[Plura-list] Collective Action In Tech For Black Lives Matter; The art of density; Attack Surface sneak peek
Cory Doctorow
doctorow at craphound.com
Tue Aug 4 12:59:33 EDT 2020
Today's links
* Collective Action In Tech For Black Lives Matter: A guide to organize
tech workers to support the anti-racism movement.
* The art of density: The exuberant aerial collages of Cássio Vasconcellos.
* Attack Surface sneak peek: A free extended preview of the next Little
Brother novel.
* Jack Dorsey's interop plan: If you can't beat 'em, out-federate 'em.
* Google acquires major stake in ADT: Your Nest is spying on you.
* Papercraft Addams Family house: Ray Keim is a genius.
* This day in history: 2005, 2015, 2019
* Colophon: Recent publications, upcoming appearances, current writing
projects, current reading
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🛐 Collective Action In Tech For Black Lives Matter
The Collective Action in Tech project has just released its latest
guide: "a guide to organize tech workers to support the anti-racism
movement."
https://collectiveaction.tech/blm
The guide starts by acknowledging that tech has a history and a present
of shoring up anti-Black racism, from IBM's role in Apartheid to
algorithmic bias to harassment and discrimination in tech workplaces.
It repeats Jamelle Bouie's assertion that anti-racism is a stepping
stone towards (and dependent upon) universal liberation: racial
discrimination and violence are part of the project to divide working
people, and overcoming them unites us all.
And Black workers have historically been the most oppressed workers of
all, a pattern repeated in tech, where Black workers are more likely to
be gig workers, warehouse workers, or other precarious, poorly
compensated workers.
To solve this, the authors say "we must recognize that workers in a
system biased against them cannot shoulder the burdens and risks alone
while also fighting oppression in the workplace."
To that end, they make a series of concrete, well-defined recommendations:
I. Build a collective: start with an "inner circle" of trusted people;
each of you build "outer circles."
II. Secure organizers: divide up information so that a single snitch
can't rat you all out.
III. Map out strategic outreach goals: which groups in your org will
join with you and how will you reach them?
IV. Fortify perspectives: "cultivate support that amplifies the demands
of fellow Black coworkers without doubling down on the daily burden of
systemic racism."
V. Measure support: Get people to tell you how much action they're
willing to take so you have realistic expectations.
VI. Build Bridges: "try not to let the idea of bad faith divide worker
power"
VII. Reach Critical Mass: "Err on the side of caution and push for more
support than you think you'll need."
VIII: Identify demands: Measurable goals that hold leadership accountable
(they include templates for demand letters)
IX: Take action: work stoppages, open letters, social media campaigns,
sick-outs, strikes, visible actions
X: Protect each other: Know your labor law, protest retaliation.
Also included: templates for organizing conversations and letters to
management.
The organizers are soliciting feedback to improve this toolkit.
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🛐 The art of density
In "Collectives," Brazilian photographer Cássio Vasconcellos uses
helicopter photos of urban landscapes, airplane boneyards, beaches,
markets, and other commonplaces of human life, cleverly collaged, to
create arresting, glorious images of higgeldy-piggeldy.
https://www.cassiovasconcellos.com/series/collectives/
As impressive as these images are when zoomed out, the fullscreen detail
images are even more impressive.
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🛐 Attack Surface sneak peek
In October, Tor Books will publish ATTACK SURFACE, the third Little
Brother book: a standalone novel about Masha, the young woman from the
beginning and ending of the first two books, and her life as a
surveillance contractor, first for the DHS and then for cyberarms-dealers.
Masha has spent her whole life rationalizing away the humanitarian
consequences suffered by the people in the crosshairs of the weapons she
developed: first in the US for the DHS after a terrorist attack, then in
Iraq as a high-paid, jihadi-hunting contractor.
And finally as a private sector mercenary, helping suppress democracy
movements in post-Soviet dictatorships in eastern Europe.
Masha's crisis of conscience sends her back to San Francisco, where she
discovers to her horror that the weapons she helped develop have been
turned on her childhood best friend, who has grown up to be a key
antiracist activist in Oakland and who is leading an uprising.
The first Little Brother books were about resistance, but this one is
about a different kind of bravery: the courage it takes to confront your
past bad deeds and rip out the parts of your personality that made them
possible.
As tech workers around the world rise up to demand better of their
employers, and as they realize what they have been complicit in all
along, this is a question that occupies much of my time and thinking.
Writing Attack Surface was in many ways harder than writing Little
Brother and Homeland, but ultimately even more satisfying:
I got to include all that juicy technothriller stuff - surveillance and
counter-surveillance tech - but beyond that, I got to imagine what we
could do with real solidarity between tech workers and the billions of
lives their work touches.
Today, Tor published an "extended preview" of the book - a free ebook
available through all the major publishers. I hope you'll check it out,
and, if you like it, pre-order.
https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250802521
Those pre-orders really matter to writers and can make the difference in
reaching the bestseller lists, which triggers all kinds of great things,
including translation deals and movie/TV interest.
And if you *do* pre-order, you get an additional bonus: a free Marcus
Yallow/Little Brother short story, "Force Multiplier," about the creepy
world of stalkerware, that you'll get as an ebook and audiobook on the
day the book launches.
https://read.macmillan.com/promo/attacksurfacepreordercampaign/
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🛐 Jack Dorsey's interop plan
Twitter is uniquely poised to lead on interoperability and federation;
though they are very large, they are dwarfed by their major competitors,
Facebook and Wechat. What's more, Twitter was initially built for
federation, with wide, generous APIs that facilitated interop.
Over the years, Twitter has grown progressively more closed and also
more fraught, as the problems of harassment, brigading, and hate speech
have dogged the daily operations of the service, rising to the level of
a global geopolitical crisis at times.
Facebook and Wechat maintain the pretense that this could all be solved
if governments would just tell them what rules to enforce and then
they'd use machine learning and boiler-rooms full of traumatized
moderation subcontractors to make it so.
Of course, this is bullshit: it only works if you don't care how much
"good" speech you catch in your moderation regime; to say nothing of the
impossibility of reconciling the mores and laws of 150+ countries.
Beyond that, a regulation requiring filters and mass-scale human
moderation constitutes a powerful moat around your business - a capex
requirement that new entrants can't satisfy, which safeguards these
champions of "disruption" from being disrupted themselves.
They do fear it. Look at Zuck's testimony and the accompanying docs from
last week's Congressional hearings: virtually everything Zuck does is
oriented around preserving his advantage against potential future Zucks,
sitting in their own dorm rooms, plotting a Myspace rout.
All of this means that Twitter - and Twitter alone, really - is set up
to champion interop, as a way to reconcile its desire to be large and
unmoderated with the pressure to do something about disinfo, harassment,
and enabling dictators.
Letting small companies federate with Twitter will cost the company some
of the rents it could extract through perfect control - but in return,
the company could devolve moderation onto user communities.
You - or a co-op, or a for-profit, or some other institution - could run
a Nazi-free Twitter and only federate with other no-Nazi instances -
something you can already do with Mastodon, but federation gives you the
benefit of Twitter's scale.
In fact, this is what Mastodon and other fediverse technologies are
lacking: a way for people to leave Twitter without leaving their
communities. Federation lets you have one foot in both worlds.
We undertheorize interop in these discussions because the web has made
it so ubiquitous as to be invisible: imagine how Twitter would be if you
couldn't include links to the web, or if you couldn't use some browsers
with it, or if it didn't run on one of the mobile OSes.
All of this to say: I am incredibly excited to read Jack Dorsey's update
on the Twitter interop project - to see that he views federation as a
way to break the walled gardens and resolve demands to moderate at scale.
https://twitter.com/jack/status/1288860270635311106
Twitter's Bluesky team is small, but it's a beachhead: Twitter is the
only company that's large enough to make this happen but threatened
enough to WANT to make it happen.
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🛐 Google acquires major stake in ADT
Google sucks at IoT so, in the time-honored tradition of monopolists, it
bought a successful company, Nest, bricked much of its existing gear,
failed catastrophically to integrate it for *years*, exposing users to
hacks, shuffled it around and around the corporate structure...
Locked out competing devices, hid secret microphones in new,
"microphone-free" devices, and now...
...they've bought a $450m stake in home security giant ADT, which will
turn ADT customers into nonconsensual Nest customers.
https://blog.google/products/google-nest/partnership-adt-smarter-home-security/
Under the deal, ADT customers' security cameras will be "upgraded" to
Nest devices whose videos will be sent to Google for long-term storage
and machine-learning analysis.
Home automation and home security have become the shittiest end of the
Internet of Shit. On the one hand, you have Ring, who turn your home
security system into part of a warrantless, off-the-books
mass-surveillance grid for local cops:
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/01/ring-doorbell-app-packed-third-party-trackers
On the other, you have devices sold through "partnerships" with cable
monopolists that are unceremoniously bricked when the deals end:
https://gizmodo.com/spectrum-kills-home-security-business-refuses-refunds-1840931761
Then there were the internal empire-builders at Google that kept Nest
from being properly secured, leading to a rash of voyeurs who spied on
and terrorized Nest owners by screaming obscenities at them and their kids:
https://www.siliconvalley.com/2019/10/18/the-voice-from-our-nest-camera-threatened-to-steal-our-baby/
None of this should be happening. For decades, America's competition law
operated on the presumption of "structural separation" - the idea that
companies should not be allowed to form vertical monopolies:
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3180174
These monopolies are inevitably not just inefficient, plagued by "the
curse of bigness," but they also crowd out *good* companies with
superior products, by using the vertical integration to keep them from
getting into the market.
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🛐 Papercraft Addams Family house
For more than a decade, I've doted on Haunted Dimensions, Ray Keim's
incredible, Haunted Mansion-themed papercraft site, home to many
download/print/assemble models of Disney's Haunted Mansion (they make
GREAT gingerbread templates!).
http://www.haunteddimensions.raykeim.com/
Keim's latest is "Neat Sweet Petite" - a papercraft model of the Addams
Family house: "Based solely on the single reference of the house shown
in the Addams Family TV show opening. It was a originally just a matte
painting. I made up the rest."
http://www.haunteddimensions.raykeim.com/index390.html
It's a free download (though Keim solicits donations), and sports superb
details and gracenotes, including "Morticia's conservatory with Cleopatra."
https://www.paypal.com/donate/?token=PU6KVvsfJfIyLWxcUeI7rLyRcKrX5Eh_nGDBpemVOoei0AyPkwwJIw29TujuqScq-uFTAm
If you are bored of being imprisoned by the plague and are in search of
a way of beautifying your cell, this looks like a hell of a fun project!
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🛐 This day in history
#15yrsago Napster loses $20MM on $21MM revenue in Q1 05
https://www.macworld.co.uk/news/mac/napster-losses-deepen-revenues-rise-12264/
#5yrsago Trophy hunting is "hunting" the way that Big Thunder Mountain
is a "train ride" https://imgur.com/gallery/59N0c
#5yrsago Idaho court strikes down anti-whistleblower "ag-gag" law
https://www.acluidaho.org/en/news/idaho-ag-gag-law-ruled-unconstitutional-federal-court
#5yrsago Actual questions from my Green Card questionnaire
https://boingboing.net/2015/08/04/actual-questions-from-my-green.html
#5yrsago Privatized, for-profit immigration detention centers force
detainees to work for $1-3/day
https://www.latimes.com/nation/immigration/la-na-detention-immigration-workers-20150803-story.html
#5yrsago EFF and coalition announce new Do Not Track standard for the
Web https://www.eff.org/dnt-policy
#1yrago Edelman PR drops GEO Group after employee revolt at the prospect
of laundering the reputation of private US concentration camps
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/30/business/edelman-geo-border-detention.html
#1yrago Medieval people bathed
https://going-medieval.com/2019/08/02/i-assure-you-medieval-people-bathed/
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🛐 Colophon
Today's top sources: Clarissa Redwine
(https://twitter.com/ClarissaRedwine), Kottke (https://kottke.org/), Ian
Brown (http://www.cs.ox.ac.uk/people/ian.brown/), Josh Fouts
(https://twitter.com/JoshuaSFouts/), Dan Howland
(https://twitter.com/ridetheory/).
Currently writing:
* My next novel, "The Lost Cause," a post-GND novel about truth and
reconciliation. Yesterday's progress: 44972 words (44972 total).
Currently reading: The Deficit Myth, Stephanie Kelton
Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town (part 12),
https://craphound.com/podcast/2020/08/03/someone-comes-to-town-someone-leaves-town-part-12/
Upcoming appearances:
* Do Androids Dream of Electric Cars? Public Transit in the Age of
Google, Uber, and Elon Musk, Aug 4,
https://www.eventbrite.ca/e/public-transit-in-the-age-of-google-uber-and-elon-musk-tickets-114353753154
* Virtual event with Christopher Brown for his novel "Failed State," Aug
12,
https://www.bookpeople.com/event/virtual-event-christopher-brown-failed-state
* Induction into the CSFFA Hall of Fame, Aug 15,
https://www.whenwordscollide.org/canvention.php
* Keynote for Law Via the Internet conference, Sept 22,
https://www.crowdcast.io/e/LVI2020/register
Latest book:
* "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/p1562/_Poesy_the_Monster_Slayer.html.
Upcoming books:
* "Attack Surface": The third Little Brother book, Oct 20, 2020.
https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250757531
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*When life gives you SARS, you make sarsaparilla* -Joey "Accordion Guy"
DeVilla
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