[Plura-list] New Little Brother/Homeland edition is out today!; There is no automation employment crisis; Cyberpunk Culture; Or What You Will

[Cory Doctorow]

Today's links

* New Little Brother/Homeland edition is out today!: With an intro by
Edward Snowden.

* There is no automation employment crisis: But there is a climate
emergency.

* Cyberpunk Culture: An online conference, Jul 9/10.

* Or What You Will: Jo Walton's new, brilliant meta-meta-novel.

* #BlackOutDay2020: Pledge not to spend a dime in a store or online,
except in Black-owned businesses.

* Right wing press duped by state-sponsored influence campaign:
Deepfakes and avatars manipulated to defeat reverse image searches.

* Coronavirus tests are a taxable benefit: HMRC creates a perverse
incentive.

* Big 4 accounting firms headed for breakup: When the referee cheats.

* Home security cameras are really insecure: Even encrypted video
streams can give away sensitive info.

* Why covid cases are spiking but deaths aren't: Lead-time bias.

* This day in history: 2010, 2015, 2019

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

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🚇 New Little Brother/Homeland edition is out today!

Today marks the publication of a new edition of Little Brother (2008)
and its sequel, Homeland (2013), with a gorgeous cover by Will Staehle
and a spectacular intro by Edward Snowden.

https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250774583

I wrote Little Brother in a kind of white heat, finishing the first
draft in eight weeks exactly, from first having the idea to typing "The
End" (while away on holiday for my anniversary, at 5AM).

It reflected my fear and rage at the co-option of networked tech for
surveillance and control, and the indifferent political response to
these alarming developments.

https://www.tor.com/2018/04/26/ten-years-of-cory-doctorows-little-brother/

Alas, this fear and rage futureproofed the tale, as we continue to
regulate tech badly and inadequately, to treat it variously as a video
on demand service, or a pornography delivery service, or a
radicalization vector, rather than as the nervous system of the 21st
century.

But I have hope this is changing: the pandemic, in particular, has
shattered our complacency about tech, made us realize that everything we
do involves the net, and shortly, everything we do will require it. It
must be taken seriously, and its defects treated as alarming.

And while the pandemic marks a phase-change in our relations to tech, it
comes as the result of a long, steady, mounting tech reform movement.

 I wrote Little Brother after the AT&T; whistleblower Mark Klein walked
into EFF's Shotwell St offices and revealed that his employer had built
a secret NSA listening post inside its Folsom St switching enter.

This sparked lawsuits and hearings, including the notorious Senate
hearing in which Ron Wyden asked James Clapper, "Does the NSA collect
any type of data at all on millions, or hundreds of millions of Americans?"

And in which Clapper perjured himself, answering, "No, sir. … Not
wittingly."

We knew he was lying. So did a young, idealistic technologist who had
washed out of Special Forces training after a severe injury and ended up
working for the CIA and NSA.

https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2018/01/19/james-clappers-perjury-dc-made-men-dont-get-charged-lying-congress-jonathan-turley-column/1045991001/

That technologist was Edward Snowden, and the spectacle of Clapper's
lies to Congress and the American people prompted him to do something
that would alter the course of our history. It also sent him into exile.

And when he left his Hong Kong hotel room and went underground, he had a
book in his carry-on: Homeland, the sequel to Little Brother.

Macmillan reissued Little Brother/Homeland between a single set of
covers as a run-up to October's publication of ATTACK SURFACE, a third,
standalone book about technologists work surveilling protest movements,
and how they rationalize to themselves.

https://read.macmillan.com/promo/attacksurfacepreordercampaign/

It's a story about comparmentalization, self-deception, amends-making
and redemption, and it addresses itself to the ways that individual
actions relate to systemic changes: how movements are made up of
individuals but are bigger than individuals.

When Snowden agreed to write the intro to this reissue, I was delighted
and honored, even moreso than when I saw that footage of him putting
HOMELAND into his bag in Laura Poitras's outstanding, Oscar-winning doc,
CITIZENFOUR.

I was also delighted to have the chance to make some small corrections
to the text, reflecting my own evolution in thought and language - this
is the author's preferred text.

You can get it at any bookstore, but if you're after a
signed/personalized copy, the good folks at Dark Delicacies are taking
orders and I'm going to to drop in and deface them to order:

https://www.darkdel.com/store/p1750/July%3A__Little_Brother_%26_Homeland.html

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🚇 There is no automation employment crisis

My latest Locus column is "Full Employment," in which I forswear "Fully
Automated Luxury Communism" as totally incompatible with the climate
emergency, which will consume 100%+ of all human labor for centuries to
come.

https://locusmag.com/2020/07/cory-doctorow-full-employment/

This fact is true irrespective of any breakthroughs in AI *or*
geoengineering. Technological unemployment is vastly oversold and
overstated (for example, that whole thing about truck drivers is bullshit).

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0019793919858079

But even if we do manage to automate away all of jobs, the climate
emergency demands unimaginably labor intensive tasks for hundreds of
years - jobs like relocating every coastal city inland, or caring for
hundreds of millions of refugees.

Add to those: averting the exinctions of thousands of species, managing
wave upon wave of zoonotic and insect-borne plagues, dealing with
wildfires and tornados, etc.

And geoengineering won't solve this: we've sunk a lot of heat into the
oceans. It's gonna warm them up. That's gonna change the climate. It's
not gonna be good. Heading this off doesn't just involve repealing
thermodynamics - it also requires a time-machine.

But none of this stuff is insurmountable - it's just hard. We *can* do
this stuff. If you were wringing your hands about unemployed truckers,
good news! They've all got jobs moving thousands of cities inland!

It's just (just!) a matter of reorienting our economy around preserving
our planet and our species.

And yeah, that's hard, too - but if "the economy" can't be oriented to
preserving our species, we need a different economy.

Period.

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🚇 Cyberpunk Culture

The Cyberpunk Culture online conference is streaming later this week on
Jul 9/10. It features a wide range of keynotes, panels and Q&As.;

http://cyberpunkculture.com/

The final program is live - it leans heavily to cinematic analysis and
critiques, but there are some exciting literary, RPG and fashion items:

http://cyberpunkculture.com/cyberpunk-culture-conference/timetable/

Some items that leapt out for me:

"Chrome and Matte Black: Cyberpunk’s Speculative Posthuman Fashions"

http://cyberpunkculture.com/cyberpunk-culture-conference/program-friday/%C2%A732-stina-attebery/

"Pants Scientists and Bona Fide Cyber Ninjas: Tracing the Poetics of
Cyberpunk Menswear"

http://cyberpunkculture.com/cyberpunk-culture-conference/program-friday/%C2%A718-esko-suoranta/

"Surveillance, Deception, and Agency in Chen Qiufan’s 'The Flower of Shazui'

http://cyberpunkculture.com/cyberpunk-culture-conference/program-friday/%C2%A719-eero-suoranta/

"'The (Cyber) Center Cannot Hold': Futures, Bodies and Minds in William
Gibson’s The Peripheral"

http://cyberpunkculture.com/cyberpunk-culture-conference/program-friday/%C2%A721-carmen-mendez-garcia/

"Machine Logic Can Be Tricky: Pat Cadigan’s “AI and the Trolley Problem”"

http://cyberpunkculture.com/cyberpunk-culture-conference/program-friday/%C2%A728-steven-shaviro/

"Resilient Cyborgs: Trauma and the Posthuman in Pat Cadigan’s Synners"

http://cyberpunkculture.com/cyberpunk-culture-conference/program-thursday/%C2%A710-maria-ferrandez-san-miguel/

"'So, you wanna be a Cyberpunk?' How Tabletop RPGs Provoke Storytelling
in Their Players"

http://cyberpunkculture.com/cyberpunk-culture-conference/program-friday/%C2%A727-adam-edwards/

The event is pay-what-you-can, with a suggested donation of $3.

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🚇 Or What You Will

"Or What You Will" is the latest novel from Jo Walton, and it is
spectacular, even by her remarkable standards: it's a fictionalized
memoir (shades of her Hugo-winning "Among Others") and a metafiction
(shades of her brilliant "My Real Children").

https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250309013

Sylvia Harrison is an elderly, successful fantasy novelist from Montreal
who, despite her late entry into the field, has published 30 successful
novels. She's had a life of incredible hardships and incredible joys,
and she only made it through because she has a secret.

Sylvia has an imaginary friend - a playmate who's been with off and on
her since her desperately unhappy girlhood - who acts as a sort of
repertory actor in her books, stepping forward to inhabit her characters
and give them life.

That nameless, imaginary friend is the narrator of the novel (!). Sylvia
is dying, and he wants them both to survive, and he has a plan. Sylvia's
last novel is a final volume in her longrunning Ilyria novels, set in a
fantasy version of Renaissance Florence.

In Ilyria, the Gods have made a pact with the wizard Pico and have left
the world, and the people of the land now enjoy eternal life in an
eternal Renaissance, where Progress has been banished from the world.

It is to Ilyria that the narrator hopes to bring Sylvia and himself,
where they might join the undying people of this eternal Renaissance,
achieving immortality.

So it is that "Or What You Will" is two novels: the tale of Sylvia and
her imaginary friend, and the novel that Sylvia is writing about Ilyria,
in which the narrator has a starring role, inhabiting one of the lead
characters.

Ilyria is filled with characters out of antiquity and the Renaissance,
and with Shakespeareans like Caliban, and "Or What You Will" is filled
with breathtaking word-paintings of modern Florence and the ancient city
beneath its modern veneer.

It's a complex stew of a novel, luscious enough to eat in places, with
pockets of shocking bitterness and drama that give it such a rich and
complex texture, somehow capturing both what makes novels so special and
what makes Florence so special.

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🚇 #BlackOutDay2020

Today is #BlackOutDay2020, a day that challenges people to "not spend a
dime in a store or online," except in Black-owned businesses.

https://medium.com/@GrownFolkConvo/blackoutday2020-1bea60b9368d

It demands action on both police violence and systematic racism that
murdered so many people of color during the pandemic.

It demands action for the millions of Black and brown people in prison,
especially those incarcerated for minor drug offenses, "while John
Boehner made $300 million dollars on the “gentrified” cannabis industry."

It demands action on the bailout that has seen millions - billions! - in
relief for connected corporations, while minority-owned businesses were
forced to shutter.

It calls us to address the rental and evictions crisis, the failure of
unemployment benefits systems.

Here is how to find Black-owned businesses near you:

https://www.fastcompany.com/90512942/how-to-find-and-support-black-owned-businesses-wherever-you-are

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🚇 Right wing press duped by state-sponsored influence campaign

Writing in The Daily Beast, Adam Rawnsley reveals that many of the
Saudi-friendly commentators published in leading right-wing news outlets
do not exist, and are likely part of a foreign government's propaganda
campaign intended to influence US policy.

https://www.thedailybeast.com/right-wing-media-outlets-duped-by-a-middle-east-propaganda-campaign

The network of at least 19 non-existent "experts" duped Newsmax, Spiked,
Washington Examiner, RealClear Markets, American Thinker, The National
Interest, The Post Millennial, The Jerusalem Post, Al Arabiya, Jewish
News Service and The South China Morning Post.

Their home base was a pair of propaganda outlets called The Arab Eye and
Persia Now, whose editorial boards, addresses and other details made
reference to nonexistent people and places. These outlets billed
themselves as a tonic against "fake news."

The forged identities used a mix of author avatars "manipulated to
defeat reverse image searches" and faces generated by machine learning
algorithms, and had Linkedin profiles that gave impressive sounding -
imaginary - work histories and affiliations.

They championed a variety of causes: the virtues of Dubai, and the need
for belligerent action against Iran, Qatar, Turkey; Hong Kong's response
to the pandemic; criticism of Al Jazeera; and calls for Tawakkol Karman
to be removed from Facebook's oversight board.

Many of the associated sites disappeared when the Daily Beast published
its findings, and Twitter has deleted many of the accounts for ToS
violations.

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🚇 Coronavirus tests are a taxable benefit

HMRC, the UK tax authority, has issued governance informing workers that
employer-provided coronavirus testing will be treated as a taxable
benefit, meaning that your taxes will go up every time you get tested.

https://www.parliament.uk/business/committees/committees-a-z/commons-select/treasury-committee/news-parliament-2017/chair-comment-income-tax-coronavirus-19-21/

Treasury Committee Chair Mel Stride wrote to the exchequer to object to
this rule, pointing out that "healthcare and hospitality workers are
required to undergo regular coronavirus testing."

"If these tests are to be treated as a taxable benefit in kind, the tax
bill for workers could soon mount up. Many of our key workers could be
faced with the perverse incentive of avoiding employer-sponsored tests
in order to reduce their tax bill."

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🚇 Big 4 accounting firms headed for breakup

Capitalism is grounded in investors entrusting businesses with their
money, which requires a system to prevent firms from robbing investors:
auditors.

Like every industry, auditing has been monopolized by a handful of
firms, but auditing isn't like every industry.

Auditing is the industry that lets other industries function, and as
auditing shrank to four giant firms - EY (Ernst & Young), PWC
(Pricewaterhousecooper), Deloitte, and KPMG - the auditors have switched
sides.

You see, these mega-firms don't merely audit giant companies - they also
sell them farcically high priced "consulting" services, and winning
these lucrative contracts requires that auditors tacitly (or overtly)
agree to turn a blind eye to financial fraud.

Lurking behind virtually every major corporate scandal of the past
decade is an auditor that was secretly in cahoots with the company it
was supposed to be overseeing and watchdogging.

The multibillion-pound Carillion collapse? Abetted by all four of the
firms, who also picked up hundreds of millions in contracts to oversee
the company's unwinding after it collapsed in a blaze of fraud.

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/news/big-four-accountancy-firms-broken-up-kpgm-pwc-deloitte-a8354911.html

Microsoft's breathtaking tax fraud? That was KPMG.

https://www.propublica.org/article/the-irs-decided-to-get-tough-against-microsoft-microsoft-got-tougher

And the internal culture of these companies is - predictably - awful.

Deloitte got hacked, lost 5 million confidential customer documents from
the world's largest businesses, and kept it a secret.

https://www.theguardian.com/business/2017/sep/25/deloitte-hit-by-cyber-attack-revealing-clients-secret-emails

PWC threatened security researchers who found grave defects in the
software it charged its clients to develop:

https://www.zdnet.com/article/pwc-sends-security-researchers-cease-and-desist-letter-instead-of-fixing-security-flaw/

But KPMG might be the worst.

Start with the company's criminal conspiracy to recruit members of its
own government oversight board, smuggling documents out of government
watchdog offices into its own files.

https://www.pogo.org/investigation/2020/01/how-accountants-took-washingtons-revolving-door-to-a-criminal-extreme/

But it gets even dirtier! Last year, the company admitted that its most
senior officials had been conspiring to steal the answer-keys to
*government ethics exams* in order to cheat on them.

https://www.marketwatch.com/story/the-kpmg-cheating-scandal-was-much-more-widespread-than-originally-thought-2019-06-18

The thing is, the Big 4 steal from rich people - the investor class - so
eventually this shit was going to stick to them. It finally has. Sorta.
A little.

The Financial Reporting Council, Britain's accounting regulator, has
given the companies until Oct 24 to submit plans to spin out their
consulting arms into separate businesses, which must take place by Jun 2024.

https://edition.cnn.com/2020/07/06/business/uk-big-4-accountancy-firms-frc/index.html

It was prompted by EY's complicity in billions of fraud by Wirecard,
Germany's disgraced payment processor.

Hilariously, the companies claim to welcome the news: "Deloitte has been
consistent in our support for reform. We remain committed to playing our
role in delivering change that embraces audit quality, improves choice
and restores trust" -Stephen Griggs/Deloitte UK Deputy CEO

Uh, dude. If only you knew someone high up at Deloitte who could have
taken action before this?

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🚇 Home security cameras are really insecure

"Your Privilege Gives Your Privacy Away: An Analysis of a Home Security
Camera Service," is a new IEEE International Conference on Computer
Communications paper by  researchers from Queen Mary U and the Chinese
Academy of Science.

https://qmro.qmul.ac.uk/xmlui/bitstream/handle/123456789/65154/Tyson%20Your%20Privilege%20Gives%202020%20Accepted.pdf

The researchers analyzed 15.4m encrypted streams from 211k users' homes
and found that they could characterize activity levels in the homes
without decrypting the streams. IOW: the encrypted video from your home
CCTVs is detectably different when you're not home.

The researchers were able to do more than figure out if now was a good
time to rob your house, though - analysis of the encrypted streams also
distinguished different types of motion, like running and sitting.

Home cameras epitomize the shitty tech adoption curve - our worst
technologies ascend a privilege gradient that starts with kids,
prisoners, refugees, welfare recipients etc, and works its way to the
rest of the world as it's normalized and perfected.

https://pluralistic.net/2020/03/28/unreciprocated-solidarity/#one-way-solidarity

20 years ago, if you had a camera streaming video from your living
quarters to a third party, it was because you were in a supermax
prisoner. Now it just means you were unwise enough to invest in Nest,
Apple Home, Google Home, or Ring.

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🚇 Why covid cases are spiking but deaths aren't

The number of covid cases in the US is spiking but the death count
isn't. This mystery has spawned many explanations, most of them
optimistic ("it's young people who are recovering," "our therapies are
better," etc). But the real explanation is simpler, and it's sad.

As epidemiologist Ellie Murray explains, it's almost certainly just
"lead time bias."

That's when you test more people, including presymptomatic people, and
thus discover the disease earlier than before.

https://twitter.com/EpiEllie/status/1280305393516904448

That means we learn people are sick earlier, which means that the time
between detection and death gets longer - not because people are
surviving longer from the onset of symptoms, but because we're detecting
sick people before they exhibit symptoms.

Lead-time bias emerges whenever we ramp up testing: routine mammograms
and colonoscopies appeared to change the course of related cancers, but
what was really going on was earlier, presymptomatic identification of
cancers.

And while it's true that we measured earlier cases from the first
symptoms, we didn't know what some symptoms were (loss of smell, for
example) and we relied on self-reporting by gravely ill people, which
isn't as good as actual tests.

That's called "recall bias." Sometimes we'd ask family members, who only
knew about the symptoms that were severe enough to warrant mentioning
("proxy respondent bias").

Bottom line: "When you start identifying people at earlier stages of a
disease, it looks like they survive longer (or have the disease longer)
compared to when you identify based on severe symptoms." -Ellie Murray

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🚇 This day in history

#10yrsago Basil Wolverton's CULTURE CORNER: grotesque HOWTOs from MAD
Magazine's gross-out king
https://boingboing.net/2010/07/07/basil-wolvertons-cul-1.html

#10yrsago Glucosamine no better than placebo for lower back pain
https://abcnews.go.com/Health/PainManagement/glucosamine-cure-chronic-lower-back-pain-study/story?id=11098747&page;=1

#10yrsago America's "jobless recovery"
https://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/07/business/economy/07generation.html

#10yrsago Finance columnist explains capitalism to children: take things
without paying, then sell them
https://chicago.suntimes.com/business/savage/2464546,CST-NWS-savage05.savagearticle

#5yrsago Hacking Team leak: bogus copyright takedowns and mass DEA
surveillance in Colombia
https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2015/07/massive-leak-reveals-hacking-teams-most-private-moments-in-messy-detail/

#5yrsago Foo Fighters demand bullshit terms from concert photographers
https://blog.natkin.net/foo-fighters/

#5yrsago RIP, Disney Imagineering great Blaine Gibson
https://paleofuture.gizmodo.com/blaine-gibson-designer-of-lifelike-robots-at-disney-pa-1716008151

#5yrsago Colorado achieved incredible reductions in teen pregnancy
through free birth control
https://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/06/science/colorados-push-against-teenage-pregnancies-is-a-startling-success.html

#1yrago Mississippi makes it a jailable offense to call plant-based or
cultured-meat patties "burgers"
https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2019/7/3/20680731/mississippi-veggie-burgers-illegal-meatless-meat

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🚇 Colophon

Today's top sources: Lars Schmeink, AngryUKStaffer
(https://twitter.com/AngryUKStaffer), Naked Capitalism
(https://nakedcapitalism.com/), Patrick Nielsen Hayden
(https://twitter.com/pnh/),

Currently writing:

* My next novel, "The Lost Cause," a post-GND novel about truth and
reconciliation. Yesterday's progress: 508 words (34991 total).

Currently reading: Anger Is a Gift by Mark Oshiro

Latest podcast: Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town (part 09)
https://craphound.com/podcast/2020/07/05/someone-comes-to-town-someone-leaves-town-part-09/

Upcoming appearances:

* In Conversation with Hank Green, Jul 10,
https://www.magersandquinn.com/product_info?isbn_id=26578312&products;_id=163359157

"Working as Intended: Surveillance Capitalism is not a Rogue
Capitalism," Jul 21,
https://stanford.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_9AwAiQSmTj2ZjaIsIoTr5A

Upcoming books: "Poesy the Monster Slayer" (Jul 2020), a picture book
about monsters, bedtime, gender, and kicking ass. Pre-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.

"Attack Surface": The third Little Brother book, Oct 20, 2020.
https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250757531

"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

This work licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license.
That means you can use it any way you like, including commerically,
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.

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*When life gives you SARS, you make sarsaparilla* -Joey "Accordion Guy"
DeVilla

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