[Plura-list] Minneapolis racists threaten arson over BLM signs; White House recants "antifa bricks" conspiracy; Rave for "Poesy the Monster Slayer"

Thu Jun 4 12:08:23 EDT 2020

Today's links

* Minneapolis racists threaten arson over BLM signs: A modern cross-burning.

* White House recants "antifa bricks" conspiracy: American Surkovs.

* Rave for "Poesy the Monster Slayer": "Some children fear monsters at
bedtime, but Poesy welcomes them."

* Autodetecting autogenerated text: The answer to the machine is the
machine.

* AMC's bankruptcy is the first domino in monopolist collapse: When
monopolism bites Disney in the ass.

* This day in history: 2005, 2010, 2015, 2019

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

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

💪🏿 Minneapolis racists threaten arson over BLM signs

An anonymous person (or persons) has been terrorizing people in
Minneapolis with notes threatening to murder them through arson in
retaliation for lawn signs supporting Black Lives Matter.

http://www.citypages.com/news/threatening-notes-left-at-houses-with-black-lives-matter-signs/570960031

The notes say things like "Your neighbors are sick of riots and your SJW
shit," and “Your sign 'bullshit matters' comes down or you and your home
will burn real quiet while you sleep in it!"

The Roseville Police Department is investigating the threats; however,
the Ramsey County Sheriff's Department has not yet been formally
notified about similar notes in Falcon Heights.

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

💪🏿 White House recants "antifa bricks" conspiracy

If you are follow the uprisings across America, you have probably
encountered both right- and left-wing commentators speculating that
piles of bricks at the sites of the protests were "staged" - either by
"antifa" or by right-wing accelerationists or agents provocateurs.

The White House released a supercut of bricks at protest sites, claiming
evidence that "antifa" provocateurs were hoping to create vandalism and
violence, but they were forced to retract it after it was debunked (but
not before it had 1m+ views).

https://theintercept.com/2020/06/04/white-house-forced-retract-claim-viral-videos-prove-antifa-plotting-violence/

The White House removed the video, but The Intercept saved a copy. You
can watch it here:

https://youtu.be/72bmj167s-4

And though the incidents in the video were thoroughly debunked, it does
raise the question, "Why are there so many piles of bricks at these
protest sites?"

The answer's pretty mundane: cities have a lot of routine construction,
which requires piles of bricks. Protests are happening all over cities.
Some of those protests will be near piles of bricks (it would be weird
if no protest ever happened near piles of bricks).

You could produce a supercut of protesters near *any* urban commonplace:
Starbucks, park benches, tall buildings, liquor stores, churches,
McDonald's restaurants... Anything that is widespread in a city will
overlap with protests in that city.

What's more, it's not outlandish to assume that cops or far-right
extremists (including/especially the "Boogaloo" accelerationists) are
infiltrating protests and hoping to incite violence.

American law enforcement has used agents provocateurs against protests
for as long as there have been protests:

https://theintercept.com/2020/06/02/history-united-states-government-infiltration-protests/

And white nationalists have been caught posing as Black Lives Matter
activists on Twitter in order to incite violence.

https://www.dw.com/en/twitter-suspends-fake-antifa-account-run-by-white-supremacists/a-53656003

Infiltration is a devastating tactic, because it derails every
conversation into a "Are you a bot/provocateur/cop?" arguments and sows
mistrust among people whose only hope of effecting change is their
social cohesion.

Putin's brilliant and terrible media strategist Vladislav Surkov (purged
from the administration earlier this year) made a point of boasting that
he funded *some* of the opposition groups, without ever saying which.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/oct/26/kremlin-puppet-masters-leaked-emails-vladislav-surkov-east-ukraine

The brilliant (terrible) thing about this tactic is that it works just
as well if he lies as if he's telling the truth - any time two
opposition groups would contemplate acting in concert, each would be
unable to shake their suspicion that the other was patsies or worse.

And anyone who thinks about joining an opposition group will always have
a lingering doubt about the group's authenticity, and whether they are
being duped into serving as a useful idiot.

Within groups, vulnerable people who act in unusual ways - because they
have anxiety or depression, or because they are neuroatypical - get
isolated because their behavior is interpreted as evidence that they are
plants.

So it's not weird to imagine that there are inauthentic members of your
group, because it's not weird to imagine that powerful people would use
such an effective, low-cost countermeasure against you.

Nor is it hard to understand why the White House would promulgate
unfounded theories about provocateurs - even if they have to walk them
back later. Consciously or unconsciously, Trump and his people know that
instilling doubt serves their purpose for a long time to come.

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

💪🏿 Rave for "Poesy the Monster Slayer"

No matter how many books I write (20+ now!), the first review for a new
one is always scary. That goes double when the book is a first as well -
like *Poesy the Monster Slayer*, my first-ever picture book, which comes
out from First Second on Jul 14.

https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781626723627

So it was with delight and relief that I read Publishers Weekly's (rave)
review of *Poesy*:

"Some children fear monsters at bedtime, but Poesy welcomes them. Her
pink 'monster lair' features gothic art and stuffed animals, and she
makes her father read The Book of Monsters from cover to cover before
lights out. 'PLEASE stay in bed tonight,' he pleads as he leaves, but
there's no chance: the werewolf who soon enters her window is the size
of a grizzly. 'Werewolves HATED silver,' Poesy knows, 'and they feared
the light' 0 armed with a Princess Frillypants silver tiara and a
light-up wand, she vanquishes the beast. And that's just the beginning
of her tear through monsterdom. 'Poesy Emmeline Russell Schnegg,' her
mother growls from the doorway (in a funny turn, the girl gains a middle
name every time a parent appears). Assured panels by Rockefeller (Pop!)
combine frilly with threatening, illuminated by eerie light sources.
Doctorow, making his picture book debut, strikes a gently edgy tone ('He
was so tired,' Poesy sees, 'that he stepped on a Harry the Hare block
and said some swears. Poor Daddy!'), and his blow-by-blow account races
to its closing spread: of two tired parents who resemble yet another
monster. Ages 4-6."

Whew!

I had planned to do a launch party at Dark Delicacies, my neighborhood
horror bookstore, on Jul 11, but that's off (obviously).

So we're doing the next-best thing: preorder from the store and you'll
get a signature and dedication from me AND my daughter, Poesy (the
book's namesake).

https://www.darkdel.com/store/p1562/_July%3A_Poesy_the_Monster_Slayer.html

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

💪🏿 Autodetecting autogenerated text

GPT2 is machine learning "language model" from Openai: feed it some
articles and it'll spit out a convincing new, very plausible article,
untouched by human hands.

Its release was attended by enormous hype, even by machine learning
standards, largely because Openai said they were nerfing the public
version to keep it from being used to create floods of undetectable fake
articles that would destroy our discourse.

https://www.vox.com/2019/5/15/18623134/openai-language-ai-gpt2-poetry-try-it

But the undetectability of ML forgeries is always overstated. Indeed,
the same tools used to create these forgeries are also very good at
detecting them.

Enter "The Giant Language Model Test Room."

http://gltr.io/

GLTR provides an example of why sometimes, "The answer to the machine is
the machines." As its authors showed in 2019 when they published a
video, conference paper, and sourcecode, you can use the same
statistical techniques as GPT2 to detect texts generated by GPT2.

GPT2 works a little like autocomplete: after each word, it tries to
guess what the most likely next word would be based on its training data.

So texts created by GPT2 are "unsurprising" in a mathematical sense: the
words that follow one another are not odd juxtapositions, they're
statistically likely successors.

It's an example of the fundamental conservativeness of machine learning:

https://reallifemag.com/instant-recall/

GLTR performs a statistical analysis of each word in a text and colors
it based on how common it is in the context of the word that came before
it: green/yellow for predictable; purple/red for "surprising."

You can look at the colored output and tell, at a glance, how "normal"
and thus machinelike, it is (alas, this doesn't work for people with
colorblindness).

It's conceivable that you could counter this by programming GPT2 to pick
"weird" words at random intervals. But because GPT2 doesn't understand
language - it merely performs statistical analysis - it can't know
whether these weird words will make its sentences incomprehensible.

Though a human being *can*, which raises the possibility of using GPT2
as a "centaur" (a human-computer collaboration team): a human could
tweak computer-generated forgeries to make them both comprehensible and
statistically undetectable.

Or vice-versa: if you wanted to remove traces of distinctive style to
combat "stylometry" (identifying anonymous authors with stats, by
analyzing texts for stylistic quirks), you could use this to remove the
"surprising" elements from your work.

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

💪🏿 AMC's bankruptcy is the first domino in monopolist collapse

AMC is (still) going bankrupt.

https://edition.cnn.com/2020/06/03/media/amc-theatres-business-coronavirus/index.html

The company is blaming covid for its demise, but as with so many
pandemic deaths, the cause of death is complicated by comorbidities that
left it in a weakened and vulnerable state.

AMC was repeatedly looted by private equity firms that loaded it up with
debt, borrowing money they paid to themselves as fees and dividends.
First, they were bled by China's Wanda Group, then the notorious looters
of America's Silverlake Partners.

https://pluralistic.net/2020/04/12/mammon-worshippers/#silver-lake-partners

When AMC says they can't pay their bills because they've had to close
their doors, a substantial part of those bills are the company's debts,
which were not incurred to invest in improving theaters or buying their
buildings (which would shield them from rent shocks).

No, that money was funnelled to billionaires who style themselves "job
creators."

What's more, AMC took advantage of America's nonexistent antitrust law
to buy most of its competitors, making it the only screen in town for
many of America's cities.

AMC's demise matters, then, because it constitutes the bulk of American
screens.

The company's leading suitor is another monopolist, Amazon, flush with
cash thanks to pandemic profiteering and shaving costs by endangering
its employees' lives:

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2020/06/culture-of-workplace-fear-leads-to-covid-19-spread-at-amazon-suit-says/

And that matters to another important monopolist, Disney, which, like
Amazon and AMC, has bought many of its competitors, notably Fox, which
it acquired in 2019.

To a first approximation, Disney now IS the American cinematic industry.
80% of last year's box office hits were owned by Disney.

https://www.theverge.com/2019/12/23/21034937/disney-star-wars-box-office-2019-marvel-pixar-star-wars-avengers-lion-king-frozen

If you were wondering why Universal didn't care that AMC announced that
it would no longer screen Universal movies in retaliation for
Universal's offering home streaming of first-run movies, that's why.
Basically, no one but Disney is in the cinematic release business.

So Disney needs big screens, especially since its Plan B, streaming
media through Disney+, is being demolished by  Time-Warner/AT&T;, which
is using Trump FCC Chairman Ajit Pai's obliteration of Net Neutrality to
upcharge customers who choose Disney+ over HBO Max.

https://pluralistic.net/2020/06/03/white-nationalist-pogrom/#bell-system

And of course, Universal owns Comcast, so it's poised to do the same.

Some people watched the endless mergers and industry concentration of
the past 40 years and thought, "Well, at least I'll get a titan who'll
protect me and give me the things I love."

But that's not how concentrated power works - instead, it proceeds with
brutal brinksmanship that destroys the things we love, the jobs those
things created, and the businesses behind those jobs.

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

💪🏿 This day in history

#15yrsago I have seen God in a cup of chocolate
https://boingboing.net/2005/06/04/i-have-seen-god-in-a.html

#10yrsago Open garage-doors in less than a minute with a hacked kid's
toy
https://www.wired.com/2015/06/hacked-kids-toy-opens-garage-doors-seconds/

#5yrsago There was a David Cameron who swallowed a fly...
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/jun/04/david-cameron-snoopers-charter-will-not-make-us-safer

#1yrago Magic for Liars: Sarah Gailey's debut is a brilliant whodunnit
in the vein of The Magicians
https://boingboing.net/2019/06/04/magic-r-us.html

#1yrago Why is there so much antitrust energy for Big Tech but not for
Big Telco?
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20190603/11293142321/if-big-tech-is-huge-antitrust-problem-why-are-we-ignoring-telecom.shtml?

#1yrago Empirical analysis of behavioral advertising finds that
surveillance makes ads only 4% more profitable for media companies
https://weis2019.econinfosec.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/6/2019/05/WEIS_2019_paper_38.pdf

#1yrago European legal official OKs orders that force Facebook to
globally remove insults to politicians like "oaf" and "fascist" (as well
as synonyms) https://twitter.com/daphnehk/status/1135945983320137728

#1yrago Blood testing giant Quest Diagnostics lost 12,000,000 patients'
personal, financial and medical data
https://www.nbcnewyork.com/news/local/quest-diagnostics-12-million-people-data-breach/1636590/

#1yrago The New York Privacy Act goes even farther than California's
privacy legislation https://www.wired.com/story/new-york-privacy-act-bolder/

#1yrago Joe Biden repeatedly claimed to have marched for civil rights.
He didn't.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/03/us/politics/biden-1988-presidential-campaign.html

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

💪🏿 Colophon

Today's top sources: Four Short Links
(https://www.oreilly.com/feed/four-short-links), Slashdot
(https://slashdot.org/), Naked Capitalism (https://nakedcapitalism.com/).

Currently writing: My next novel, "The Lost Cause," a post-GND novel
about truth and reconciliation. Yesterday's progress: 588 words (23172
total).

Currently reading: Adventures of a Dwergish Girl, Daniel Pinkwater

Latest podcast: How Big Tech Monopolies Distort Our Public Discourse
https://craphound.com/podcast/2020/06/01/how-big-tech-monopolies-distort-our-public-discourse/

Upcoming appearances:

* Cogx, Jun 8, "Freedom and Civic Duties: How to beat surveillance
capitalism and reclaim your privacy" 9AM Pacific. Free registration via
https://ti.to/cogx/cogx-2020/en/discount/SPCXSFP100

* Discussion with Nnedi Okorafor, Torcon, June 14
https://www.torforgeblog.com/torcon-2020/

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

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.

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

💪🏿 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/20200604/fb155802/attachment.sig>