[Plura-list] SF anthology to benefit covid charities; Politics and sf; Robots aren't stealing your job; Earbuddy; The Worm; CDA230; Hue and cry, posses, sheriffs

[Cory Doctorow]

Today's links

* SF anthology to benefit covid charities: With Neil Gaiman, Chelsea
Quinn Yarbro, Robert Silverberg, Jonathan Maberry, Seanan McGuire,
Andrew Mayne, Scott Sigler, Orson Scott Card, Alan Dean Foster, A.C.
Crispin and me.

* Politics and sf: Highlights from my Torcon panel with Nnedi Okarafor.

* Robots aren't stealing your job: Your boss is destroying it and
blaming it on automation.

* Earbuddy: "Enabling On-Face Interaction via Wireless Earbuds."

* The Worm: 1975 National Aeronautics and Space Administration Graphics
Standards Manual, NHB 1430.2 January 1976, Section 2.1 "Reproduction
Art, Logotype."

* CDA230: Americans don't trust Big Tech to moderate their communities.

* Hue and cry, posses, sheriffs: What did we do before cops?

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

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

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🧜🏿‍♀️ SF anthology to benefit covid charities

Surviving Tomorrow is a new anthology whose entire profits go to pay for
covid-19 tests for front-line workers. Contributors include Neil Gaiman,
Chelsea Quinn Yarbro,  Robert Silverberg, Jonathan Maberry, Seanan
McGuire, Andrew Mayne, Scott Sigler, Orson Scott Card, Alan Dean Foster,
A.C. Crispin...

And me.

You can get it in several editions, from a $5 ebook to a $109
collectable, numbered, super-limited, gold-embossed hardcover.

https://www.survivingtomorrowanthology.com/shop

All told the anthology features 29 stories. You can see a list of the
charities that your purchase benefits here:

https://www.survivingtomorrowanthology.com/charities

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🧜🏿‍♀️ Politics and sf

Last weekend, Nnedi Okarafor and I did a really fun, wide-ranging panel
on politics and sf for Tor Books' TorCon, moderated by Kayti Burt; it
was the closing panel, and Tor has transcribed some of the highlights.

https://www.tor.com/2020/06/16/read-highlights-from-cory-doctorow-and-nnedi-okorafor-in-conversation-at-torcon/

We started with our origin stories: I grew up in Toronto under the
umbrella of Judith Merril, who was omnipresent and fantastically
generous with her time; Nnedi found her sf/f interest came naturally out
of the "mystical aspects" of the stories she wanted to tell.

Nnedi talked about how her writing process always starts with
characters: "I’ve been writing about this particular character for a
pretty long time, and she’s kind of existed in different ways and
stories, but writing about her—it started with her."

And we discussed how sf can present "challenging issues and diverse
world views for conversation and change."

Nnedi talked about how genre is a "skewed lens" to see painful issues
with new eyes, "and when you see it with new eyes, you can see more."

I talked about how sf can give you a (possibly false and sometimes
harmful) story to reach for when you need to understand what's going to
happen in moments of crisis or extremis:

"As pulp writers, science fiction writers don’t want to confine
themselves to man-against-man or man-against nature, we like the
plot-forward twofer, where it’s man-against-nature-against-man, where
the tsunami blows your house over and your neighbors come over to eat
you. That kind of story of the foundational beastiality of humans does
make for great storytelling, but it’s not true. That’s not actually what
happens in crises.

"In crises, the refrigerator hum of petty grievance stops and leaves
behind the silence to make you realize that you have more in common with
your neighbors. It’s when people are are their best."

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🧜🏿‍♀️ Robots aren't stealing your job

You've probably heard a lot about how robutts are coming to steal your
jerb, but even a cursory look at both employment stats and the state of
automation tell a very different tale.

A pair of essays from Sareeta Amrute, Alex Rosenblat, and Brian Callaci
from Data & Society take a deep dive into the reality of precarious
employment and its relationship to automation.

In "Why Are Good Jobs Disappearing if Robots Aren’t Taking Them?" the
authors blame the disappearance of good jobs not on automation, but on
the ability of apps to circumvent employment law (the gig economy).

https://points.datasociety.net/why-are-good-jobs-disappearing-if-robots-arent-taking-them-9f8d4845302a

Tech also simplifies the process of outsourcing to low-waged, poor
workers overseas, and surveillance and real-time predictive tools allow
employers to shift the costs of slow business times onto their workers.

We hear a lot about how economic downturns prompt investment in
automation, but the authors don't find that. Rather, "firms restructure
in response to downturns in ways that create fewer permanent job
opportunities than in the past."

Crises allow for permanent changes in employment norms: " What is at
risk now, is that the management techniques of gig companies will become
protected by U.S. law and embedded in the national economy."

There are few robots on the horizon in the US workplace: "The rate of
productivity growth has been slowing, not accelerating, in recent
years...At the same time, investments in capital equipment, information
processing equipment, and software have been slowing since 2000."

On to part two: "The Robots are Just Automated Management Tools": the
hallmarks of the modern workplace are "Surveil, Schedule, Speed Up" and
all three are supercharged by tech.

https://points.datasociety.net/the-robots-are-just-automated-management-tools-b9bf28c4434

Consider how workplaces use scheduling software to dynamically and
unpredictably assign shifts in 15-minute increments, while equipping
workers with trackers that monitor their every move and software
accelerates the pace of work.

It's cost-shifting, from employers to workers: workers have to be
on-call 24/7 but are guaranteed no work;  the breathing time a
stock-picker in a warehouse gets before picking up an item is squeezed
out by a light beam that skewers the item as soon as they are in position.

But the authors hold out hope for worker power, as the realization that
"essential workers" are the lowest-paid, worst-treated among us gives
workers a newfound sense of their power and the public a newfound
respect for their work.

"In short, the robots are coming, but slowly, and not in the ways they
are often portrayed. What’s actually happening is that precarious work
is becoming more visible, while management software hides the changing
the nature of working conditions."

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🧜🏿‍♀️ Earbuddy

It turns out that earbud mics are sensitive enough to distinguish an
entire range of "facial gestures" by listening to the sounds of your
filthy fingertips scraping over the delicate pores of your face.

https://dl.acm.org/doi/fullHtml/10.1145/3313831.3376836

Earbuddy is a research project that explores how to "enable on-face
interaction" with your computing devices by listening to you as you
touch your face; the research team found 27 distinct gestures that they
could reliably distinguish in this method.

Leaving aside the epidemiological and dermatological problems of
constantly touching your face, this is way cool - it opens an entire
interaction vocabulary without any additional hardware sensors,
exploiting the material differences between different facial structures.

"For example, the ear rim is primarily composed of cartilage, while the
cheek is typically more fleshy. We identified seven areas that can be
used for interaction: the temple, the cheek, the mandible angle, the
mastoid, and the top/middle/bottom of the ear rim."

The participants learned the gestures quickly; they rated "tapping" as
more socially acceptable than "sliding."

It's all very preliminary - just a pilot study, N=24, but they got good
results in both noisy and quiet environments, and they only used one
side of the face - in theory this means you could double the vocabulary
by sensing on the other side, too.

The work was partly funded from a grant-pool dedicated to "Disability,
Independent Living and Rehabilitation Research," which suggests a whole
other realm of use-cases.

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🧜🏿‍♀️ The Worm

"The Worm" is the affectionate nickname for NASA's 1975 logo, designed
by Richard Danne and Bruce Blackburn. A new book from Standards Manual,
available for pre-order, collects 300+ archival NASA images featuring
The Worm in action.

The Worm was deprecated in 1992, but it's back as part of Spacex's livery.

The book comes out in October, and is available for pre-order at $59.

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🧜🏿‍♀️ CDA230

"Free Expression, Harmful Speech and Censorship in a Digital World," a
new study from The Knight Foundation and Gallup finds that Americans are
notably skeptical of the idea that social media platforms should take a
more active role in moderating their content.

https://knightfoundation.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/KnightFoundation_Panel6-Techlash2_rprt_061220-v2_es-1.pdf

"The poll found that 80% of Americans don't trust big tech companies to
make the right decisions about what content appears on their sites and
what should be removed."

https://www.cnet.com/news/americans-dont-trust-content-decisions-made-by-social-media-giants-study-says/

The backdrop for the poll is the Trump administration's war on CDA230, a
law that places liability for bad speech acts (libel, hate speech, etc)
on people who use platforms, not the platforms themselves.

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2012/12/effs-guide-cda-230-most-important-law-protecting-online-speech

Trump has proposed that only platforms that are "neutral" in their
moderation policies would receive this protection.

Unfortunately, Trump's view has widespread support from well-meaning
progressives, who want more action against harassment and racist invective.

They often say things like, "Facebook can eliminate nudity, why can't
they eliminate racism?" The reality is that FB's elimination of nudity
(and copyright infringement, etc) is only possible because of unlimited
collateral damage to legit speech.

https://pluralistic.net/2020/06/13/robopinkertons/#filternet

And yes, fair enough, that tells us that FB views boobies as a worse
problem than genocide.

But the reality of FB's moderation failures underlying its success in
purging the platform of nudity should be equally present in these debates.

Big Tech's anti-harassment filters routinely censor survivors of
harassment who quote their tormenters.

The anti-extremism filters censor survivors of terrorist violence who
describe their ordeals, and scholars who study them.

Anti-sex-trafficking filters block sex workers who want to discuss which
clients are potentially violent and other protective dialogs.

Giving Big Tech *more* censorship duties will not make them better at
censorship.

There's another telling stat from the study: while 80% of Americans
don't trust tech to moderate their conversations, they trust the
government even less.

And of course, eliminating 230 gives you both: companies would be
charged with more moderation, and governments would check their work.

As I wrote when Facebook nudity-blocked images of enslaved Australian
Aboriginal people (posted after the prime minister publicly lied about
the country's history of slavery):

"The answer isn't to lard FB with more censorship duties for it to fuck
up even worse – it's to cut FB down to size, to a scale where
communities can set and enforce norms.

"Because the problem with FB isn't merely that Mark Zuckerberg is
uniquely unsuited to making decisions about the social lives and
political discourse of 2.6 billion people.

"It's that no one is capable of doing that job. That job should not exist."

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🧜🏿‍♀️ Hue and cry, posses, sheriffs

Maybe you think cops have been with us forever. Didn't Robin Hood tangle
with the Sheriff of Nottingham?

Nope! Sweary medievalist Eleanor Janega: "historically in the global
north an established police force... is an extremely new development."

https://going-medieval.com/2020/06/17/on-a-world-without-police/

In medieval Europe, communities were expected to raise a "hue and cry"
when they witnessed a crime, bringing out people to apprehend the
perpetrator and bring them to justice.

"Elsewhere, adult men were organized into groups of ten called
'tithings' where each man in the group was tasked with bringing the
others to justice if they committed a crime. "

Watchmen (and women) were employed to raise an alarm when they saw
crimes. Sheriffs would be called in when the community couldn't catch a
criminal, and would draft men over 15 to serve in posses comitatus.

"After 1250 villages would often appoint a Constable who was responsible
for raising the hue and cry, a position that rotated yearly and was
unpaid to ensure against both corruption and over work."

Medieval justice was more restorative than punitive: "many acts which we
would consider as crimes were addressed not through carceral measures,
but as disputes which required resolution between the offender and the
victims."

Janega's at pains to point out that medieval justice had its own
problems, especially "when the powerless and unconnected were found
guilty of crimes committed against the powerful."

Rather, her point is that modern policing is *modern*, not an eternal
and unchangeable factor.

"Not only is this possible, it has happened in the past. It can happen
again, but better. Let’s get to it."

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🧜🏿‍♀️ This day in history

#15yrsago Neal Stephenson: Why Star Wars doesn't suck
https://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/17/opinion/turn-on-tune-in-veg-out.html

#15yrsago Disneyland rides must be as safe as buses
https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2005-jun-17-me-rides17-story.html

#15yrsago Red Cross wants all its volunteers' copyrights and patents
https://web.archive.org/web/20050909002103/http://www.redcrossomaha.org/Confidential%20Information%20and%20Intellectual%20Property.pdf

#10yrsago Copyright astroturfers target Torontoist
https://torontoist.com/2010/06/is_copyright_bill_c-32_being_astroturfed/

#5yrsago Memento Mori: the beautiful ways we have kept the dead among
the living
https://boingboing.net/2015/06/17/memento-mori-the-beautiful-wa.html

#5yrsago Owner of "Relentlessly Gay" yard raising money to make yard
MOAR GHEY
https://www.baltimoresun.com/features/bal-relentlessly-gay-yard-20150617-story.html

#1yrago Traverse City, MI braves the wrath of telcoms lobbyists, pushes
ahead with municipal fiber network
https://upnorthlive.com/news/local/traverse-city-light-and-power-approves-fiber-optic-internet

#1yrago Fox News poll has Trump losing to Sanders, Biden, Warren,
Harris, or Buttigieg
https://www.commondreams.org/news/2019/06/16/fox-news-poll-bernie-sanders-would-beat-trump-9-points

#1yrago Structural Separation: antitrust's tried-and-true weapon for
monopolists who bottleneck markets
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3180174

#5yrsago Seattle's tent cities
https://grist.org/cities/tent-cities-seattles-unique-approach-to-homelessness/

#5yrsago John Oliver commissions Helen Mirren to narrate an audiobook of
the CIA Torture Report
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20150615/18091231347/john-oliver-gets-helen-mirren-to-read-cia-torture-report-as-ebook-to-get-people-to-read-it.shtml

#5yrsago American Gods will be a TV series
https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2015/06/neil-gaimans-american-gods-to-get-a-series-on-starz/

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🧜🏿‍♀️ Colophon

Today's top sources: Four Short Links
(https://www.oreilly.com/feed/four-short-links), Kottke ().

Currently writing:

* My next novel, "The Lost Cause," a post-GND novel about truth and
reconciliation. Yesterday's progress: 585 words (28135 total).

* A short story, "Making Hay," for MIT Tech Review. Yesterday's
progress: 332 words (1296 total)

Currently reading: Adventures of a Dwergish Girl, Daniel Pinkwater

Latest podcast: Part 6 of "Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town"
https://craphound.com/podcast/2020/06/14/someone-comes-to-town-someone-leaves-town-part-06/

Upcoming appearances:

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

Upcoming appearances:

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

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

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

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