrestricted, third-party surveillance and advertising): https://twitter.com/doctorow Tumblr (mass-scale, unrestricted, third-party surveillance and advertising): https://mostlysignssomeportents.tumblr.com/tagged/pluralistic "When life gives you SARS, you make sarsaparilla" -Joey "Accordion Guy" DeVilla
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Today’s links You were promised a jetpack by liars: AIs and self-driving cars are the new jetpacks. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. This day in history: 2009, 2014, 2019, 2023 Upcoming appearances: Where to find me. Recent appearances: Where I’ve been. Latest books: You keep readin’ em, I’ll keep writin’ ’em. Upcoming books: Like I said, I’ll keep writin’ ’em. Colophon: All the rest. You were promised a jetpack by liars (permalink) As a science fiction writer, I find it weird that some sf tropes – like space colonization – have become culture-war touchstones. You know, that whole "we were promised jetpacks" thing. I confess, I never looked too hard at the practicalities of jetpacks, because they are so obviously either used as a visual shorthand (as in the Jetsons) or as a metaphor. Even a brief moment’s serious consideration should make it clear why we wouldn’t want the distracted, stoned, drunk, suicidal, homicidal maniacs who pilot their two-ton killbots through our residential streets at 75mph to be flying over our heads with a reservoir of high explosives strapped to their backs. Jetpacks can make for interesting sf eyeball kicks or literary symbols, but I don’t actually want to live in a world of jetpacks. I just want to read about them, and, of course, write about them: https://reactormag.com/chicken-little/ I had blithely assumed that this was the principle reason we never got the jetpacks we were "promised." I mean, there kind of was a promise, right? I grew up seeing videos of rocketeers flying their jetpacks high above the heads of amazed crowds, at World’s Fairs and Disneyland and big public spectacles. There was that scene in Thunderball where James Bond (the canonical Connery Bond, no less) makes an escape by jetpack. There was even a Gilligan’s Island episode where the castaways find a jetpack and scheme to fly it all the way back to Hawai’i: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0588084/ Clearly, jetpacks were possible, but they didn’t make any sense, so we decided not to use them, right? Well, I was wrong. In a terrific new 99 Percent Invisible episode, Chris Berube tracks the history of all those jetpacks we saw on TV for decades, and reveals that they were all the same jetpack, flown by just one guy, who risked his life every time he went up in it: https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/rocket-man/ The jetpack in question – technically a "rocket belt" – was built in the 1960s by Wendell Moore at the Bell Aircraft Corporation, with funding from the DoD. The Bell rocket belt used concentrated hydrogen peroxide as fuel, which burned at temperatures in excess of 1,000’. The rocket belt had a maximum flight time of just 21 seconds. It was these limitations that disqualified the rocket belt from being used by anyone except stunt pilots with extremely high tolerances for danger. Any tactical advantage conferred on infantrymen by the power to soar over a battlefield for a whopping 21 seconds was totally obliterated by the fact that this infantryman would be encumbered by an extremely heavy, unwieldy and extremely explosive backpack, to say nothing of the high likelihood that rocketeers would plummet out of the sky after failing to track the split-second capacity of a jetpack. And of course, the rocket belt wasn’t going to be a civilian commuting option. If your commute can be accomplished in just 21 seconds of flight time, you should probably just walk, rather than strapping an inferno to your back and risking a lethal fall if you exceed a margin of error measured in just seconds. Once you know about the jetpack’s technical limitations, it’s obvious why we never got jetpacks. So why did we expect them? Because we were promised them, and the promise was a lie. Moore was a consummate showman, which is to say, a bullshitter. He was forever telling the press that his jetpacks would be on everyone’s back in one to two years, and he got an impressionable young man, Bill Suitor, to stage showy public demonstrations of the rocket belt. If you ever saw a video of a brave rocketeer piloting a jetpack, it was almost certainly Suitor. Suitor was Connery’s stunt-double in Thunderball, and it was he who flew the rocket belt around Sleeping Beauty castle. Suitor’s interview with Berube for the podcast is delightful. Suitor is a hilarious, profane old airman who led an extraordinary life and tells stories with expert timing, busting out great phrases like "a surprise is a fart with a lump in it." But what’s most striking about the tale of the Bell rocket belt is the shape of the deception that Moore and Bell pulled off. By conspicuously failing to mention the rocket belt’s limitations, and by callously risking Suitor’s life over and over again, they were able to create the impression that jetpacks were everywhere, and that they were trembling on the verge of widespread, popular adoption. What’s more, they played a double game: all the public enthusiasm they manufactured with their carefully stage-managed, canned demos was designed to help them win more defense contracts to keep their dream alive. Ultimately, Uncle Sucker declined to continue funding their boondoggle, and the demos petered out, and the "promise" of a jetpack was broken. As I listened to the 99 Percent Invisible episode, I was struck by the familiarity of this shuck: this is exactly what the self-driving car bros did over the past decade to convince us all that the human driver was already obsolete. The playbook was nearly identical, right down to the shameless huckster insisting that "full self-driving is one to two years away" every year for a decade: https://www.theverge.com/2023/8/23/23837598/tesla-elon-musk-self-driving-false-promises-land-of-the-giants The Potemkin rocket belt was a calculated misdirection, as are the "full self-driving" demos that turn out to be routine, pre-programmed runs on carefully manicured closed tracks: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/tesla-autopilot-staged-engineer-says-company-faked-full-autopilot/ Practical rocketeering wasn’t ever "just around the corner," because a flying, 21 second blast-furnace couldn’t be refined into a practical transport. Making the tank bigger would not make this thing safer or easier to transport. The jetpack showman hoped to cash out by tricking Uncle Sucker into handing him a fat military contract. Robo-car scammers used their conjurer’s tricks to cash out to the public markets, taking Uber public on the promise of robo-taxis, even as Uber’s self-driving program burned through $2.5b and produced a car with a half-mile mean time between fatal collisions, which the company had to pay someone else $400m to take the business off their hands: https://pluralistic.net/2022/10/09/herbies-revenge/#100-billion-here-100-billion-there-pretty-soon-youre-talking-real-money It’s not just self-driving cars. Time and again, the incredibly impressive AI demos that the press credulously promotes turn out to be scams. The dancing robot on stage at the splashy event is literally a guy in a robot-suit: https://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musks-ai-day-tesla-bot-is-just-a-guy-in-a-bodysuit-2021-8 The Hollywood-killing, AI-produced video prompting system is so cumbersome to use, and so severely limited, that it’s arguably worse than useless: https://www.wheresyoured.at/expectations-versus-reality/ The centuries’ worth of progress the AI made in discovering new materials actually "discovered" a bunch of trivial variations on existing materials, as well as a huge swathe of materials that only exist at absolute zero: https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/23/maximal-plausibility/#reverse-centaurs The AI grocery store where you just pick things up and put them in your shopping basket without using the checkout turns out to be a call-center full of low-waged Indian workers desperately squinting at videos of you, trying to figure out what you put in your bag: https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/31/neural-interface-beta-tester/#tailfins The discovery of these frauds somehow never precipitates disillusionment. Rather than getting angry with marketers for tricking them, reporters are ventriloquized into repeating the marketing claim that these are lies, they’re premature truths. Sure, today these are faked, but once the product is refined, the fakery will no longer be required. This must be the kinds of Magic Underpants Gnomery the credulous press engaged in during the jetpack days: "Sure, a 21-second rocket belt is totally useless for anything except wowing county fair yokels – but once they figure out how to fit an order of magnitude more high-explosive onto that guy’s back, this thing will really take off!" The AI version of this is that if we just keep throwing orders of magnitude more training data and compute at the stochastic parrot, it will eventually come to life and become our superintelligent, omnipotent techno-genie. In other words, if we just keep breeding these horses to run faster and faster, eventually one of our prize mares will give birth to a locomotive: https://locusmag.com/2020/07/cory-doctorow-full-employment/ As a society, we have vested an alarming amount of power in the hands of tech billionaires who profess to be embittered science fiction fans who merely want to realize the "promises" of our Golden Age stfnal dreams. These bros insist that they can overcome both the technical hurdles and the absolutely insurmountable privation involved in space colonization: https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/09/astrobezzle/#send-robots-instead They have somehow mistaken Neal Stephenson’s dystopian satirical "metaverse" for a roadmap: https://pluralistic.net/2022/12/18/metaverse-means-pivot-to-video/ As Charlie Stross writes, it’s not just that these weirdos can’t tell the difference between imaginative parables about the future and predictions about the future – it’s also that they keep mistaking dystopias for business plans: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/tech-billionaires-need-to-stop-trying-to-make-the-science-fiction-they-grew-up-on-real/ Cyberpunk was a warning, not a suggestion. Please, I beg you, stop building the fucking torment nexus: https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/torment-nexus These techno-billionaires profess to be fulfilling a broken promise, but surely they know that the promises were made by liars – showmen using parlor tricks to sell the impossible. You were "promised a jetpack" in the same sense that table-rapping "spiritualists" promised you a conduit to talk with the dead, or that carny barkers promised you a girl that could turn into a gorilla: https://milwaukeerecord.com/film/ape-girl-shes-alive-documentary-november-11-sugar-maple/ That’s quite a supervillain origin story: "I was promised a jetpack, but then I grew up discovered that it was just a special effect. In revenge, I am promising you superintelligent AIs and self-driving cars, and these, too, are SFX." In other words: "Die a disillusioned jetpack fan or live long enough to become the fraudster who cooked up the jetpack lie you despise." Hey look at this (permalink) Ada goes to the set: let’s make an animated movie https://fsfe.org/news/2024/news-20240515-01.html Cloudseeder https://github.com/ipv6rslimited/cloudseeder How Much is a Planet Worth? https://billmckibben.substack.com/p/how-much-is-a-planet-worth This day in history (permalink) #15yrsago Gigantic study of UK CCTVs find that they should be used in parking lots, scrapped elsewhere https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2009/may/18/cctv-crime-police #15yrsago Montreal cop cuffs, busts and fines student $450 for not holding escalator rail in subway https://web.archive.org/web/20090517012200/https://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20090515.wescalator16/BNStory/National/home #10yrsago How advocacy beat ACTA in Europe https://web.archive.org/web/20140522133328/http://jip.vmhost.psu.edu/ojs/index.php/jip/article/view/168 #5yrsago Elizabeth Warren proposes legislation to enshrine Roe v Wade in Federal law and guarantee reproductive health care in all insurance plans https://medium.com/@teamwarren/congressional-action-to-protect-choice-aaf94ed25fb5 #5yrsago Europe’s top trustbuster thinks it’ll be impossible to break up Facebook https://www.cnet.com/tech/services-and-software/eu-competition-commissioner-facebook-breakup-would-be-last-resort/#ftag=CAD590a51e #1yrago The IRS will do your taxes for you (if that’s what you prefer) https://pluralistic.net/2023/05/17/free-as-in-freefile/#tell-me-something-i-dont-know Upcoming appearances (permalink) Authorship in an Age of Monopoly and Moral Panics (SF), May 17 https://www.authorsalliance.org/2024/03/15/authors-alliance-10th-anniversary-event-authorship-in-an-age-of-monopoly-and-moral-panics/ Media Ecology Association keynote (Amherst, NY), Jun 6-9 https://media-ecology.org/convention HOPE XV, Jul 14 (Queens, NY) https://www.hope.net/talks.html American Association of Law Libraries keynote (Chicago), Jul 21 https://www.aallnet.org/conference/agenda/keynote-speaker/ Recent appearances (permalink) Suur Futuroloogiline Kongress https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6hITj793htg&t=398s That Word Chat https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=miwEy_mACEY Come sfuggire al “Merdocene” e costruire un Internet migliore (Torino Biennale Tecnologia) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z5NC2EZCYBg Latest books (permalink) The Bezzle: a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about prison-tech and other grifts, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2024 (the-bezzle.org). Signed, personalized copies at Dark Delicacies (https://www.darkdel.com/store/p3062/Available_Feb_20th%3A_The_Bezzle_HB.html#/). "The Lost Cause:" a solarpunk novel of hope in the climate emergency, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), November 2023 (http://lost-cause.org). Signed, personalized copies at Dark Delicacies (https://www.darkdel.com/store/p3007/Pre-Order_Signed_Copies%3A_The_Lost_Cause_HB.html#/) "The Internet Con": A nonfiction book about interoperability and Big Tech (Verso) September 2023 (http://seizethemeansofcomputation.org). Signed copies at Book Soup (https://www.booksoup.com/book/9781804291245). "Red Team Blues": "A grabby, compulsive thriller that will leave you knowing more about how the world works than you did before." Tor Books http://redteamblues.com. Signed copies at Dark Delicacies (US): and Forbidden Planet (UK): https://forbiddenplanet.com/385004-red-team-blues-signed-edition-hardcover/. "Chokepoint Capitalism: How to Beat Big Tech, Tame Big Content, and Get Artists Paid, with Rebecca Giblin", on how to unrig the markets for creative labor, Beacon Press/Scribe 2022 https://chokepointcapitalism.com "Attack Surface": The third Little Brother novel, a standalone technothriller for adults. The Washington Post called it "a political cyberthriller, vigorous, bold and savvy about the limits of revolution and resistance." Order signed, personalized copies from Dark Delicacies https://www.darkdel.com/store/p1840/Available_Now%3A_Attack_Surface.html "How to Destroy Surveillance Capitalism": an anti-monopoly pamphlet analyzing the true harms of surveillance capitalism and proposing a solution. https://onezero.medium.com/how-to-destroy-surveillance-capitalism-8135e6744d59?sk=f6cd10e54e20a07d4c6d0f3ac011af6b) (signed copies: https://www.darkdel.com/store/p2024/Available_Now%3A__How_to_Destroy_Surveillance_Capitalism.html) "Little Brother/Homeland": A reissue omnibus edition with a new introduction by Edward Snowden: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250774583; personalized/signed copies here: https://www.darkdel.com/store/p1750/July%3A__Little_Brother_%26_Homeland.html "Poesy the Monster Slayer" a picture book about monsters, bedtime, gender, and kicking ass. Order here: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781626723627. Get a personalized, signed copy here: https://www.darkdel.com/store/p2682/Corey_Doctorow%3A_Poesy_the_Monster_Slayer_HB.html#/. Upcoming books (permalink) Picks and Shovels: a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about the heroic era of the PC, Tor Books, February 2025 Unauthorized Bread: a graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, 2025 Colophon (permalink) Today’s top sources: Currently writing: A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING Picks and Shovels, a Martin Hench noir thriller about the heroic era of the PC. FORTHCOMING TOR BOOKS JAN 2025 Vigilant, Little Brother short story about remote invigilation. FORTHCOMING ON TOR.COM Spill, a Little Brother short story about pipeline protests. FORTHCOMING ON TOR.COM Latest podcast: Precaratize Bosses https://craphound.com/news/2024/04/28/precaratize-bosses/ This work – excluding any serialized fiction – is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. That means you can use it any way you like, including commercially, provided that you attribute it to me, Cory Doctorow, and include a link to pluralistic.net. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ Quotations and images are not included in this license; they are included either under a limitation or exception to copyright, or on the basis of a separate license. Please exercise caution. How to get Pluralistic: Blog (no ads, tracking, or data-collection): Pluralistic.net Newsletter (no ads, tracking, or data-collection): https://pluralistic.net/plura-list Mastodon (no ads, tracking, or data-collection): https://mamot.fr/@pluralistic Medium (no ads, paywalled): https://doctorow.medium.com/ Twitter (mass-scale, unrestricted, third-party surveillance and advertising): https://twitter.com/doctorow Tumblr (mass-scale, unrestricted, third-party surveillance and advertising): https://mostlysignssomeportents.tumblr.com/tagged/pluralistic "When life gives you SARS, you make sarsaparilla" -Joey "Accordion Guy" DeVilla
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Today’s links Utah’s getting some of America’s best broadband: Public goods for the win. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. This day in history: 2009, 2014, 2019, 2023 Upcoming appearances: Where to find me. Recent appearances: Where I’ve been. Latest books: You keep readin’ em, I’ll keep writin’ ’em. Upcoming books: Like I said, I’ll keep writin’ ’em. Colophon: All the rest. Utah’s getting some of America’s best broadband (permalink) Residents of 21 cities in Utah have access to some of the fastest, most competitively priced broadband in the country, at speeds up to 10gb/s and prices as low as $75/month. It’s uncapped, and the connections are symmetrical: perfect for uploading and downloading. And it’s all thanks to the government. This broadband service is, of course, delivered via fiber optic cable. Of course it is. Fiber is vastly superior to all other forms of broadband delivery, including satellites, but also cable and DSL. Fiber caps out at 100tb/s, while cable cans out at 50gb/s – that is, fiber is 1,000 times faster: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/10/why-fiber-vastly-superior-cable-and-5g Despite the obvious superiority of fiber, America has been very slow to adopt it. Our monopolistic carriers act as though pulling fiber to our homes is an impossible challenge. All those wires that currently go to your house, from power-lines to copper phone-lines, are relics of a mysterious, fallen civilization and its long-lost arts. Apparently we could no more get a new wire to your house than we could build the pyramids using only hand-tools. In a sense, the people who say we can’t pull wires anymore are right: these are relics of a lost civilization. Specifically, electrification and later, universal telephone service was accomplished through massive federal grants under the New Deal – grants that were typically made to either local governments or non-profit co-operatives who got everyone in town connected to these essential modern utilities. Today – thanks to decades of neoliberalism and its dogmatic insistence that governments can’t do anything and shouldn’t try, lest they break the fragile equilibrium of the market – we have lost much of the public capacity that our grandparents took for granted. But in the isolated pockets where this capacity lives on, amazing things happen. Since 2015, residents of Jackson County, KY – one of the poorest counties in America – have enjoyed some of the country’s fastest, cheapest, most reliable broadband. The desperately poor Appalachian county is home to a rural telephone co-op, which grew out of its rural electrification co-op, and it used a combination of federal grants and local capacity to bring fiber to every home in the county, traversing dangerous mountain passes with a mule named "Ole Bub" to reach the most remote homes. The result was an immediately economic uplift for the community, and in the longer term, the county had reliable and effective broadband during the covid lockdowns: https://www.newyorker.com/tech/annals-of-technology/the-one-traffic-light-town-with-some-of-the-fastest-internet-in-the-us Contrast this with places where the private sector has the only say over who gets broadband, at what speed, and at what price. America is full of broadband deserts – deserts that strand our poorest people. Even in the hearts of our largest densest cities, whole neighborhoods can’t get any broadband. You won’t be surprised to learn that these are the neighborhoods that were historically redlined, and that the people who live in them are Black and brown, and also live with some of the highest levels of pollution and its attendant sicknesses: https://pluralistic.net/2021/06/10/flicc/#digital-divide These places are not set up for success under the best of circumstances, and during the lockdowns, they suffered terribly. You think your kid found it hard to go to Zoom school? Imagine what life was like for kids who attended remote learning while sitting on the baking tarmac in a Taco Bell parking lot, using its free wifi: https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2020/09/02/elem-s02.html ISPs loathe competition. They divide up the country into exclusive territories like the Pope dividing up the "new world" and do not trouble one another by trying to sell to customers outside of "their" turf. When Frontier – one of the worst of America’s terrible ISPs – went bankrupt, we got to see their books, and we learned two important facts: The company booked one million customers who had no alternative as an asset, because they would pay more for slower broadband, and Frontier could save a fortune by skipping maintenance, and charging these customers for broadband even through multi-day outages; and Frontier knew that it could make a billion dollars in profit over a decade by investing in fiber build-out, but it chose not to, because stock analysts will downrank any carrier that made capital investments that took more than five years to mature. Because Frontier’s execs were paid primarily in stock, they chose to strand their customers with aging copper connections and to leave a billion dollars sitting on the table, so that their personal net worth didn’t suffer a temporary downturn: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/04/frontiers-bankruptcy-reveals-cynical-choice-deny-profitable-fiber-millions ISPs maintain the weirdest position: that a) only the private sector can deliver broadband effectively, but b) to do so, they’ll need massive, unsupervised, no-strings-attached government handouts. For years, America went along with this improbable scheme, which is why Trump’s FCC chairman Ajit Pai gave the carriers $45 billion in public funds to string slow, 19th-century-style copper lines across rural America: https://pluralistic.net/2022/02/27/all-broadband-politics-are-local/ Now, this is obviously untrue, and people keep figuring out that publicly provisioned broadband is the only way for America to get the same standard of broadband connectivity that our cousins in other high-income nations enjoy. In order to thwart the public’s will, the cable and telco lobbyists joined ALEC, the far-right, corporatist lobbying shop, and drafted "model legislation" banning cities and counties from providing broadband, even in places the carriers chose not to serve: https://pluralistic.net/2023/03/19/culture-war-bullshit-stole-your-broadband/ Red states across America adopted these rules, and legislators sold this to their base by saying that this was just "keeping the government out of their internet" (even as every carrier relied on an exclusive, government-granted territorial charter, often with massive government subsidies). ALEC didn’t target red states exclusively because they had pliable, bribable conservative lawmakers. Red states trend rural, and rural places are the most likely sites for public fiber. Partly, that’s because low-density areas are harder to make a business case for, but also because these are also the places that got electricity and telephone through New Deal co-ops, which are often still in place. Just about the only places in America where people like their internet service are the 450+ small towns where the local government provides fiber. These places vote solidly Republican, and it was their beloved conservative lawmakers whom ALEC targeted to enact laws banning their equally beloved fiber – keep voting for Christmas, turkeys, and see where it gets you: https://communitynets.org/content/community-network-map But spare a little sympathy for the conservative movement here. The fact that reality has a pronounced leftist bias must be really frustrating for the ideological project of insisting that anything the market can’t provide is literally impossible. Which brings me back to Utah, a red state with a Republican governor and legislature, and a national leader in passing unconstitutional, unhinged, unworkable legislation as part of an elaborate culture war kabuki: https://www.npr.org/2023/03/24/1165975112/utah-passes-an-age-verification-law-for-anyone-using-social-media For more than two decades, a coalition of 21 cities in Utah have been building out municipal fiber. The consortium calls itself UTOPIA: "Utah Telecommunication Open Infrastructure Agency": https://www.utopiafiber.com/faqs/ UTOPIA pursues a hybrid model: they run "open access" fiber and then let anyone offer service over it. This can deliver the best of both worlds: publicly provisioned, blazing-fast fiber to your home, but with service provided by your choice of competing carriers. That means that if Moms for Liberty captures you local government, you’re not captive to their ideas about what sites your ISP should block. As Karl Bode writes for Techdirt, Utahns in UTOPIA regions have their choice of 18 carriers, and competition has driven down prices and increased speeds. Want uncapped 1gb fiber? That’s $75/month. Want 10gb fiber? That’s $150: https://www.techdirt.com/2024/05/15/utah-locals-are-getting-cheap-10-gbps-fiber-thanks-to-local-governments/ UTOPIA’s path to glory wasn’t an easy one. The dismal telco monopolists Qwest and Lumen sued to put them out of business, delaying the rollout by years: https://www.deseret.com/2005/7/22/19903471/utopia-responds-to-qwest-lawsuit/ UTOPIA has been profitable and self-sustaining for over 15 years and shows no sign of slowing. But 17 states still ban any attempt at this. Keeping up such an obviously bad policy requires a steady stream of distractions and lies. The "government broadband doesn’t work" lie has worn thin, so we’ve gotten a string of new lies about wireless service, insisting that fiber is obviated by point-to-point microwave relays, or 5g, or satellite service. There’s plenty of places where these services make sense. You’re not going to be able to use fiber in a moving car, so yeah, you’re going to want 5g (and those 5g towers are going to need to be connected to each other with fiber). Microwave relay service can fill the gap until fiber can be brought in, and it’s great for temporary sites (especially in places where it doesn’t rain, because rain, clouds, leaves and other obstructions are deadly for microwave relays). Satellite can make sense for an RV or a boat or remote scientific station. But wireless services are orders of magnitude slower than fiber. With satellite service, you share your bandwidth with an entire region or even a state. If there’s only a couple of users in your satellite’s footprint, you might get great service, but when your carrier adds a thousand more customers, your connection is sliced into a thousand pieces. That’s also true for everyone sharing your fiber trunk, but the difference is that your fiber trunk supports speeds that are tens of thousands of times faster than the maximum speeds we can put through freespace electromagnetic spectrum. If we need more fiber capacity, we can just fish a new strand of fiber through the conduit. And while you can increase the capacity of wireless by increasing your power and bandwidth, at a certain point you start pump so much EM into the air that birds start falling out of the sky. Every wireless device in a region shares the same electromagnetic spectrum, and we are only issued one such spectrum per universe. Each strand of fiber, by contrast, has its own little pocket universe, containing a subset of that spectrum. Despite all its disadvantages, satellite broadband has one distinct advantage, at least from an investor’s perspective: it can be monopolized. Just as we only have one electromagnetic spectrum, we also only have one sky, and the satellite density needed to sustain a colorably fast broadband speed pushes the limit of that shared sky: https://spacenews.com/starlink-vs-the-astronomers/ Private investors love monopoly telecoms providers, because, like pre-bankruptcy Frontier, they are too big to care. Back in 2021, Altice – the fourth-largest cable operator in America – announced that it was slashing its broadband speeds, to be "in line with other ISPs": https://pluralistic.net/2021/06/27/immortan-altice/#broadband-is-a-human-right In other words: "We’ve figured out that our competitors are so much worse than we are that we are deliberately degrading our service because we know you will still pay us the same for less." This is why corporate shills and pro-monopolists prefer satellite to municipal fiber. Sure, it’s orders of magnitude slower than fiber. Sure, it costs subscribers far more. Sure, it’s less reliable. But boy oh boy is it profitable. The thing is, reality has a pronounced leftist bias. No amount of market magic will conjure up new electromagnetic spectra that will allow satellite to attain parity with fiber. Physics hates Starlink. Yeah, I’m talking about Starlink. Of course I am. Elon Musk basically claims that his business genius can triumph over physics itself. That’s not the only vast, impersonal, implacable force that Musk claims he can best with his incredible reality-distortion field. Musk also claims that he can somehow add so many cars to the road that he will end traffic – in other words, he will best geometry too: https://pluralistic.net/2022/10/09/herbies-revenge/#100-billion-here-100-billion-there-pretty-soon-youre-talking-real-money Geometry hates Tesla, and physics hates Starlink. Reality has a leftist bias. The future is fiber, and public transit. These are both vastly preferable, more efficient, safer, more reliable and more plausible than satellite and private vehicles. Their only disadvantage is that they fail to give an easily gulled, thin-skinned compulsive liar more power over billions of people. That’s a disadvantage I can live with. (Image: 4028mdk09, CC BY-SA 3.0, modified) Hey look at this (permalink) One (Busy) Day in the Life of EFF’s Activism Team https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2024/05/one-busy-day-life-effs-activism-team The Walls Are Closing in on John Deere’s Tractor Repair Monopoly https://www.404media.co/the-walls-are-closing-in-on-john-deeres-tractor-repair-monopoly/ Porter’s five forces analysis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Porter’s_five_forces_analysis (h/t Bernardo Malfitano) This day in history (permalink) #15yrsago How kids use the net now, from danah boyd https://www.zephoria.org/thoughts/archives/2009/05/16/answers_to_ques.html #15yrsago Danger Mouse’s EMI-killed CD will be released as a blank CD-R, just add download https://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/8053471.stm #15yrsago Chicago Alderman vandalizes public art depicting CCTVs https://web.archive.org/web/20090520083519/http://www.chicagopublicradio.org/Content.aspx?audioID=34234 #10yrsago Cloud computers are computers you can only use with someone else’s permission https://memex.craphound.com/2014/05/16/cloud-computers-are-computers-you-can-only-use-with-someone-elses-permission/ #10yrsago Photo of NSA technicians sabotaging Cisco router prior to export https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2014/05/photos-of-an-nsa-upgrade-factory-show-cisco-router-getting-implant/ #5yrsago Watch: Tim Wu debates trustbusting with Tyler Cowen, who just wrote “a love letter” to Big Business https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y_Jp-GJ9LM0 #5yrsago A report from the Christchurch Call, where the future of “anti-extremist” moderation was debated at the highest levels https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/05/christchurch-call-good-not-so-good-and-ugly #5yrsago Lent: Jo Walton’s new novel is Dante’s Groundhog Day https://www.latimes.com/books/la-ca-jc-review-jo-walton-lent-20190516-story.html #5yrsago EPA Inspector General Report finds massive waste from Trump’s Pruitt flying business class, staying in swanky hotels https://www.epa.gov/sites/default/files/2019-05/documents/_epaoig_20190516-19-p-0155.pdf #5yrsago Under Trump, immigrants who serve in the armed forces are finding it harder to attain citizenship than those who do not serve https://www.miamiherald.com/news/nation-world/national/article230269884.html #5yrsago California set to legalize eating roadkill https://www.kqed.org/science/1941435/eating-roadkill-is-illegal-in-california-but-maybe-not-for-long #5yrsago Florida Governor says the FBI told him how the Russians hacked Florida voting machines, but swore him to secrecy https://www.tampabay.com/florida-politics/buzz/2019/05/14/which-florida-counties-had-election-hacks-russians-fbi-and-now-gov-ron-desantis-all-know-but-we-dont/ #5yrsago Grifty “information security” companies promised they could decrypt ransomware-locked computers, but they were just quietly paying the ransoms https://memex.craphound.com/2019/05/16/grifty-information-security-companies-promised-they-could-decrypt-ransomware-locked-computers-but-they-were-just-quietly-paying-the-ransoms/ #5yrsago Luna: Moon Rising, in which Ian McDonald brings the trilogy to an astounding, intricate, exciting and satisfying climax https://memex.craphound.com/2019/05/16/luna-moon-rising-in-which-ian-mcdonald-brings-the-trilogy-to-an-astounding-intricate-exciting-and-satisfying-climax/ #1yrsago Rent control works https://pluralistic.net/2023/05/16/mortgages-are-rent-control/#housing-is-a-human-right-not-an-asset Upcoming appearances (permalink) Authorship in an Age of Monopoly and Moral Panics (SF), May 17 https://www.authorsalliance.org/2024/03/15/authors-alliance-10th-anniversary-event-authorship-in-an-age-of-monopoly-and-moral-panics/ Media Ecology Association keynote (Amherst, NY), Jun 6-9 https://media-ecology.org/convention HOPE XV, Jul 14 (Queens, NY) https://www.hope.net/talks.html American Association of Law Libraries keynote (Chicago), Jul 21 https://www.aallnet.org/conference/agenda/keynote-speaker/ Recent appearances (permalink) Suur Futuroloogiline Kongress https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6hITj793htg&t=398s That Word Chat https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=miwEy_mACEY Come sfuggire al “Merdocene” e costruire un Internet migliore (Torino Biennale Tecnologia) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z5NC2EZCYBg Latest books (permalink) The Bezzle: a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about prison-tech and other grifts, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2024 (the-bezzle.org). Signed, personalized copies at Dark Delicacies (https://www.darkdel.com/store/p3062/Available_Feb_20th%3A_The_Bezzle_HB.html#/). "The Lost Cause:" a solarpunk novel of hope in the climate emergency, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), November 2023 (http://lost-cause.org). Signed, personalized copies at Dark Delicacies (https://www.darkdel.com/store/p3007/Pre-Order_Signed_Copies%3A_The_Lost_Cause_HB.html#/) "The Internet Con": A nonfiction book about interoperability and Big Tech (Verso) September 2023 (http://seizethemeansofcomputation.org). Signed copies at Book Soup (https://www.booksoup.com/book/9781804291245). "Red Team Blues": "A grabby, compulsive thriller that will leave you knowing more about how the world works than you did before." Tor Books http://redteamblues.com. Signed copies at Dark Delicacies (US): and Forbidden Planet (UK): https://forbiddenplanet.com/385004-red-team-blues-signed-edition-hardcover/. "Chokepoint Capitalism: How to Beat Big Tech, Tame Big Content, and Get Artists Paid, with Rebecca Giblin", on how to unrig the markets for creative labor, Beacon Press/Scribe 2022 https://chokepointcapitalism.com "Attack Surface": The third Little Brother novel, a standalone technothriller for adults. The Washington Post called it "a political cyberthriller, vigorous, bold and savvy about the limits of revolution and resistance." Order signed, personalized copies from Dark Delicacies https://www.darkdel.com/store/p1840/Available_Now%3A_Attack_Surface.html "How to Destroy Surveillance Capitalism": an anti-monopoly pamphlet analyzing the true harms of surveillance capitalism and proposing a solution. https://onezero.medium.com/how-to-destroy-surveillance-capitalism-8135e6744d59?sk=f6cd10e54e20a07d4c6d0f3ac011af6b) (signed copies: https://www.darkdel.com/store/p2024/Available_Now%3A__How_to_Destroy_Surveillance_Capitalism.html) "Little Brother/Homeland": A reissue omnibus edition with a new introduction by Edward Snowden: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250774583; personalized/signed copies here: https://www.darkdel.com/store/p1750/July%3A__Little_Brother_%26_Homeland.html "Poesy the Monster Slayer" a picture book about monsters, bedtime, gender, and kicking ass. Order here: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781626723627. Get a personalized, signed copy here: https://www.darkdel.com/store/p2682/Corey_Doctorow%3A_Poesy_the_Monster_Slayer_HB.html#/. Upcoming books (permalink) Picks and Shovels: a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about the heroic era of the PC, Tor Books, February 2025 Unauthorized Bread: a graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, 2025 Colophon (permalink) Today’s top sources: Currently writing: A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING Picks and Shovels, a Martin Hench noir thriller about the heroic era of the PC. FORTHCOMING TOR BOOKS JAN 2025 Vigilant, Little Brother short story about remote invigilation. FORTHCOMING ON TOR.COM Spill, a Little Brother short story about pipeline protests. FORTHCOMING ON TOR.COM Latest podcast: Precaratize Bosses https://craphound.com/news/2024/04/28/precaratize-bosses/ This work – excluding any serialized fiction – is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. That means you can use it any way you like, including commercially, provided that you attribute it to me, Cory Doctorow, and include a link to pluralistic.net. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ Quotations and images are not included in this license; they are included either under a limitation or exception to copyright, or on the basis of a separate license. Please exercise caution. How to get Pluralistic: Blog (no ads, tracking, or data-collection): Pluralistic.net Newsletter (no ads, tracking, or data-collection): https://pluralistic.net/plura-list Mastodon (no ads, tracking, or data-collection): https://mamot.fr/@pluralistic Medium (no ads, paywalled): https://doctorow.medium.com/ Twitter (mass-scale, unrestricted, third-party surveillance and advertising): https://twitter.com/doctorow Tumblr (mass-scale, unrestricted, third-party surveillance and advertising): https://mostlysignssomeportents.tumblr.com/tagged/pluralistic "When life gives you SARS, you make sarsaparilla" -Joey "Accordion Guy" DeVilla
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Today’s links Even if you think AI search could be good, it won’t be good: It’s just too goddamned easy to cheat. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. This day in history: 2004, 2009, 2014, 2019, 2023 Upcoming appearances: Where to find me. Recent appearances: Where I’ve been. Latest books: You keep readin’ em, I’ll keep writin’ ’em. Upcoming books: Like I said, I’ll keep writin’ ’em. Colophon: All the rest. Even if you think AI search could be good, it won’t be good (permalink) The big news in search this week is that Google is continuing its transition to "AI search" – instead of typing in search terms and getting links to websites, you’ll ask Google a question and an AI will compose an answer based on things it finds on the web: https://blog.google/products/search/generative-ai-google-search-may-2024/ Google bills this as "let Google do the googling for you." Rather than searching the web yourself, you’ll delegate this task to Google. Hidden in this pitch is a tacit admission that Google is no longer a convenient or reliable way to retrieve information, drowning as it is in AI-generated spam, poorly labeled ads, and SEO garbage: https://pluralistic.net/2024/05/03/keyword-swarming/#site-reputation-abuse Googling used to be easy: type in a query, get back a screen of highly relevant results. Today, clicking the top links will take you to sites that paid for placement at the top of the screen (rather than the sites that best match your query). Clicking further down will get you scams, AI slop, or bulk-produced SEO nonsense. AI-powered search promises to fix this, not by making Google search results better, but by having a bot sort through the search results and discard the nonsense that Google will continue to serve up, and summarize the high quality results. Now, there are plenty of obvious objections to this plan. For starters, why wouldn’t Google just make its search results better? Rather than building a LLM for the sole purpose of sorting through the garbage Google is either paid or tricked into serving up, why not just stop serving up garbage? We know that’s possible, because other search engines serve really good results by paying for access to Google’s back-end and then filtering the results: https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/04/teach-me-how-to-shruggie/#kagi Another obvious objection: why would anyone write the web if the only purpose for doing so is to feed a bot that will summarize what you’ve written without sending anyone to your webpage? Whether you’re a commercial publisher hoping to make money from advertising or subscriptions, or – like me – an open access publisher hoping to change people’s minds, why would you invite Google to summarize your work without ever showing it to internet users? Nevermind how unfair that is, think about how implausible it is: if this is the way Google will work in the future, why wouldn’t every publisher just block Google’s crawler? A third obvious objection: AI is bad. Not morally bad (though maybe morally bad, too!), but technically bad. It "hallucinates" nonsense answers, including dangerous nonsense. It’s a supremely confident liar that can get you killed: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/sep/01/mushroom-pickers-urged-to-avoid-foraging-books-on-amazon-that-appear-to-be-written-by-ai The promises of AI are grossly oversold, including the promises Google makes, like its claim that its AI had discovered millions of useful new materials. In reality, the number of useful new materials Deepmind had discovered was zero: https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/23/maximal-plausibility/#reverse-centaurs This is true of all of AI’s most impressive demos. Often, "AI" turns out to be low-waged human workers in a distant call-center pretending to be robots: https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/31/neural-interface-beta-tester/#tailfins Sometimes, the AI robot dancing on stage turns out to literally be just a person in a robot suit pretending to be a robot: https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/29/pay-no-attention/#to-the-little-man-behind-the-curtain The AI video demos that represent "an existential threat to Hollywood filmmaking" turn out to be so cumbersome as to be practically useless (and vastly inferior to existing production techniques): https://www.wheresyoured.at/expectations-versus-reality/ But let’s take Google at its word. Let’s stipulate that: a) It can’t fix search, only add a slop-filtering AI layer on top of it; and b) The rest of the world will continue to let Google index its pages even if they derive no benefit from doing so; and c) Google will shortly fix its AI, and all the lies about AI capabilities will be revealed to be premature truths that are finally realized. AI search is still a bad idea. Because beyond all the obvious reasons that AI search is a terrible idea, there’s a subtle – and incurable – defect in this plan: AI search – even excellent AI search – makes it far too easy for Google to cheat us, and Google can’t stop cheating us. Remember: enshittification isn’t the result of worse people running tech companies today than in the years when tech services were good and useful. Rather, enshittification is rooted in the collapse of constraints that used to prevent those same people from making their services worse in service to increasing their profit margins: https://pluralistic.net/2024/03/26/glitchbread/#electronic-shelf-tags These companies always had the capacity to siphon value away from business customers (like publishers) and end-users (like searchers). That comes with the territory: digital businesses can alter their "business logic" from instant to instant, and for each user, allowing them to change payouts, prices and ranking. I call this "twiddling": turning the knobs on the system’s back-end to make sure the house always wins: https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/19/twiddler/ What changed wasn’t the character of the leaders of these businesses, nor their capacity to cheat us. What changed was the consequences for cheating. When the tech companies merged to monopoly, they ceased to fear losing your business to a competitor. Google’s 90% search market share was attained by bribing everyone who operates a service or platform where you might encounter a search box to connect that box to Google. Spending tens of billions of dollars every year to make sure no one ever encounters a non-Google search is a cheaper way to retain your business than making sure Google is the very best search engine: https://pluralistic.net/2024/02/21/im-feeling-unlucky/#not-up-to-the-task Competition was once a threat to Google; for years, its mantra was "competition is a click away." Today, competition is all but nonexistent. Then the surveillance business consolidated into a small number of firms. Two companies dominate the commercial surveillance industry: Google and Meta, and they collude to rig the market: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jedi_Blue That consolidation inevitably leads to regulatory capture: shorn of competitive pressure, the companies that dominate the sector can converge on a single message to policymakers and use their monopoly profits to turn that message into policy: https://pluralistic.net/2022/06/05/regulatory-capture/ This is why Google doesn’t have to worry about privacy laws. They’ve successfully prevented the passage of a US federal consumer privacy law. The last time the US passed a federal consumer privacy law was in 1988. It’s a law that bans video store clerks from telling the newspapers which VHS cassettes you rented: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_Privacy_Protection_Act In Europe, Google’s vast profits lets it fly an Irish flag of convenience, thus taking advantage of Ireland’s tolerance for tax evasion and violations of European privacy law: https://pluralistic.net/2023/05/15/finnegans-snooze/#dirty-old-town Google doesn’t fear competition, it doesn’t fear regulation, and it also doesn’t fear rival technologies. Google and its fellow Big Tech cartel members have expanded IP law to allow it to prevent third parties from reverse-engineer, hacking, or scraping its services. Google doesn’t have to worry about ad-blocking, tracker blocking, or scrapers that filter out Google’s lucrative, low-quality results: https://locusmag.com/2020/09/cory-doctorow-ip/ Google doesn’t fear competition, it doesn’t fear regulation, it doesn’t fear rival technology and it doesn’t fear its workers. Google’s workforce once enjoyed enormous sway over the company’s direction, thanks to their scarcity and market power. But Google has outgrown its dependence on its workers, and lays them off in vast numbers, even as it increases its profits and pisses away tens of billions on stock buybacks: https://pluralistic.net/2023/11/25/moral-injury/#enshittification Google is fearless. It doesn’t fear losing your business, or being punished by regulators, or being mired in guerrilla warfare with rival engineers. It certainly doesn’t fear its workers. Making search worse is good for Google. Reducing search quality increases the number of queries, and thus ads, that each user must make to find their answers: https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/24/naming-names/#prabhakar-raghavan If Google can make things worse for searchers without losing their business, it can make more money for itself. Without the discipline of markets, regulators, tech or workers, it has no impediment to transferring value from searchers and publishers to itself. Which brings me back to AI search. When Google substitutes its own summaries for links to pages, it creates innumerable opportunities to charge publishers for preferential placement in those summaries. This is true of any algorithmic feed: while such feeds are important – even vital – for making sense of huge amounts of information, they can also be used to play a high-speed shell-game that makes suckers out of the rest of us: https://pluralistic.net/2024/05/11/for-you/#the-algorithm-tm When you trust someone to summarize the truth for you, you become terribly vulnerable to their self-serving lies. In an ideal world, these intermediaries would be "fiduciaries," with a solemn (and legally binding) duty to put your interests ahead of their own: https://pluralistic.net/2024/05/07/treacherous-computing/#rewilding-the-internet But Google is clear that its first duty is to its shareholders: not to publishers, not to searchers, not to "partners" or employees. AI search makes cheating so easy, and Google cheats so much. Indeed, the defects in AI give Google a readymade excuse for any apparent self-dealing: "we didn’t tell you a lie because someone paid us to (for example, to recommend a product, or a hotel room, or a political point of view). Sure, they did pay us, but that was just an AI ’hallucination.’" The existence of well-known AI hallucinations creates a zone of plausible deniability for even more enshittification of Google search. As Madeleine Clare Elish writes, AI serves as a "moral crumple zone": https://estsjournal.org/index.php/ests/article/view/260 That’s why, even if you’re willing to believe that Google could make a great AI-based search, we can nevertheless be certain that they won’t. (Image: Cryteria, CC BY 3.0; djhughman, CC BY 2.0; modified) Hey look at this (permalink) Sam Bankman-Fried Is Not Entirely Wrong https://prospect.org/health/2024-05-13-sam-bankman-fried-not-wrong-steward-health-bankruptcy/ My Mother’s Letters Should Belong to Me — Not a Company That Works With Prisons https://truthout.org/articles/my-mothers-letters-should-belong-to-me-not-a-company-that-works-with-prisons/ Big Tech to EU: "Drop Dead" https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2024/05/big-tech-eu-drop-dead This day in history (permalink) #20yrsago Mayor dispatches cops to bust blogger-critic https://web.archive.org/web/20040605152433/https://www.loiclemeur.com/english/2004/05/a_french_blogge.html #20yrsago England’s love affair with the utility bill https://web.archive.org/web/20040706124142/https://cede.blogspot.com/2004_05_01_cede_archive.html#108455091554008455 #20yrsago RIAA’s funny bookkeeping turns gains into losses https://web.archive.org/web/20040607052730/http://www.kensei-news.com/bizdev/publish/factoids_us/article_23374.shtml #20yrsago Read this and understand the P2P wars https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=532882 #15yrsago Sarah Palin’s legal team doesn’t understand DNS https://www.huffpost.com/entry/crackhocom-sarah-palins-n_n_202417 #15yrsago Was 1971 the best year to be born a geek? https://www.raphkoster.com/2009/05/14/the-perfect-geek-age/ #15yrsago Charlie Stross on the future of gaming http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2009/05/login_2009_keynote_gaming_in_t.html #15yrsago UK chiropractors try to silence critic with libel claim https://gormano.blogspot.com/2009/05/two-things.html #15yrsgo The Yggyssey: Pinkwater takes on The Odyssey https://memex.craphound.com/2009/05/15/the-yggyssey-pinkwater-takes-on-the-odyssey/ #15yrsago Sony Pictures CEO: “Nothing good from the Internet, period.” https://wwd.com/feature/memo-pad-uniqlo-nabs-deyn-bad-internet-classic-martha-2136751-1496073/ #10yrsago FCC brings down the gavel on Net Neutrality https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2014/05/prepare-take-action-defend-net-neutrality-heres-how-fcc-makes-its-rules #10yrsago IETF declares war on surveillance https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc7258.txt #10yrsago Rob Ford: a night of drunk driving, racism, drugs, beating friends and demeaning his wife https://www.thestar.com/news/insight/rob-ford-one-wild-night-in-march/article_7167c4f4-2a92-5444-b0d1-54d16a6a3f5b.html #10yrsago Aussie politician calls rival a “c*nt” in Parliament, gets away with it https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5TsNL3uBw1g #10yrsago Mozilla CAN change the industry: by adding DRM, they change it for the worse https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2014/05/mozilla-and-drm #10yrsago De-obfuscating Big Cable’s numbers: investment flat since 2000 https://www.techdirt.com/2014/05/14/cable-industrys-own-numbers-show-general-decline-investment-over-past-seven-years/ #10yrsago Nude closeups of people who are more than 100 years old https://web.archive.org/web/20140516055234/http://anastasiapottingerphotography.com/gallery/art/centenarians/ #10yrsago Cable lobbyists strong-arm Congresscritters into signing anti-Net Neutrality petition https://web.archive.org/web/20140527030122/http://www.freepress.net/blog/2014/05/12/tell-congress-dont-sign-cable-industry-letter-against-real-net-neutrality #10yrsago London property bubble examined https://timharford.com/2014/05/when-a-man-is-tired-of-london-house-prices/ #5yrsago A year after Meltdown and Spectre, security researchers are still announcing new serious risks from low-level chip operations https://www.wired.com/story/intel-mds-attack-speculative-execution-buffer/ #5yrsago Jury awards $2b to California couple who say Bayer’s Roundup weedkiller gave them cancer https://www.cnn.com/2019/05/14/business/bayer-roundup-verdict/index.html #5yrsago AT&T promised it would create 7,000 jobs if Trump went through with its $3B tax-cut, but they cut 23,000 jobs instead https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2019/05/att-promised-7000-new-jobs-to-get-tax-break-it-cut-23000-jobs-instead/ #5yrsago DOJ accuses Verizon and AT&T employees of participating in SIM-swap identity theft crimes https://www.vice.com/en/article/d3n3am/att-and-verizon-employees-charged-sim-swapping-criminal-ring #5yrsago Collecting user data is a competitive disadvantage https://a16z.com/the-empty-promise-of-data-moats/ #5yrsago Three years after the Umbrella Revolution, Hong Kong has its own Extinction Rebellion chapter https://www.scmp.com/news/hong-kong/health-environment/article/3010050/hong-kongs-new-extinction-rebellion-chapter-looks #5yrsago Lawyer involved in suits against Israel’s most notorious cyber-arms dealer targeted by its weapons, delivered through a terrifying Whatsapp vulnerability https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/13/technology/nso-group-whatsapp-spying.html #5yrsago The New York Times on Carl Malamud and his tireless battle to make the law free for all to read https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/13/us/politics/georgia-official-code-copyright.html #5yrsago Alex Stamos on the security problems of the platforms’ content moderation, and what to do about them https://memex.craphound.com/2019/05/15/alex-stamos-on-the-security-problems-of-the-platforms-content-moderation-and-what-to-do-about-them/ #5yrsago Axon makes false statements to town that bought its police bodycams, threatens to tase their credit-rating if they cancel the contract https://www.muckrock.com/news/archives/2019/may/09/algorithms-axon-fontana/ #5yrsago After retaliation against Googler Uprising organizers, a company-wide memo warns employees they can be fired for accessing “need to know” data https://www.vice.com/en/article/pajkkz/its-almost-impossible-to-tell-if-iphone-has-been-hacked #5yrsago Foxconn promised it would do something with the empty buildings it bought in Wisconsin, but they’re still empty (still no factory, either) https://www.theverge.com/2019/5/13/18565408/foxconn-wisconsin-innovation-centers-factories-empty-tax-subsidy #1yrago Ireland’s privacy regulator is a gamekeeper-turned-poacher https://pluralistic.net/2023/05/15/finnegans-snooze/#dirty-old-town #1yrago Google’s AI Hype Circle https://pluralistic.net/2023/05/14/googles-ai-hype-circle/ Upcoming appearances (permalink) "Finding the Money" screening (LA), May 15 https://www.laemmle.com/film/finding-money?date=2024-05-15 Authorship in an Age of Monopoly and Moral Panics (SF), May 17 https://www.authorsalliance.org/2024/03/15/authors-alliance-10th-anniversary-event-authorship-in-an-age-of-monopoly-and-moral-panics/ Media Ecology Association keynote (Amherst, NY), Jun 6-9 https://media-ecology.org/convention HOPE XV, Jul 14 (Queens, NY) https://www.hope.net/talks.html American Association of Law Libraries keynote (Chicago), Jul 21 https://www.aallnet.org/conference/agenda/keynote-speaker/ Recent appearances (permalink) Suur Futuroloogiline Kongress https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6hITj793htg&t=398s That Word Chat https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=miwEy_mACEY Come sfuggire al “Merdocene” e costruire un Internet migliore (Torino Biennale Tecnologia) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z5NC2EZCYBg Latest books (permalink) The Bezzle: a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about prison-tech and other grifts, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2024 (the-bezzle.org). Signed, personalized copies at Dark Delicacies (https://www.darkdel.com/store/p3062/Available_Feb_20th%3A_The_Bezzle_HB.html#/). "The Lost Cause:" a solarpunk novel of hope in the climate emergency, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), November 2023 (http://lost-cause.org). Signed, personalized copies at Dark Delicacies (https://www.darkdel.com/store/p3007/Pre-Order_Signed_Copies%3A_The_Lost_Cause_HB.html#/) "The Internet Con": A nonfiction book about interoperability and Big Tech (Verso) September 2023 (http://seizethemeansofcomputation.org). Signed copies at Book Soup (https://www.booksoup.com/book/9781804291245). "Red Team Blues": "A grabby, compulsive thriller that will leave you knowing more about how the world works than you did before." Tor Books http://redteamblues.com. Signed copies at Dark Delicacies (US): and Forbidden Planet (UK): https://forbiddenplanet.com/385004-red-team-blues-signed-edition-hardcover/. "Chokepoint Capitalism: How to Beat Big Tech, Tame Big Content, and Get Artists Paid, with Rebecca Giblin", on how to unrig the markets for creative labor, Beacon Press/Scribe 2022 https://chokepointcapitalism.com "Attack Surface": The third Little Brother novel, a standalone technothriller for adults. The Washington Post called it "a political cyberthriller, vigorous, bold and savvy about the limits of revolution and resistance." Order signed, personalized copies from Dark Delicacies https://www.darkdel.com/store/p1840/Available_Now%3A_Attack_Surface.html "How to Destroy Surveillance Capitalism": an anti-monopoly pamphlet analyzing the true harms of surveillance capitalism and proposing a solution. https://onezero.medium.com/how-to-destroy-surveillance-capitalism-8135e6744d59?sk=f6cd10e54e20a07d4c6d0f3ac011af6b) (signed copies: https://www.darkdel.com/store/p2024/Available_Now%3A__How_to_Destroy_Surveillance_Capitalism.html) "Little Brother/Homeland": A reissue omnibus edition with a new introduction by Edward Snowden: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250774583; personalized/signed copies here: https://www.darkdel.com/store/p1750/July%3A__Little_Brother_%26_Homeland.html "Poesy the Monster Slayer" a picture book about monsters, bedtime, gender, and kicking ass. Order here: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781626723627. Get a personalized, signed copy here: https://www.darkdel.com/store/p2682/Corey_Doctorow%3A_Poesy_the_Monster_Slayer_HB.html#/. Upcoming books (permalink) Picks and Shovels: a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about the heroic era of the PC, Tor Books, February 2025 Unauthorized Bread: a graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, 2025 Colophon (permalink) Today’s top sources: Currently writing: A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING Picks and Shovels, a Martin Hench noir thriller about the heroic era of the PC. FORTHCOMING TOR BOOKS JAN 2025 Vigilant, Little Brother short story about remote invigilation. FORTHCOMING ON TOR.COM Spill, a Little Brother short story about pipeline protests. FORTHCOMING ON TOR.COM Latest podcast: Precaratize Bosses https://craphound.com/news/2024/04/28/precaratize-bosses/ This work – excluding any serialized fiction – is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. That means you can use it any way you like, including commercially, provided that you attribute it to me, Cory Doctorow, and include a link to pluralistic.net. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ Quotations and images are not included in this license; they are included either under a limitation or exception to copyright, or on the basis of a separate license. Please exercise caution. How to get Pluralistic: Blog (no ads, tracking, or data-collection): Pluralistic.net Newsletter (no ads, tracking, or data-collection): https://pluralistic.net/plura-list Mastodon (no ads, tracking, or data-collection): https://mamot.fr/@pluralistic Medium (no ads, paywalled): https://doctorow.medium.com/ Twitter (mass-scale, unrestricted, third-party surveillance and advertising): https://twitter.com/doctorow Tumblr (mass-scale, unrestricted, third-party surveillance and advertising): https://mostlysignssomeportents.tumblr.com/tagged/pluralistic "When life gives you SARS, you make sarsaparilla" -Joey "Accordion Guy" DeVilla
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