[Plura-list] Student debt trap; Postmortem of the NYPD's murder of a Black man; Section 230 is Good, Actually

[Cory Doctorow]

_,.-'~'-.,__,.-'~'-.,__,.-'~'-.,__,.-'~'-.,__,.-'~'-.,_

My 2017 novel Walkaway is a $2.99 DRM-free ebook at US retailers today.

William Gibson called it "A wonderful novel."

Edward Snowden said it "Walkaway reminds us that the world we choose to
build is the one we’ll inhabit."

Neal Stephenson called it "The Bhagavad Gita of hacker/maker/burner/open
source/git/gnu/wiki/99%/adjunctfaculty/Anonymous/shareware/thingiverse/cypherpunk/LGTBQIA*/squatter/upcycling
culture."

https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780765392787

_,.-'~'-.,__,.-'~'-.,__,.-'~'-.,__,.-'~'-.,__,.-'~'-.,_

Today's links

* Student debt trap: Borrowed: $79,000. Paid: $190,000. Now Owes? $236,000.

* Postmortem of the NYPD's murder of a Black man: How to write about
individual stories of a structural crisis.

* Section 230 is Good, Actually: It's not a "corporate giveaway," it's
how you got the parts of the internet that you actually like.

* This day in history: None

* Colophon: Recent publications, upcoming appearances, current writing
projects, current reading

_,.-'~'-.,__,.-'~'-.,__,.-'~'-.,__,.-'~'-.,__,.-'~'-.,_

💄 Student debt trap

There's a tacit bet on the left that Biden might turn out be a president
in the mold of FDR or Lincoln - a centrist margin-tinkerer whose
susceptibility to political currents is such that he can be pushed into
real, structural reform.

That's why we're talking about striking student debt, even as Biden
("The Senator from MNBA") stacks his cabinet with finance-bros of all
genders (see also: why we're talking about universal health care, police
defunding, real climate policies, etc).

These fights are existential. As I wrote in the epigraph to Attack
Surface: some fights you fight because they're fights you win, and other
fights you fight because you must. When the ship sinks, you tread water
until you run out of kicks.

https://attacksurface.com

So there's a lively left debate on student debt forgiveness that's
really chewy and interesting, even if it turns on many unlikely
hypotheticals about Biden's lack of spine and concomitant susceptibility
to pressure from the base.

Take Marshall Steinbaum's work on skyrocketing student debt defaults: he
argues that we're *already* forgiving student debt, but only after it
has destroyed debtors. We're wiping out human capital *and* creditors'
balance-sheets, at tragic human cost.

https://pluralistic.net/2020/11/20/sovkitsch/#student-debt

By contrast, Michael Olenick argues that student debt forgiveness would
transfer billions from the USG to predatory lenders (who'd pay off the
debts) *and* stick debtors with massive tax-bills for the "benefit" of
debt-unshackling.

As an alternative, he proposes simplifying discharging student debt
through bankruptcy, which would euthanize the rentiers who hold the
debt, and unshackle debtors without creating unpayable tax liabilities.

https://pluralistic.net/2020/11/23/opsec-and-personal-security/#racket

The main forgiveness proposal comes from Elizabeth Warren, who proposes
a $50k cap. This number has undergone a lot of scrutiny, with analysts
slicing up the data to see who would see the most benefit from this and
whether it would be sufficient.

Today, I want to consider a different number: $236,000.

That's how much Chris, a 59-year-old debtor, owes for college. Now,
Chris didn't borrow that much! In fact, Chris started out at Missouri
State in 1980 paying cash for his courses.

https://taibbi.substack.com/p/student-loan-horror-stories-borrowed

But by 1981, Chris needed a loan. Unfortunately for Chris, that was the
year that Ronald Reagan, a human monster, raised interest rates on
student loans from 7% to 9%. If he'd borrowed from the start, he'd have
gotten a much lower rate.

By the time Chris finished his law-degree, he had $79k in loans. But he
figured that he'd be OK, because a) He would get a good job and b) He
could deduct the interest from his student loans.

But in 1986, Ronald Reagan (see above) changed the tax code so that
college grads could no longer deduct loan interest. Chris got burned out
on the law, had a terrible divorce and his life fell apart.

He missed payments and got hit with hard penalties. Then interest on the
penalties. In 2002 he was making $28k/year. By 2004, 15% of his paycheck
was being garnished to service his loans, which continued until 2011.
Since then, he's faced 25% garnishment.

All told, Chris has paid $190,000 against the $79,000 in loans he's
taken out.

He owes $236,000 still.

How did that happen? Well, first, there were the terrible penalties he
accrued. But then there's the way the loans are serviced out of those
paycheck garnishments: the money is applied solely to the penalties,
meaning his interest piles onto his principal, which grows.

He's 59. His loan-servicer won't renegotiate his loan, even though they
know he's going to retire in ~9years and will likely be dead in ~15
years. The loan servicer is content to continue taking 25% of every cent
he gets until he's buried and then hit his estate.

Here's Matt Taibbi with the bottom line: "Chris made mistakes, but as
he’s noticed, so have other types of borrowers."

Here's Chris: “It doesn't appear that we seem to hesitate much in giving
money to Ford or Chrysler, or a collection of banks."

_,.-'~'-.,__,.-'~'-.,__,.-'~'-.,__,.-'~'-.,__,.-'~'-.,_

💄 Postmortem of the NYPD's murder of a Black man

In 2019, two NYPD officers murdered Kawaski Trawick, a 32 year old Black
man who struggled with mental illness and addiction. Trawick was in his
own apartment, he was not violent, and the police killed him 112 seconds
after they broke in.

https://www.propublica.org/article/it-wasnt-the-first-time-the-nypd-killed-someone-in-crisis-for-kawaski-trawick-it-only-took-112-seconds

The story of Trawick's murder is a near-perfect microcosm of the NYPD's
many sins and defects.

* One of the officers who entered Trawick's apartment had "forgotten"
his bodycam

* The officers violated every NYPD policy: entering without knocking,
escalating rather than de-escalating, using a taser, shooting

* The NYPD refuses to release unredacted bodycam footage, citing
Trawick's privacy, but Trawick's family wants the footage released

* The inexperienced white cop who tased and then murdered Trawick did so
in spite of repeated admonishments from his more experienced Black
partner to stand down

* The officers disregarded their dispatcher's notifications that Trawick
had struggled with mental illness

* The officers are still serving, and the Bronx prosecutor has declared
that there is no basis for criminal charges against them

* NYPD implies that the officers haven't been interviewed about the
killing; this is offered as pretense for not releasing bodycam footage

* The NYPD has decades of history of murdering mentally ill Black people
in their own homes, it claims to have addressed this through additional
training

* But the training is of low quality, poorly administered, with few
records kept and little followup

* The vast majority of NYPD officers have not received the training

* However, the officers who murdered Trawick - Herbert Davis and Brendan
Thompson - *did* receive the training and it didn't help (Davis
completed his training 3 days before he murdered Trawick)

The animating principle of "abolish the police" is that police murder
and racism are systemic problems, not individual ones. The problem isn't
that bad people become cops, or being a cop is corrupting. The problem
is the institution itself, the very model of policing.

Institutional problems have institutional causes and need systemic
solutions, and the danger of focusing on individuals - victims and
perpetrators - is that it can pull focus away from the institutional
nature of the problems.

But Eric Umansky's incredible, lengthy expose on Trawick's murder for
Propublica is a masterclass in how to use individual stories to
illuminate, rather than sideline, the systemic nature of the problem.

Umansky humanizes Trawick, bringing him to life for us: a lively,
driven, talented ambitious dancer and athlete who burned to run his own
dance studio and taught with grace and patience.

Trawick's struggles are likewise illuminated with empathy, illustrated
by the people who loved him and lived with him, telling a tale that too
many of us know: the story of a brilliant friend or relative whom we
fear for and want to help.

And then Umansky uses this sharp-focused person as a spotlight to show
how the system failed at every single level, before, during and after
the crisis. How the system's self-protective urge means it can NEVER be
improved.

How other places have done better, which means that New York could too -
which means that New York's situation isn't an inevitability, it's a choice.

Trawick's murder is a stain, but it is grotesquely unexceptional. It is
part of a pattern, a string of similar murders.

Umansky's piece puts this tragedy in its proper context: not as an
accident of history, but as the inevitable, ongoing outcome of a broken
system that New York City's authorities choose ever day not to address.

_,.-'~'-.,__,.-'~'-.,__,.-'~'-.,__,.-'~'-.,__,.-'~'-.,_

💄 Section 230 is Good, Actually

There's a bipartisan movement to abolish CDA230, the Clinton-era law
that makes people liable for their own speech, while simultaneously
immunizing tech providers who carry that speech and incentivizing them
to moderate it.

On the right, you have trumpy calls for a social media fairness doctrine
that would require a platform that removed false claims that masks don't
prevent covid transmission to also remove true claims that masks DO work
(seriously, wear a fucking mask).

On the left, you have people who claim that CDA230 is corporate welfare,
absolving Big Tech companies of the need to hire an (impossibly large)
army of moderators to approve everything their users say before it goes
live.

The truth is that CDA230 is one of the very few internet regulations
that is a serious force for good. Its primary beneficiaries are you and
me - members of the public who get to speak without having to host our
own webservers, DNS, and CDNs.

To really understand the issue, read Jason Kelley's "Section 230 is
Good, Actually," for EFF: a comprehensive guide to CDA230 and the myths
around it.

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/12/section-230-good-actually

Have you read 230? You should! It's 26 words long!

"No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated
as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another
information content provider."

Kelley: "the law means that although you are legally responsible for
what you say online, if you host or republish other peoples' speech,
only those people are legally responsible for what they say."

It really isn't that complicated. It's arguably the most important 26
words in internet history. Without it, there would be no Wikipedia, no
Internet Archive, no Patreon, no Github. Security researchers couldn't
compare notes on forums.

Parents couldn't organize afterschool activities on public systems.
Kickstarter couldn't host project updates with backer Q&A.; Kiss
Wordpress goodbye. Kiss goodbye your favorite geneology forum and the
place where you show off your Warhammer and Blythe doll paints.

All of these forums for speech need CDA230. You know who doesn't? Big
platforms. To understand how this works, cast your mind back to the
fight over SESTA, a bill that made online forums liable for blocking
acts of sex trafficking, a horrific crime.

Sex workers opposed this bill. They said that because platforms couldn't
know whether conversations among sex workers or between sex workers and
their customers were voluntary or coerced, this would lead to a total
shutdown of all forums.

Initially, Big Tech fought SESTA. Then Facebook endorsed it - they,
after all, have lots of moderators who could seek-and-destroy sex work
conversations, and they have lots of other ways to make money.

Two years later, sex trafficking is untouched, voluntary sex work is
more dangerous than ever (which means that pimps finally have a reason
to exist again - offering physical security for sex workers who can't
use online forums to identify abusive customers).

Many of Facebook's smaller competitors have, of course, disappeared.

SESTA was the first real change to 230 in decades. It's a preview of the
likely consequences of the proposed 230 reforms: more power to
monopolists whose bad moderation practices will be harder to punish.

Despite this, there is a wealth of disinformation about 230. Kelley
tackles the most common shibboleths.

* Moderation violates the First Amendment

As a matter of law, this is completely wrong. Private actors are not
bound by the First Amendment.

That's not to say that there aren't serious speech problems with Big
Tech's moderation policies, but these are problems of Big Tech's
bigness, not of a lack of fairness.

https://locusmag.com/2020/01/cory-doctorow-inaction-is-a-form-of-action/

A fairness doctrine for online speech wouldn't just limit when Facebook
or Twitter remove or put warnings on speech - it would mean that a BLM
safe-space would have to tolerate white nationalism; and that Parler
couldn't kick off people who think Ayn Rand was a sociopath.

* 230 does not draw a distinction between "publishers" and  "platforms."
No such distinction exists.

Rather, 230 distinguishes between "offline" and "online" platforms.
That's because the public - you and I - can contribute to online
publication but not offline ones.

No matter how loudly you shout at your newspaper, it will not be audible
to the other subscribers. But newspapers' online editions can be
discussed, corrected and disputed by their readers. CDA 230 protects
newspapers online editions, too.

* CDA 230 encourages online publishers to moderate bad speech

Before 230, a US court found that if you moderate at all, you have to
moderate *everything*. The result was that no one wanted to remove even
the worst speech because this created unlimited liability for them.

230 changed that, creating a "Good Samaritan" rule that allows
moderators to pick off the bad stuff they catch, without holding them
liable for the stuff they miss.

230's detractors have a point. Big Tech's moderation *sucks*. They hold
all our friends and content hostage and  they do a terrible job of
moderating content. But making them double down on stuff they're bad at
will only make things worse.

We should fix these real, harmful moderation problems by creating
alternatives, not wiping them out by making it impossible to co-exist
alongside of Big Tech. If you hate having 90% of your online life inside
of Big Tech silos, your *really* gonna hate when it's 100%.

Antimonopoly work, in other words: break 'em up, block their mergers,
mandate interoperability, strip them of the legal power to block
interoperators.

And if we *do* want to mandate good moderation, then use the The Santa
Clara Principles On Transparency and Accountability in Content
Moderation, which are a good, multistakeholder starting place:

https://santaclaraprinciples.org/

_,.-'~'-.,__,.-'~'-.,__,.-'~'-.,__,.-'~'-.,__,.-'~'-.,_

💄 This day in history

#5yrsago Fossil fuel divestment sit-in at MIT President’s office hits
10,000,000,000-hour mark
https://twitter.com/FossilFreeMIT/status/672526210581274624

#1yrago Opendemocracy: the Libdems tried to censor our article about
their sale of voter data, then used a forged email to intimidate us
https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/opendemocracyuk/what-are-jo-swinsons-liberal-democrats-so-desperate-to-hide/

#1yrago Second wave Algorithmic Accountability: from “What should
algorithms do?” to “Should we use an algorithm?”
https://memex.craphound.com/2019/12/04/second-wave-algorithmic-accountability-from-what-should-algorithms-do-to-should-we-use-an-algorithm/

#1yrago The south’s latest culinary trend: inadequate, rotting prison
food, supplemented by cattle feed
https://www.southernfoodways.org/gravy/are-prison-diets-punitive-a-report-from-behind-bars/

#1yrago FCC Chairman Pai’s former employer, Verizon, lied about
coverage, and then Pai tried to bury the news
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2019/12/fcc-tries-to-bury-finding-that-verizon-and-t-mobile-exaggerated-4g-coverage/

_,.-'~'-.,__,.-'~'-.,__,.-'~'-.,__,.-'~'-.,__,.-'~'-.,_

💄 Colophon

Today's top sources:

Currently writing: My next novel, "The Lost Cause," a post-GND novel
about truth and reconciliation. Yesterday's progress: 517 words (90491
total).

Currently reading: The City We Became, NK Jemisin

Latest podcast: Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town (part 24)
https://craphound.com/podcast/2020/11/23/someone-comes-to-town-someone-leaves-town-part-24/

Upcoming appearances:

*  Monopoly, Not Mind Control: What's Really Happening With
"Surveillance Capitalism," Dec 8,
https://www.nuug.no/aktiviteter/20201208-doctorow/

* Colloquium on Information Security, Dec 14
https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/the-31st-hphpe-virtual-colloquium-on-information-security-tickets-128859336745

* Keynote, NISO Plus, Feb 22-25,
https://niso.plus/cory-doctorow-to-keynote-at-niso-plus-2021/

Recent appearances:

* A More Competitive Web (Techdirt Podcast):
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20201201/10183045801/techdirt-podcast-episode-264-more-competitive-web-with-cory-doctorow-daphne-keller.shtml

* Big Tech Podcast:
https://www.cigionline.org/big-tech/cory-doctorow-true-dangers-surveillance-capitalism

* Nerdcanon Podcast:
http://nerdcanon.com/episode-25-cory-doctorow-and-attack-surface/

Latest book:

* "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

* "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.

This work 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/web/accounts/303320

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

-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: signature.asc
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 195 bytes
Desc: OpenPGP digital signature
URL: <http://mail.flarn.com/pipermail/plura-list/attachments/20201204/67629e08/attachment.sig>